When I was about 13 or 14 years old, one of my English assignments was to write a legend - a short story for children that explained, well, I don’t know, explained something. As a child with a brother seven years older than I who had already left our house for university, I’d been forced to rely on my imagination for entertainment. For instance, instead of tossing a baseball with a sibling, I used to throw it up on the roof and catch it as it rolled back down to me. I had to improvise. A sad scene, I know, but the point is that my overactive imagination and creative thinking was quite helpful when it came to writing short stories for school. For my legend assignment, I wrote a story called “The Boys who Became Seven Stars”. It explained the appearance of an imaginary constellation in the sky.

As the story goes, there was a tribe of people who lived somewhere at sometime (details were not my forte), and had been terrorized by a vicious monster for generations. The monster had never actually been seen by any member of the tribe, but it had cast its shadow over the people so many times that it was endangering their prosperity and indeed their survival. (I don’t think I described it like that when I was 13, but you get the idea - it was serious!). One of the traditions in this tribe was for all young boys to perform a courageous act when they turned 13 in order to prove their manhood. (Perhaps I was not a liberated teenage girl, or maybe I wisely selected which areas of women’s liberation were worth fighting for, or maybe I had just heard about bar mitzvahs?) Anyway, in the year of this story, there were seven boys in the tribe turning 13. They banded together and bravely decided that to prove their manhood they would fight and kill the monster and thereby save their tribe from extinction. They elected to fight the monster one at a time, with one boy going into the woods each night for seven nights, or a week (symbolic number choice on my part!). Now this probably wasn’t the best strategy, but they were only 13 after all. As you can guess, each night the boy was killed and never returned to the tribe, but before each boy fell, he did manage to injure a part of the monster. By the seventh night, the final terrified boy (who just happened to be the son of the tribe’s chief) went into the woods and just before the monster killed him, he speared the only uninjured part of the monster, its single eye, and the monster fell to the ground dead.

With no boys returning to the tribe, the men had finally had it (about time!) and together they marched into the woods to seek revenge on the monster (about time again!). What they found was devastating but filled them with pride, for although their boys were dead, they had killed the monster and the tribe was now free to roam wherever it was that they lived without fear. They returned to the women of the tribe (who were probably doing important things like cooking, knitting, playing bridge) and told them what had happened. The tribe went into mourning for seven days (see - the symbolic number again!) and lo and behold, on the seventh (again the number!!) night they looked up into the sky to see seven (yet again!) new stars in the form of an arrow. A new constellation had suddenly appeared and, obviously, was made from the souls of the seven boys (duh!). The tribe followed the direction of the arrow for the rest of their days and was kept safe from harm. Ahhh. Nice ending.

Well, the reason I remember this story is not because of the riveting plot, but because of the names I chose for the characters. It just didn’t seem right to use names like “John”, “Mark”, or “David” for the boys. Nor did it seem exciting to use traditional native people’s names like “Eaglefeather” or “Yellowneck”. So, I asked my mother for help. Being the brilliant mother that she was, she suggested I use names of Caribbean food dishes as names in my legend. Perfect! What an idea! My characters lined up nicely: Chief Callaloo; his son, Accra; not to be confused with his friend, Ackee; the other boys, Bammie, Foo-Foo, Buljol, Sancoche, and Pelau; and of course, the monster, the great and awesome Alupouri. Luckily, my teacher in Calgary had no West Indian connections. I received an “A”.

It’s now a little over twenty years later and these names mean much more to me. I just recently had my first experience actually making (rather than just eating) Alu Puri. Let me tell you, it is still a monster! Alu Puri is a bread. It is a roti that has a curried potato filling. It has a close relative called Dahl Puri which is a roti filled with a curried split pea filling - another monster. The challenge to making Alu Puri is to roll the dough thin enough with the filling inside without having the filling break through the dough. My first attempt at this was disastrous. I actually thought for a minute that perhaps the errors in my ways would create a new original dish - that’s how far from the original intent it ended up to be. In reality, I’d just created a mess. After much practice and making different doughs, I ended up with a result that pleased me. The key is patience. In typical West Indian fashion, take your time when making this bread. It is critical to let the dough rest between any handling or rolling so that the gluten can relax and let you roll it further in a little while. I’m not saying it will take seven days and seven nights to get this monster, but you will need to relax, sit back and expect this to take a few hours. If you do it right, you just might see stars!