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Saturday, October 24, 2020

Filling in my diary

Back in Durgapur, daughter with me, because after two months alone in Delhi, she decided that if she has to work endlessly from home, it’s best to stay for long stretches with the parents. I am not complaining! Delighted that Andal airport has reopened: it makes travelling so much faster and cheaper. The Air India flights have been replaced by Spice Jet, and they fly at decent hours, so no more getting up at ungodly hours on bitterly cold winter mornings.

Would like to start classes, at least with the senior year, in November. I hope it works out, but I am not being too optimistic: best strategy against avoidable disappointment. (The crowds on the roads these pujo days have given me some reason for cheer, though).

Delhi was already cool, so I found Durgapur hot on the first day. There was also a very dense cloud cover: I could see the ground from the air only when the aircraft had descended to a few hundred feet. We had to use the air conditioner the first night, while we had been shivering in the morning! But the change in the weather, though very slow, is still perceptible. The sky is azure, the breeze is gentle, and though the sun is still hot, the evenings come sooner, and there is a nip in the air if you go out in the late evening on a two wheeler in shirtsleeves. The IMD has predicted a long winter with several cold waves, I have noticed.

This was the first time since it was built, back in 1988, that the house had been under lock and key continuously for a month. We are still busily cleaning up. I was glad that some current pupils visited me on the very first morning after my return.

Vegetable prices have gone through the roof here. I wonder why. The newspaper says people are eating much more fish and meat instead: exactly the opposite of what the doctors would recommend amidst the ongoing pandemic!

One very good recent development that I noticed in Delhi is that a lot of people have taken to riding bicycles again, and not only poor folk either. I think the government should strongly encourage the trend – one way would be to subsidize bikes for poor people, another to mark bicycle lanes along the sides of roads. I badly miss good, smooth footpaths in Delhi as much as in Durgapur, though otherwise both are so good for walkers. Delhi, at least, has huge parks galore, but here we don’t even have that much, something I keep grouching over endlessly…

Our prime minister has been growing his now-snow white beard ever since the lockdown days began, as I am sure lots of people have noticed. It has given him a distinctly wise-old-sadhubaba look. Is it simply because he has been avoiding the physical closeness that a barber’s work entails?

I read somewhere recently that China’s economy has been growing, albeit slowly, all through this year – the only one among the ten biggest economies to do so in the coronavirus year, while all others have gone into a tailspin, India included. And China is where the pandemic began! What do the Chinese know and do that we don’t? It is high time the whole world started studying them seriously without bias and preconceived notions (such as that capitalism works best without state involvement, or that the price in terms of oppression of the masses in such a regime is not worth paying) – much more seriously than we have done since the People’s Republic was established. If we cannot learn and follow quickly in their footsteps, then, regardless of what any non-Chinese thinks, wants or likes, no one will be left in any doubt by 2050 that this is definitely going to be the Chinese century…

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Book review: Korma, Kheer and Kismet

For those of my old readers who might be flabbergasted to see me reviewing a cookery book, I shall only say, imitating Sherlock Holmes (who was himself paraphrasing Shakespeare), ‘I trust that age cannot wither nor custom stale my infinite variety’. Only, a very great deal of the credit must go to my daughter.

The wheel has come round full circle. I tried with every fibre of my being to make her an avid reader with an eclectic palate; now, over the last few years, she has been increasingly guiding my reading, introducing me to some writers to whom I have grown addicted, like Madhulika Liddle and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Julian Rathbone. Not that she actually told me to read a book on cooking, but I had been rummaging through her ever growing collection when this book, Korma, Kheer and Kismet by Pamela Timms caught my attention after I had casually flipped through the first few pages, and I literally devoured it at little more than one sitting, then liked it enough to write about it here.

Needless to say, the book is much more than a mere catalogue of recipes, else I would not have bothered: I am quite a gastronome, but one of the odd few who have never bothered to learn how to cook the simplest meal themselves, so no reading material could be less interesting to me than a cookery book as such. I have always shown my profound respect – not to say awe – of the culinary arts by both being content with whatever regular meals I have been fed by the women in my life and also paying back their special efforts with the most fulsome praise I could muster, or at least bearing up with stoic silence when they occasionally turned out to be disasters (some people in my family still laugh with guilty wonder over how I ploughed through a cup of supposed tea where the herb had been mistakenly replaced by kalo jeere – black cumin – or a largeish plate of visually appealing pudding that had been untouched by sugar). This has always been one of my conceits: that if no woman feeds me with love, there will always be some eatery not too far away which would fill my belly as long as I have money in my pocket, and if even such things – lately bolstered by services like Swiggy and Zomato – someday fall beyond my reach, I shall decide that my Maker has rung the final bell, and be calmly reconciled to my fate. I have come a long way with that outlook unchanged. But as I was saying...

Pamela Timms and her husband Dean are natives of Scotland, both journalists. They came to Delhi experimentally for a year in 2005, fell in love with this magical city (as I have been over the last two years) and stayed on till 2015. The book is subtitled Five Seasons in Old Delhi, and the whole book is unapologetically dedicated to her adventures in the dingy, damp, cluttered, maddeningly crowded, thoroughly unhygienic, noisy and occasionally dangerous serpentine lanes and bylanes on and off Chandni Chowk, savouring the vast variety of mouth watering street food that the city rustles up daily for pockets deep and shallow, hunting down the creators even at ungodly hours to watch them work and perchance to wangle some of their secret recipes out of them, then trying them out at home with her own innovations and improvisations and jotting down the recipes of those dishes which turned out to be somewhat better than just successful. All this she has described in the most luminous and evocative prose that went into, first, her blog Eat and Dust, and finally took the shape of this 2014 book, which someone like myself – unlikely candidate as I am – can certify as good literature. Below are a few samples of her writing that persuaded me to make a blogpost out of it.

