Stick it!

While we have not quite finished the vast amounts of bread that just happen to be left over from the time that there was too much bought – for various reasons – we do find that there is an occasional need for more. Like when I have to take some lunch with me when I go to work, or when I need to find something quick and easy to eat for dinner and have lot of soup on hand, the logical accompaniment being, of course, toast. So every now and then we go out there and get some bread, but not the nice soft squishy white kind, not for a while now, at least. But there is invariably temptation that crunches at the bakery, be it the very warm and familiar Yazdani, in the Fort area, the better lighted and more accessible by road City Bakery in Worli, not too far away from where the office is located, or the close-to-home Front Street, which is, the sign has said for a while now, moving to another location not too distant from its current site. There are others, equally good, but further off my beaten track, of which I shall speak anon. And that temptation comes in the form of breadsticks, also called soup sticks, which all three of the shops I generally prefer specialise in.

Yazdani has plain and simple breadsticks, with an occasional tinge of garlic, jeera or even cheese. These are not very long, stout and uneven, which makes for a wonderful distribution of taste and mouth feel, and almost always very crunchy and crisp. They come in crackly plastic bags heat-sealed at one end and perma-sealed at the other, not hard to open but rather noisy to sneak into during a meeting. City Bakery has a wider range of flavour – there is the ordinary breadstick, crunchy, thick, occasionally siamesed with a twin, identical or, more likely, fraternal. Then there is the cheese stick, which is tangy-salty, a pale orange in colour, with the once-in-a-while bite that will spark the cutting edge of chilli powder in your mouth when you least expect it. And there is the ajwain breadstick, which happens to be Small Cat’s favourite, which has the distinctive flavour and smell of the herb-seed sprinkled through it. Front Street is more assembly line, with both white and whole wheat breadsticks of uniform size and length, though not boringly so, most of the time crunchy and perfectly salted.

The others – for now is the time of the ‘anon’ I spoke of before – are a-plenty. Moshe’s bake shop and deli at Crossword, in Kemps Corner, has long thin breadsticks with a herby tinge. But they are not always crisp and go stale very quickly, so I tend to prefer the lavache instead, which Small Cat also likes rather a lot. The Bake Shop down the road towards Nana Chowk is also a good place to find really delicious and fabulously crunchy breadsticks – both the white and the whole wheat are thick, not too long, hard and incredibly noisy; they do not break on demand, but snap where they want to, and almost hurt the teeth as you try and bite into one and then chew it up to the last yummy morsel. I have a veritable passion for the whole wheat sticks, even though I know that eating too many of them is not exactly a good idea, given that I am not stick-like and slim any more, even though I do have my moments of crispness.

But in all this, it is very rare – in fact, I cannot remember any such occasion – when I have eaten a breadstick the way I am reliably informed it is meant to be eaten: with soup. Often in the bread basket in fancy hotels, I tend to hold on and break it as a sort of conversational change of direction, if I am with a casual friend, or a moment of emphasis, if I am involved in converse with a close buddy or a fond parent. It is also useful when waved as a sort of filler during an awkward hiatus in speech, or when a bubble threatens to burst out of your tummy and gauchely forth as a crass burp. And, when you are irritated by what someone is saying to you and need a diversion of thought, a breadstick is a very valuable weapon; you can hold it and break it sharply, pretending it is the neck of the person who is annoying you at that time.

But a breadstick is all about finger-play, having something to deal with while you are thinking about what to say and how, having a diversion from the actual emotion that you may feel that has an unfortunate habit of showing on your face and when you want to laugh but know that it would not be politic to do so. And, for all those reasons and more, I bless whoever thought them up.

The roll that rocks!

Somebody was talking about Karim’s, a popular and old Delhi restaurant, and my mind went floating back to the days when I learned to eat something that fast became a passion. It was when I worked for a publishing house based in the centre of the city and was taught more about food as it is available out of table-cloth-style restaurants than in them. While a late night visit to Karim’s rang no culinary bells for me, since I was more worried what was under the soles of my delicate spike-heeled sandals than what was going into my stomach, another eatery did its thing so well that even today, so many miles away from the capital of my country, I crave its offerings.

