It feels like a very long time ago that I came back to my own city from various parts of the world. At that time, I was delicately nurtured on Big Macs, salads, enchiladas, lasagne and whatever else I and my roomie Karen conjured up in the small kitchen of our tiny two-bedroom apartment. It was, of course, bolstered by occasional jaunts to restaurants that we could afford on our rather meagre allowances, which was not fancy but quite healthy. And Karen, in her infinite wisdom, believed that her daily recommended allowance of veggies came from the ketchup on her burger, even as I fought her prejudices and force-fed her with eggplant, celery, yellow peppers (the green ones are still avoidable for both of us) and – very rarely after a protracted battle – broccoli.
It was when I was in college that street food became a sort of cred. Of a kind, that is. It meant pizza, bagels, hot dogs (but only in New York city), baked chestnuts and French fries, but disallowed tacos, burritos, peanuts and cotton candy that was not blue, since I had a grumbly tummy and Karen was astonishingly calorie conscious. It was not that I had never eaten food outside the house or a restaurant with tablecloths before. In Geneva, where we lived for a while, my mother and I would eat a crepe or two on the pavement outside the main department store in the shopping enclave and in Lyon, we devoured the most wonderful rolls stuffed with Brie (for her) and ‘le ’ot dog’ and sinus-jarring mustard for me. We also chomped out way through various other street-sold foods, from pain au chocolat to chocolate covered almonds from the candy counter outside C&A in Heidelberg when I was a much younger child.
In Mumbai, food eaten from a streetside stall was a whole different proposition. I could rarely stomach it, being rather allergic (in a manner of speaking) to anything beyond the level of perhaps 0.5 on the chilli scale. Perhaps the only time I really tried it was when I had just started my brief stint in college and my friends insisted that I get down and dirty with them and snack from the stall just outside the campus gate. It was a form of exotica called ragda pattice and burned as it went in and even more as it went out. To me, it consisted of a small round patty composed mainly of potatoes and chilli, swimming in a gravy that consisted of lentils and more chilli, and topped with various sauces that had tamarind, yoghurt and even more chilli. I wept pathetically, so much so that my friends vowed never ever to feed me the stuff again.
Having escaped that experience fairly unscathed, I dived much later into the great Indian paani puri. It was interesting, texturally and gustatorily, and controllable in that I didn’t have to be drowned by chillies at every gulp. Instead, I was made totally greenly bilious by the sweetness of the various liquids that I was given in my puri and managed to colour coordinate with my clothes with some difficulty. Which ruled out future contact with the stuff.
Perhaps the food that captured my culinary senses was alu chaat. I found it in Delhi, as the mildest and most innocuous of a vast panoply of chilli-laden snacky foods, very similar to hash browns, albeit with a dash of spice that seared through my system with happy fire. I would eat it only at restaurants where the waiters wiped down the tables with a semi-clean cloth and only in the company of my buddy Nina, and with the accompaniment of enormous quantities of yoghurt to soothe my lips and tongue. But I loved it. And I will devour it again when I find it. Chillies and all!
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