Here is a description of what happens when the much awaited food arrives before a hungry and impatient crowd of diners in one of those famous hole in the wall eateries that have been carrying on for generations: ‘...a nervy silence gripped the diners; then at last the rotis were ready and plates of korma were unceremoniously slapped down in front of us. Juicy pieces of mutton shimmered in a lake of deep mahogany sauce – so far removed from the anaemic, gloopy, bland concoctions that go by the same name in British curry houses as to be an entirely different species. Armed with pieces of hot, crisp, coriander-laced rotis, we all dived in. Some immediately started chewing on the bones but most of us made straight for the gravy. The first taste was an eye-watering blast of chilli heat that had me spluttering and reaching for the water bottle. This was quickly followed by layers of more nuanced, elusive ingredients – ‘up to thirty different spices’, one of my dining companions assured me between mouthfuls – in a devilish pact with ghee. The meat itself had been cooked long and slow, and fell away easily from the bone at a nudge from the bread. For the few minutes it took us to devour our korma, no one uttered a word, and we paused only to signal to the waiters when more rotis were required. Too soon, we were again staring at empty plates, this time with no hope of a refill. The day’s korma was already sold out.’

For those with a sweet tooth, on the other hand, here is a rhapsody on that ethereal delight called daulat ki chaat, snack of wealth: ‘one of the great highlights of the winter is a heavenly milky dessert that makes a brief but unforgettable earthly appearance in the gullies of Old Delhi almost as soon as the last Diwali firecracker has fizzled. From then until Holi, the chaat vendors wander through the bazaars, their snowy platters dazzling in the pale sunshine, as if a dozen small, perfectly formed clouds have dropped from the sky... the taste is shocking in its subtlety, more molecular gastronomy than raunchy street food, a light foam that disappears instantly on the tongue, leaving behind the merest hint of sweetness, cream, saffron, sugar and nuts; tantalizing, almost not there... the means by which a pail of milk is transformed into the food of the gods, though, is the stuff of Old Delhi legend rather than of the food lab.’ And she goes on to narrate the kind of tale that would fit in seamlessly into The Thousand and One Nights.

And though this last passage is not strictly about Delhi and therefore does not really belong to the book, being about the ecstasy that tasting roadside kulcha and chhole in Amritsar (which some Indian friends had described to her as the ‘street food capital of India’, though as a proud Bengali I should have liked her to reserve judgment until she had toured our own great metropolis) at the crack of dawn brought her, I cannot resist the temptation of quoting a part of the lyrical description here: ‘I was wary, but also cold and famished... I broke off a small piece of the bread and scooped up some of the chickpeas. It took a couple of mouthfuls before I noticed the extraordinary texture of the kulcha – buttery, flaky shards, as if the finest Parisian feuilleté had been combined with a perfectly spiced nugget of soft potato. Then the chhole – melting, nutty, vibrant pulses – spicy yet soothing. A third element on the plate brought it all together – a sour tamarind sauce cutting brilliantly through the buttery bread and creamy chickpeas, making the whole dish sing its heart out... I felt, as M. F. K. Fisher once did, “a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted into one chord of well-being” ’.

Well, if you liked those little snippets, there’s 166 pages of it. And then,  like the perfect topping on a great cake, there are the few concluding pages spelling out the already obvious fact that the writer's labour of love was not really about food but about people who made Delhi 'home' for her. That is what endeared her to me. Go and read the book, and may it give you the same delight as it gave me. Many thanks, Ms. Timms. I hope you read this review, and come back and write some more about the India that you have come to love.

As for me, I am off on another flight of culinary wonderment with Chitrita Banerjee’s Bengali Cooking, seasons and festivals. Pupu has got me hooked.

Friday, October 09, 2020

In Delhi

 My family has been through a very nasty crisis - certainly much worse than in 2015 when I broke my leg and was partially incapacitated for nearly six months, and even than 2017, when my father died a slow and painful death - and it is still far from over. Nevertheless, because every cloud has a silver lining, I have, after prolonged reflection, decided that it has taught me a few valuable lessons which I shall live by till I pass on. Most significantly, that nobody except blood (my daughter) really cares (if some do, they live too far away to be of any practical use) - those who picked me up and took me to the hospital when I had that accident were mostly strangers, and those who helped during my father's troubled last days were mostly paid service-providers.

For whatever duration I live hereafter, I shall have to go it alone (even more than Harry Potter, I have realized this rather late in the day), barring maybe only my daughter, and that too if she is around to help  before it is too late. The flip side of the coin is, I can forever stop worrying about the welfare of other people. The world is welcome to take care of itself. Meanwhile, in my desperate loneliness, it has been wonderful to stay with my daughter and help with the housework. Living out my old age before I had anticipated it, and I can't say that I don't like it, even doing the dishes and taking out the trash!

Saturday, October 03, 2020

Katha Daan Utsav

This is about helping people again: children who can benefit from your assistance to get along with their education in these unusually troubled times.

My daughter is closely involved with the project. I thought it won't hurt to give it whatever little publicity I can.

Click on this link to find out more about the 'wish tree' that she and her friends have put up on their organizational website. The link will be operational till October 08, so if you want to act, please don't delay.

I should have posted this yesterday, Gandhi Jayanti, but I was too upset about certain things in the family to remember in time.