This particular dining place – it had fine food, but it was a far cry from fine dining – was called Nizam’s. To my delight and, I must admit, wonder, it had a website, from which my friend and colleague read out menu listings that he insisted I choose from. Of course, being from Mumbai and being rather protected on my own turf, especially where food was concerned, I listened in wide-eyed and open-mouthed wonder and then opted for what was tried and tested rather than what sounded exotic and exciting. And forevermore, whenever aforementioned friend suggested getting something to eat from outside our own home-made dabbas, I would clamour for Nizam’s and it’s justifiably famous kathi roll.

A kathi roll, I learned, was a thick and slightly flaky paratha that wrapped itself around egg, meat, onions and a spicy sauce. You could have double-egg-double-chicken (since I preferred that to any other meat) or single-egg-double-chicken or double-egg-single-chicken…well, you get the point, I presume. It was, essentially, the equivalent of the Mumbai Frankie, with the meat in chunks rather than shredded. Deconstructed, it was a paratha, on which was spread beaten egg, gently cooked, then layered with meat, raw red onions (I think they are marinated, since they do not have that characteristic sharpness of the completely raw onion) and a liquid chutney that was tangy, spicy, delicious and addictive. It left your lips tingling and burned fire down into your stomach if you were injudicious about its use, but in delicate applications, it worked wonders for the appetite and its aftermath.

People tell me that the Nizam’s kathi roll is not as good as the one that Karim’s serves up. I have tried to be unbiased about that, but it is not easy. After all, the ones that I think of so fondly were made even more delicious by the circumstances, the friendship and the hunger that I felt during the cold Delhi winter that seemed to have no end and no stimulation to warm me up with. Since then, I have eaten my way through various avatars of the roll, from the prettily wrapped version from a multi-star hotel deli to a more street-style concept at a fair, but my opinion on this cannot be changed that easily. I have my preference and just talking about it has my mind and tummy demanding more.

Flat as a pancake

My Soul Sister sent me a birthday gift package that contained, among other sundries that I giggled over, a bag of pancake mix. Chocolate pancakes, actually. We have not yet had the courage to open the packet and try the stuff, but it smells divinely chocolate and promises much that we all like very much, even though Small Cat is forbidden the sweet brownness and would rather chew on her kitti bikki anyway. But every time I open the larder door, I peek at the bag and wonder, just what would I let myself in for if I used it?

I have a passion for pancakes, perhaps nurtured by the ones my mother would make for me a long time ago, when I was a child and she believed that her cooking was the only thing between me and certain starvation. She would beat up and egg with some flour and milk, a little salt and a pinch of pepper, and spread lacy thin rounds of it on a hot griddle. We ate them, many at a time, with lots of salted butter and a hearty appetite. Those days soon ended, however, as we both became alarmingly rounded and ate these instead of regular food, causing merry havoc at the dining table.

When we lived in Geneva, Switzerland, my mother and I would occasionally walk down to the main square and browse through the shops for school and home supplies. And, after we were done, we would stop by the creperie just outside the main department store and order ourselves a crepe to much on before trekking back home. For her, it was the sweet kind; for me, I preferred the crepe rolled around cheese or jambon fume, fine shards of smoked ham. Once in a while, our wicked sides would emerge and we would slowly savour our way through a chocolate crepe, with molten brown heaven within the fragile envelope of soft dough.

A few years later, when I was in the United States as a student on my own, my friends and I would drop by the Pancake Cottage near Stony Brook on Long Island, where I was based. While they drenched their ’cakes in maple syrup or fruit compote, I would go comparatively austere, with a little bit of butter and perhaps a sprinkle of nuts. Then I discovered the cheese stack, American style. It was all about calories, those things that never bothered me then, since whatever I ate seemed to evaporate almost instantly and allowed me to slide into the slimmest jeans possible without too much heavy breathing. It was all about delicious and tangy cheese, sandwiched between thick, spongy, slightly sour buttermilk pancakes, making a gooey, pully, stringy, heavenly forkful that could be twined around the fork with happy warmth.

And then the calories starting attaching themselves to inconvenient parts of my anatomy. So now when I order or eat pancakes, I make sure that I have the buckwheat kind, allegedly higher in fibre content and lower in calories, with whipped butter, if any, and a little fruit rather than all that cheese and fat. I look wistfully at plates around me that have lashings of regular butter and strips of crispy, salty bacon that just cries to belong to me rather than where they are. And I sigh gently as my dining companions ask for more butter, some grated cheese please and perhaps some chocolate sauce. But I still fit into those jeans. They wear stretch-waist trousers.

