Thaali Tali

We take off from London at 5pm and arrive in New Delhi,India at 6am after an 8 hour flight. I don’t understand the time difference but I set my watch right. It is like a larger version of Daylight Saving Time with an additional change in the thermostat setting at the same time. It is about 30°C on arrival.

From the moment I exit the airport, I am immediately immersed in this new environment that puts all my senses high gear. From the taxi, I look around and discover. It is still very early, but everything seems “a lot”: people, cars, color, dogs, horns, cows… I look at Anne-Gaëlle and like me, she is stuck to the window (first time I see her with eyes so wide open in the early morning). It is also her first trip to India, and I do not know why, something is telling me that it will be not the last.

Once at the guesthouse of the university, we get some rest and spend the day discovering around. In the evening, we have dinner along with some visitors from Nepal, Russia and Japan. We eat a thaali. This is an assortment of dishes: rice, bread (chapati) and 3 small cups: the first one contains a spicy preparation, the second one contains a very spicy preparation and the third one a yoghurt.

While the spices are busy transferring the heat outside to my insides, Anne-Gaëlle says : ”See, they are very much into algae in the country!” What is she saying? I can notice lots of colors in my plate, but where is the alga?

So she tells me that it is a pun: in Brittany, the word « Tali » is employed for talking about some algae, the Laminariales, big brown seaweeds from the Iroise sea. And she goes on about the word thallus.

While here in India, we are eating a thaali, for algae, thalli is the plural of thallus and is a word used for naming the body of these plants¹. This had been used in the past for classifying plants into categories: those which have a thallus were called thallophytes, while others were part of another group, the cormophytes.

The cormophytes are the plants we see commonly such as trees, ferns and the plants with flowers. For them, the body is called a cormus and it has different parts which are the stems, roots, leaves and some specialized tissues for conducting the sap.

In opposition, thallophytes - including algae - were defined as having undifferentiated bodies and referred as lower plants. Anne-Gaëlle seems pretty upset while saying that.

Apparently, even if this distinction was an old way to do the classification of plants, this vocabulary is still employed sometimes nowadays.

What I mainly get is that Anne-Gaëlle will never stop: even in the case of a culinary discovery, I realize that I am never too far from a vocabulary attack!

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