Ode to the White Onion

A short essay on the white onion, a symbol of my homeland, and teaching Pablo Neruda's Ode to the Onion

Dear readers,

In September 2020, I had asked the kids to get onions to class. We were fairly settled in the pandemic era zoom school. I had started using their surroundings to learn English. Some got big onions, pink and shiny, with bushy noses. Other got small ones, with lilac covers and a matte-finish.

We meditated with the onions. We smelled them. Saw their colours glow in the sunlight. Touched their curves. Heard their covers crinkle. I don’t remember if I asked the students to cut them or taste them, but we spent many mindful minutes with an onion. All in preparation to read Pablo Neruda’s Ode to the Onion.

Before we read his poem, I screen-shared pages from a book by Alexandria Giardino and Felicita Sala which tells us how the poet wrote this poem.

Upset about the plight of the miners, Pablo went to his friend, Matilde’s house in a hopeless mood. Matilde asked him to help with lunch. He was to cut an onion. Arrested with the beauty of the onion, the poet who wrote 225 odes in his lifetime, wrote an ode to the onion the next day.

We read the poem out loud a few times. In 41 lines, Neruda compares the onion to flasks and flowers, planets and goblets. In Neruda’s poetic eye, the onion was ‘a round rose of water/upon the table of the poor’. To slowly understand and unpeel each metaphor, the class was divided into Poetry Detective Squads via Zoom breakout rooms.

Students had googled the words they didn’t know and having meditated on onions, could explain the lines to each other swiftly. The investigation was successful because by the end, the mystery was not solved, but kept alive.

In the next class, each student wrote an ode to ordinary things around them. N wrote an ode to her dreamcatcher,

So let me dream because,
we are living in a real nightmare

B wrote an ode to her yellow football,

You are the nearest sun I’ve seen

I am a good teacher because I celebrated their odes that entire week. I am a bad teacher because I haven’t written an ode myself yet.

Until this week at the Ochre Sky Memoir Workshop, where

Natasha Badhwar

and I, enthusiastic co-facilitators, write with the writers. It’s not an ode, but an ode-hearted, onion-flavoured tiny essay.

Ode to the White Onion

A braid of white onions costs Rs. 90 these days. It is jewellery for the kitchen. Their bulbs glow as sunlight pours in from the window. Their papery skins hang tight or seek to fly. Gentle green veins show at the base. Some mud from the farm is still refusing to let go. They are milder, sweeter, crunchier than red onions. They smell more fruity and are more appetising, especially to eat raw.

White onions are my summer companions. They are known to reduce body heat. In my native Vidarbha, white onions are more essential than mangoes as a summer delight. We not only slice it, pound it, eat it, we also keep a white onion in our pockets to save ourselves from heatstroke. I remember P, my friend who would take me to art classes in the scorching afternoons on her bicycle. She would place a white onion right on the crown of our heads, held in place with colourful cotton scarves. Our shadows looked funny, but it worked.

Paired with the right mango pickle, slices of the white onion can elevate an ordinary meal. Baba doesn’t slice it though, he would smash it on the floor. Aai knows how to make a tangy rassa bhaaji with baby white onions. People carry white onions on trains and share them with strangers at dinner time.

The white onion is a symbol of my homeland, Vidarbha and its unsung richness. Unlike Pablo Neruda, we haven’t written odes to our onions yet. But we bite into its crunch as the temperature rises from 38 to 41 to 43.

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Join us to discover the stories waiting inside you at the Ochre Sky Memoir Workshops facilitated by Natasha Badhwar and

Raju Tai

*5 online sessions on 5 consecutive Saturdays of June 2024*
Time and Dates: 10am -1pm || 1, 8,15, 12, 29 June
APPLY: https://tinyurl.com/OchreSkyWriting