Food of thought

I had this strange conversation with a lady on the phone yesterday and wonder if she has got over the shock just yet. She had left a message on my answering machine at work and I called her back, only to find out that she was inviting me to a wine and pastries festival hosted by a local French organisation. How she got me as the one to call, I do not know, and do not much care about, though she did say that she had found someone to cover the event for her. But we chatted for a while and I told her that if she promises to feed me lots of chocolate pastry, I would definitely be there. Judging from the silence that followed my comment, I figure I should be a little more formal when I wear my journalistic cap, especially if I have never met the person I am talking to. But her comeback, once she had recovered, was fairly quick. She told me that there would be no chocolate, only brioches and croissants and a few puff-y indulgences, but that we could always make up for the lack of chocolate another day. Which left me speechless.

That has happened only a few times in my long and culinarily indulgent life. Perhaps the first time ever was when I was confronted by more French fries than I could even start to eat. It was in a small but famous inn high in the mountains of the Black Forest in what was then West Germany, in a small village called Waldhillsbach, known all over the country and perhaps beyond for its wonderful blue trout. Being a gourmand rather than anything close to a gourmet in those youthful times, I shuddered at the prospect of first meeting my fish, then having it cooked for me, and shuddered some more at the idea that I would actually eat fish. Being a stout and stout-hearted ten year old, I chose roast chicken and, inevitably, chips, aka French fries.

It was, for me, a wise decision. I watched in horror as my parents and their guests – a couple and their young son, Bengalis – chose their fish and saw it off to the kitchen with due ceremony. The food arrived, my chicken nicely grilled and succulent, the fish strangely grey-blue and staring with its fishy eyes, still in its fishy head, with a distinctively fishy leer. Not being one who liked her food to watch her as she ate, I delicately looked away from the piscine offerings and concentrated on my own foul play. It was delicious. But defeating. I managed to eat a lot of the Halbes Huhn, a considerable portion, but even I, known for my prowess at the sport, gave up about a third way through the chips. There were just too many of them. It felt as if it was sort of a Tantalus dish of fries – the more you ate, the more there seemed to be. Finally, breathing heavily, I stopped. But Father did not stop teasing me about it…I still get hints of the way I could not eat my chips, even today. I maintain my silence.

I was also defeated many years later by a chocolate sundae. Frozen yoghurt, actually, an overdose of chocolate that left be feeling and perhaps even looking rather bilious and exhausted. And silent. I wrote about this not too long ago, I know. More recently, there was another defeat on my plate at the local branch of the Hard Rock Café. I asked for a burger and got through the vast quantity of fries and of some of the veggies, but left most of the bun and some of the meat on my plate. But I know how to beat that one – from then on, I just ordered the insides, without the bread! Very quietly.

Got any bread?

Okay, so perhaps we overdid it. Or I did, at least. Sometimes I tend to get carried away and get more than I need and then stand there helplessly staring at it, hoping inspiration will strike and show me the way to a brighter and better world…or at least a world where I do not need to throw stuff away. I hate waste and was brought up on the maxims of haste making for waste, my eyes being bigger than my stomach and more such meaningful homilies. I had done this mainly with clothes, shoes and, occasionally, lipstick, but rarely with anything edible. This time I had really done it, big time, literally.

It started with Father’s request for bread that was not high fibre, not rough, not multi-grain. Nice soft and squishy unsliced white bread, he asked plaintively, well deserving of a break from my usual almost-Fascist dietary regimen I subject the poor man to most of the time. The first time I tried to do this for him – a small request, after all, especially considering what I demand of him – I failed. The bakery was not making the aforementioned staple, since it was festival time and the demand was so low as to be non-existent. So I got a most interesting and delicious brown loaf instead; except for the colour, it was soft, squishy and rather nice, even Father admitted that.

But I was determined to do what I had promised to do. So the next time bread was needed at home, I went back to the bakery (which has what is perhaps the best fresh white loaves ever made since the dawn of baking) and demanded the familiar. Sorry, the friendly chappie behind the counter – who could have been the owner, for all I knew, he certainly threw his considerable weight around to deserve that cachet – the oven was not working properly, so the baking is delayed; fresh white unsliced bread would be out only an hour after I had dropped by. Nah, I said to myself and to the friendly chappie, let’s try something new instead. So I took home sliced white bread that he promised would be soft squishy and most nice, and some multi-grain stuff for me to keep my fibre-hungry insides satisfied with.

