Any South Asian food lover will agree that there is no such thing as too many curry leaves. Who doesn’t savor the earthy aftertaste of curry leaves crackled in ghee and tossed on a mutton roast, or mixed into a bowl of comforting Gujarati kadhi, or a few sprigs ground with fried peanuts for a mouthwatering dry chutney?
In West Oakland, Zee Lilani’s Kula Nursery pays homage to that tiny leaf that packs a punch of flavor. Lilani is giving me a tour of her nursery and we are suddenly flanked on both sides by curry leaf trees.
As we pause briefly to breathe in the fragrance she laughs, “I look like a crazy person with so many curry leaf trees!” Lilani herself uses the aromatic leaves to accentuate an Asian-inspired chili oil she’s created.
The curry leaf plants are one of the most popular items in Lilani’s Kula Nursery, which specializes in South Asian heritage herbs, vegetables and spices. Tucked away in an unassuming corner in West Oakland, the myriad smells of a South Asian kitchen waft enticingly through rows of tulsi, tomatoes, ginger, and a heap of curry leaves drying on a table nearby.
Among the more than twenty varieties of desi-origin produce growing here, Zee Lilani is queen – playing plant mom to thousands of herbs and shrubs. She confesses to being a helicopter parent to her plants: “I can’t imagine doing anything that doesn’t involve staring at plants all day,”
Lilani’s labor of love is a living, breathing tribute to her ancestral roots in both India and Pakistan, celebrating food as ancestral heritage passed down through generations of South Asian families.
What’s In A Name? Everything.
The Sanskrit word kula means an ancestral clan, tribe, or group to which one claims origin. The name is fitting because inspiration for the nursery came from Lilani’s maternal grandmother, who was born in Surat, but migrated to Karachi during the Partition. In the tumultuous days that followed, millions moved across the newly formed border, and tried to put down roots in their new home.
For Lilani’s naani – Vaza Jangbarwala – who now lives in San Francisco – the unavailability of Gujarati vegetables in Karachi was especially devastating, and exacerbated the feeling of not belonging in a new homeland.
Eventually, as more Gujaratis migrated to Karachi, veggies like gawar and doodhi followed, allowing Jangbarwala to cook Gujarati food again, a culinary nod to her life across the border.
“During that Partition, I think there was a lot of culture lost,” says Lilani. “But I also think a lot of people clung on to their culture in whatever way they knew how, and for my naani, that was through vegetables.”
Lilani, born and raised in the United States, grew up eating the Gujarati food her naani cooked, and noted that in the Bay Area, much like in the post-Partition days, her grandmother did not have access to traditional Gujarati vegetables for her cuisine.
Lilani settled for listening to her naani talk wistfully about the culinary delights of her youth first in India and then in Pakistan. The family’s Pakistani heritage meant that they would likely never visit India again, due to the visa freeze between the two countries.
So Lilani did the only thing she could – she decided to grow her naani’s Indian vegetables in the Bay Area.
The Crowd-Sourced Kula Nursery
In the pandemic, Lilani started her home garden with bhindi (okra), sesame, and amaranth leaves. When she took her produce to the farmers’ market in Fremont, the South Asian community responded enthusiastically.
Not only did they buy her produce, but week after week, they brought her seeds to her from their own homes and gardens. Over the next three years, Lilani built on their goodwill and established Kula Nursery, nurturing the crowd-sourced seeds into viable crops.
Today, she also rents a half-acre farm in Petaluma where she grows the second, and third generations of these crops.
“This nursery is a community effort, and I’m just the vessel that plants them and tends to them,” she says of the collection of seeds the community gifted her. “This is really just a version of what this community envisioned, and wanted, and needed. And I’m just the steward.”
Here, one can find brinjal, ginger, a variety of gourds including doodhi, karela, and turai, guava, and many different varieties of basil or tulsi. Lilani even grows flowers like the radiant genda (marigold) and the fragrant raat ki rani (night blooming jasmine).
She spends most of the week on her farm, planting, watering, repotting, pruning, and “developing a relationship with the plants” and opens her nursery every Saturday for customers. Throughout the day, a steady stream of customers amble into the greenhouse.
One regular customer bustles through the entrance and is delighted to find that the tulsi isn’t sold out; buoyed by how well the plants grew in his mother’s backyard, he’s getting some for his own garden. Another family has made the drive from Milpitas to pick up some eggplant, gourds, and marigold flowers. A couple waltzes in and proudly shows Lilani pictures of the okra they’ve grown since their last visit. When they ask for a tougher challenge, Lilani points them to the delicate Pakistani mulberry which is a tough plant to grow, and gives them a crash course on how to do it.
Not only is Lilani supplying the community with vegetables and herbs through Kula, but also sharing knowledge on how to nurture South Asian plants in American homes.
Desi Girl Tomatoes
Lilani is particularly proud of her homegrown open-pollinated tomato variant called the Desi Girl tomato, which she has been growing for two seasons. The fruit, she explains, is sour in comparison to sweeter variants like California favorites heirloom and cherry. The sourness is characteristic of South Asian tomatoes and makes them a great choice to cook with, especially for curries that need a tang to balance the spicy heat.
The name is a play on the Early Girl tomato, which has a similar flavor but is not as sour. In just two seasons, Lilani’s community of plant parents have taken her tomato to far-flung places like New York, Ohio, and Virginia, where they seem to be thriving.
That is a common feature with most of the South Asian seeds she grows, explains Lilani. Subsequent generations grow better than their ancestors because the first generation of seeds are adapted to South Asian climates which are hotter and more humid. As a result, they don’t fare very well when transplanted to the cooler climes of the U.S. However, within a season or two, the seeds adapt to their new surroundings and become more resilient.
Therein lies a similarity between plants and humans, observes Lilani: “If we were to have children in the U.S., they would be more adapted to this type of culture. The same goes for the seeds!”
Food Sovereignty
Adapting South Asian plants and making them available to the diaspora is more than a question of taste for Lilani. While she relishes the traditional Gujarati dishes from her naani’s kitchen, Kula’s more salient aspect for her is food sovereignty – being able to choose what food she puts into her body.
“I didn’t really learn about agriculture as a kid, because schools don’t really teach about farming as a career, or teach about where food comes from,” she comments on the evolution of her own relationship with food.
“When I got my master’s degree [in International Agricultural Development], I learned about all the politics involved with our local food system. It just became really apparent to me to grow food and to have more sovereignty around what kinds of foods I digest, and interact with, and how our collective health is so reliant on what types of foods we surround ourselves with.”
A personal rebellion
Kula started as a form of personal rebellion against the larger food industry that controls what ends up on the shelves in the supermarket. Now, four years into her first foray with farming, Lilani is keen to open up her rebellion to others by curating regular events at her farm.
“Especially with children nowadays, they don’t know what a broccoli plant looks like or an eggplant looks like. So being able to go to the farm and see these vegetables growing on the plants, maybe that’ll inspire them to get interested in gardening and growing and learning about their food system.”
In the future Lilani wants to create and steward a South Asian seed bank and share heritage seeds among diaspora communities all over the world. She envisions a complementary project which will record the oral histories of how older generations – such as her own naani – used these plants to preserve the cultural knowledge associated with them.
Her aim is to advocate for consumers to play a more active role in the way their food is grown, treated, prepared, and distributed. And as Oakland’s resident curry leaf queen, Lilani is leading by example.
Defying the forces that control our food production, and South Asian geopolitics, she is bringing the taste of Gujarat to her Pakistani-American naani’s San Francisco home. One doodhi at a time.