Problem: they were both ghastly. Father and I did our valiant best with the bread, but could not handle it after a few slices. Leave it in the fridge, I said, I would figure out what to do with it over the weekend. But there were miles to go and promises to keep, so I stopped at the first decent bakery I found on a visit into town and got a nice soft squishy unsliced white loaf of bread, just for Father. The only issue to deal with was the size. It was almost as big as the backseat of our little car and took up more space than I did. Almost.

But it was delicious. A lot like the much-reviled Wonder Bread of my fairly dietarily dissipated childhood on the inside – you could squash the entire loaf into one small pellet to flick at someone across a dinner table, I giggled to myself, but the crust was hearty, chewy and brilliant. Made into toast, it lacked some of the bite – literally – of the more fibre-rich loaves I preferred, but it made Father happy. Which was the point of the entire exercise, I told myself, giving my halo a well-earned buffing to make it extra-shiny.

But all this left me with a little bit of a problem to deal with. In the fridge I had two three-quarter loaves of disliked bread, plus a huge shelf-occupying hunk that took up more room than the cooked food the fridge contained. And I had to do something with it all, just to follow my own rule of not wasting anything that can be used. We already had breadcrumbs. We had eaten all the toast we could and should. With the multi-grain bread and some of the sliced white, I managed to make a large batch of strata, that wonderful way to use stale bread and make it entirely palatable – lots of tomato-onion-garlic goop, lots of cheese and a little egg and milk and voila, a stint in the oven produces something that comforts the nerves and satisfies the tummy. And the frugal vein that runs deep inside my soul.

That leaves us with about half the sliced white loaf and a great deal of the mammoth nice soft squishy unsliced white bread. Maybe bread-and-butter pudding? Or bread pakoras? Or even bread upma? Your choice, Father dear!

Getting gas

No, this is not a description of digestive processes gone awry, but a situational comedy of sorts. I had made big plans for my Sunday yesterday, deciding what I would make and then eat for lunch days before the lunch actually arrived. So I was busy cooking up quite a bit of a storm in the morning, in between coochieing with Small Cat and hanging up the laundry, humming quietly to myself as the dal bubbled away on one burner and the bhindi did its thing on another. I had one eye on the stove and the other on the strata I was assembling for a future dinner, layering old bread and grated cheese with a spicy blend of tomatoes, onions, garlic and, to add that Indian touch that Madhur Jaffrey (I just interviewed her, hence the reference) and others talk so delightedly about, some ginger and kothmir. Just as I was whipping up the eggs with some fabulously bland mustard I had acquired, I heard a gentle popping sound and looked over at the burners. The flame was perilously low and I ran to switch on the main and relight the fire. To no avail. We had run out of gas. Being brave and also having watched it being done so many times before, I went about getting the cylinder changed, having demanded Father’s presence, just to make sure that I was doing it right. But the alternative was also empty. Oops.

There was no major kitchen drama or disaster here. I finished my cooking on the electric range, skipped a couple of steps here and there and served up a more simple lunch than I had intended to. And dinner was even more simple, with poor Father given peanut butter and jelly on toasted soft white bread, while I ate toast and cream cheese with, mercifully, chocolate pudding afterwards for both of us to relieve the monotony. The gas cylinders arrived this morning and all is back to normal in our household.

But it gave me cause to think about life, the universe and cooking methods. While today I am lucky enough to have the alternative of electricity, what happened before that was available? I dimply remember Mother saying very rude and unladylike words in the days before we got our range, when the fuel source apart from cooking gas was not easy to get. She has to deal with an aged and recalcitrant kerosene stove, which I have fond memories of – not only did the food taste funny, it was very awkward to pick up whenever I helped clean the servants’ room, which is where it was stored for many years. It was also home to a large and curious spider, which popped its rounded head out of the kerosene storage space whenever I lifted the stove, which could explain to some extent where my dislike for the eight-legged creatures comes from – to get leered at and to have your fingers scraped rather painfully when you are only trying to help is all a bit much, don’t you think?

And then, of course, there was coal, or even wood, if you want to be even more primitive and eco-unfriendly. I have eaten many an American barbecue, where the host (or the cook, whichever came first) was proud of the fact that the grill was heated by ‘real wood chips’ and the coal was flavoured (albeit artificially) by the manmade essence of some exotic and perhaps endangered wood. It just tasted smoky and burned to me. I am afraid I had no discrimination in this. You see so many families in Mumbai, squatting by the railway tracks or living along the main roads through the city, cooking on scraps of wooden crate or twigs from a nearby timberyard or even old cardboard boxes. And you wonder what, in this day and age of microwave ovens and electric ranges, you are really complaining about.

Except that I was not complaining, just wondering what I would do if there was a power cut just when we run out of gas…

Just for kids

Today is Children’s Day. Apart from the irony of belonging to a country where children are still used to get work done – as in that horrific phenomenon that is known as child labour – I am in many ways a child at heart, even though I am very long past that age. I still play with my food. I still like eating stuff like French fries and slurping my way through large and very thick chocolate milkshakes and making that dreadfully louche sound at the end when the straw siphons up nothing but a few brown bubbles. And I still find that food tastes better when someone else makes it for you than if you make it yourself to a greater degree of perfection. Especially if you arrange it artfully on a plate to look like flowers or even funny faces.

But there was much that I was not allowed to eat when I was a child. Like crawlies, which at that stage in my life I did not consider to be creepies as well. I had a young Japanese-Indian friend with whom I would go grubbing in the dust in the garden. She would pick up the long black crawlies, the ones we call millipedes but which are really not, biologically speaking, as far as I know, and stuff them happily into her mouth. Her mother knew she did that. She said nothing. But let me stretch one fat starfish hand towards a long black crawlie and my mother would descend like an avenging angel upon my hapless head, snatch me up from my vantage grubbing spot and bear me off homewards, scolding even as she hugged me, as if my proximity to the long black crawlie had somehow contaminated my being in some way.

And then there was the friendly neighbourhood chanawala outside school. He sat there, evening after evening, his huge smile beaming upon us clamouring babies all nicely dressed in natty school uniforms, waiting for either the school bus or our assorted parents to take us home. I had been warned that I was never to partake of his offerings that were so interestingly filled into a tight cone of notebook paper, but at that age – or any age, for that matter – resisting temptation was not very easy. One day, I almost managed to grab myself a cone. I had practiced saying “sing-chana mix” for a long time and was all ready with my coin clutched in one hot little hand. I ran out with my small friends to where the chanawala sat, set to launch into my great adventure. But just as my foot stepped out of the school walk and on to the pavement, I heard my name being called in a very familiar voice. It was my father, waiting for me at the gate, all ready to hold my hand to walk me to the car parked just down the street. I still have not said my line and bought my little cone of sing-chana, not yet, not even today, so many years later.

Perhaps the most memorable edible I ever met with as a child was the Hedgehog Cake. Made by a fond parent for her young daughter’s birthday party, it was served up to us kiddies after a veritable orgy of chips, sandwiches and a fizzy drink, all eaten in a living room that was almost instantly a scrapyard of party debris. There were chip crumbs all over the carpet and the rexine-covered furniture was patchily sticky with the dried residue of various sugary colas. And all of children were happily smeared with bits of whatever we had eaten…or thrown at each other. The piece de resistance was the birthday cake in the shape and decorative finish of a small round hedgehog – iced in chocolate, it had sprinkles and bits and pieces of frosting, chocolate and candy studded into it like hedgehog spines. When it was cut, it was rather more plain inside, layered chocolate and vanilla sponge with a gentle slather of cream icing in between and the occasional M&M (or Gems, as they are called here) added for interest.

I was completely fascinated. So much so that I actually wrote down the recipe, painfully in my rounded knitting-like scrawl. I still find it occasionally in the Betty Crocker box when I am looking for clues on how much sugar to use for flan or how long my basic wholewheat bread should bake.

Doing the waddle well

It’s been that kind of week. After doing ferocious and valiant battle with a virus that took on various forms, from a mere cold to influenza to whatever makes you breathe heavily as you walk up stairs and clutch your chest because you know that you will probably die when you get to wherever you are going before you actually get down to doing whatever you went there for but you won’t, since you have too much to do before, when and after you get there…I think I just lost track of that wonderfully wild sentence, by the way, so let’s abandon it and continue on our normally chaotic course…

Anyway, hot on the heels of the virus came the festival. Which meant that though I could spend a whole two-days of a weekend at home, I worked on the day that was actually the occasion as per the calendar as per the religious tenets that the family follows. And it was not just working, but working later than usual, which left me, Father and the driver in a very bad mood indeed, compounded by the assorted felonies of not being satisfied with the work I had done and wanting to eat junk food that I normally do not indulge in for various reasons that shall remain my own. But the festival of lights had nothing to do with light – normally spelled ‘lite’ by clever marketing folk – as describing the feeling we all collectively and individually experienced at the end of it all.

The festival was the classic celebration of good over evil or, as with all Indian celebrations, the victory of the calorie over counsel. Even as I ordered goodies to take to my team at work from the chappie who was said to be the best in the business, I knew that it would be the season of a certain degree of indulgence over the norm. And it was, surprisingly, not really. I do not waddle – albeit gracefully – down the corridor of the office while navigating my normal hectic workaday route; at least, not yet. But some people do…or perhaps they always did, it’s just that it is rather more noticeable now than before, maybe because everyone is so darn self-conscious about having eaten too much, too well, too blatantly.

The festival was also about giving. I gave away sweets by the kilo. I was given sweets by the kilo. And somewhere along the way, a lot more chocolate than we see on an average day made its home in our fridge, leaving very little space for the stuff that is our daily diet – greens, fruit, fibre! I began to dread each time the courier boy arrived at my desk bearing a package and a broad smile – most of it was junk mail related (or not) to work, mercifully. And I started feeling that the heavy breathing was not my bronchioles getting a trifle clouded, but the mithai that had been perforce stuffed into my mouth by well-meaning and cheerily celebrating friends.

This is the time of year that you perfect the sidle. As someone bears down upon you, one arm ominously outstretched, the hand at the end of it holding something that makes the fingers glisten greasily, you need to do a quick sidestep and either grab the mithai before it is shoved into you, or avoid the friend completely, hoping that he or she will understand why you suddenly have developed an aversion to the person that you shared so many gossip sessions and giggles with. There will be times when you find that same piece of sweetmeat that you worked so hard to avoid waiting for you on your desk, but the perils of that too can be averted with retrograde amnesia – you carefully give the mithai away, leave it there for the office pests (anything from cockroaches or your neighbour at the next table) to carry off or drop it (oops!) on the floor where it will be gradually ground into the anonymously coloured carpet to be discovered as fossil fragments during some future excavation.

All that apart, Diwali has come and gone. Now it is time to clean out the debris - physical, emotional and edible – and get life and self back into shape. Meanwhile, a very happy albeit belated Diwali to all!

Gather ye rosebuds…or labels

My friend Ranjona refuses to eat apples that have not been home grown. ‘Home’, as in the larger sense of the word, as in ‘India’, as in native produce. I, on the other hand, revel in any apple from anywhere, but only if it is hard and sweet and juicy. So the Chinese apples that we get here, large, pinky-tinged and wrapped nicely in a foamy muffler in a brighter pink synthetic mesh, make me very happy indeed. They are crisp and somehow always cool, with sweet juice spurting with every bite. Best of all, they have a cute little label stuck on the side - unfortunately with the most persistent of glue - that I can occasionally peel off and add to my fruit label collection.

It’s funny what people collect these days. In my day, when I collected things rather than characters, I had boxes full of bus tickets. They piled up all over the place, in boxes, in plastic bags, in storage cupboards (well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, since I really did not have THAT many). And, at the end of it, I was bored with it. I had no idea what I was doing with that many bits of paper and, as they gently yellowed or floated into the rain whenever there was a storm and someone left the windows open, I didn’t really honestly, genuinely care. Finally, most of them were thrown away. The rest, which did not fit into the garbage can, were given to a friend who really did need to collect something…anything.

Then I started a new collection, one that was far healthier and much less voluminous. It started long ago on a bright and sunny summer’s day. We were in a small garden that belonged to an auberge somewhere in Switzerland, just at the edge of a lake. I cannot, at this time and distance, be sure which lake it was, but it was a beautiful lake and a gorgeous day. The sun beat down, but there was a distinct chill in the air – every pore along my bare back and shoulders recognised that winter was not too far away. As we finished a leisurely and assuredly delicious lunch, a large bowl of fruit was set on the table. In the company of a few apples, a couple of peaches and a very large nectarine or two, was a conglomerate of bananas. They sat against the rim of the serving dish, happy, fat and very yellow. And the one that faced me and beamed sunnily had a neat little label pressed nattily on its side.

That was the serendipitous moment. That stunning instant of revelation. I knew what I was going to be collecting for the next so many years and I henceforth, as they said in good English novels, went about doing it with a certain dedication. In the process, I ate a vast number more of bananas than I actually liked – but it did detox my system and balance my electrolytes excellently – just to collect the labels, from Chiquita to Dole to Del Monte to the more mundane ‘Product of India’ (which I am most proud of, to be frank). I stuck them all carefully into a notebook that went everywhere with me, in which I scribbled notes for the school play, short stories that I was inspired to write when I was in a bathtub eating spring rolls and more than one vaguely libellous thought about what to do to a particularly repellent set of clothes if I ever got the chance.

Today I cannot find that notebook. I also have no idea what I would do with all the labels if I still had the extensive collection. But that has not stopped me sort-of-peeling-off the labels on fruit if I see them. For now, I waver between kiwi and apples, preferring to collect rather than consume.

Out, cold

It started slowly, but now I am addicted. Many years ago, when I was a mere babe-in-arms, my parents battled to feed me ice cream. In the struggle, they were exhausted, wiped out by the extent of the fighting and yelling and forcing that they had to do to get a little of the cold sweet down my throat. But then, serendipitously almost, they managed to sneak a tiny smidgen past my incipient milk teeth and that, my friends, was that. I have not given up looking for the dessert since.

It started with the basic of plain vanilla, common garden, nothing particularly spectacular. Then it gradually developed into more, with chocolate overtaking that to top the list. I never really did get too experimental or adventurous, because I did not need to, did not want to and did not ever become brave enough to cross the lines. I did go overboard occasionally and find myself unable to deal with the quantity of chocolate ice cream that my mind believed to be optimal, but that was rare – in fact, it may have happened once, a story that will be told anon.

Perhaps my favourite memory of cold stuff is sitting on the stairs of our house in Maryland, watching something monumental unfolding on television. We had just discovered the dairy at the University and had stocked up our freezer with nicely-sized tubs of frozen dessert. I sat there, peering at the TV (I have a vague suspicion that I was supposed to be upstairs in my room dealing with homework or something equally traumatic) and spooning up sweet heaven – it was thick, it was creamy, it was just plain delicious, the only way for a finely honed taste in ice cream to travel.

Many years later, when I was in college in New York (the state, not the city), I was introduced to frozen yoghurt. It was an odd concept, but for me it worked, since it was lighter and less sweet and cloying than regular ice cream, and it hit the perfect spot when you wanted cold refreshment and not the fallout of biliousness and hyperactivity. And it tasted better than usual, because it was dished out by my ‘little brother’ Robby, who managed a chain of the stores on Long Island. In fact, I still have a couple of store-logo keychains that he gave me then!

But it was frozen yoghurt that did the aforementioned defeating of my capacity to go through ice cream. I was in college in Colorado at the time, living in a small (and, after my home turf of Mumbai) very hick town called Boulder. Perhaps the charm of the place was in its ultra-granola culture, where former flower children mingled quite coherently with new-age gurus who ate granola and believed in weaving their own woollen garments (and, often, selling then at some horrendously over-inflated price, of course) that they wore in conjunction with clunky Pedestrian sandals and hear done in bead-braids. There was a frozen yoghurt shop in the middle of the cobbled-street mall and we went in there quite often to cool off, or just indulge in a little superfluous calori-bashing.

I was there with friend Karen and demanded their Death by Chocolate. It may, of course, have been called something else, but it was almost the death of me and chocolate beyond any conceivable doubt. It started with a layer of brownie. Atop was a slab of chocolate, shaved into substantial spirals. Then followed a thick slather of chocolate sauce, with chocolate nuggets (or was it chunks? Chips?) over that, then a couple of scoops of chocolate frozen yoghurt. Then a repeat, if I remember right. And, over the whole arrangement, a generous pour of chocolate fudge sauce and a handful of chocolate shavings. I got through about half of it. And I had to yell Uncle, Aunt and every cousin on any block, ever. I could not take any more.

It is perhaps still spoken of, albeit in hushed voices, in my small circle of friends.