Delhi belly

Being away from home always disrupts my food routine, but in the nicest way. and sicne I am for the most part responsible for my own kitchen, when I planned my brief holiday, I got the fridge stocked with enough to last Father the week and make me feel better, albeit long distance, about fibre, fresh veggies and the rest of that sort of good stuff. And I packed up my assortment of vitamins and make-up and got on that plane. Breakfast was served soon after take off.

At which point I almost got off. Though it smelled decent enough, with the sharp tang of tandoori spice cutting through the acrid whiff of newly perked coffee, by the time the cart came around, I was ready to jump out, even sans parachute. “Tea, please,” I asked with the timidity I feel only on planes during meal service, knowing that one inadvertently rude word can provide you with a lapful of steaming liquid or no access to the loo just when you are desperate enough to use a paper cup. And when the hot liquid was poured into my small plastic cup, I quailed; it was strong, it was brewed and it was the colour of tar distillate or furniture varnish. One sip was enough to jolt me out of the early-morning fug of sleeplessness that was mine at that hour of the day. The food, I shook my head mutely at.

In Delhi I was fed by friends who tend to get it right. Perhaps the nicest meal I had was a lunch that was simplicity itself – a plate of fine slices of smoked salmon, with a wee pot of sour cream and a handful of wonderfully tangy capers to add that special cachet. The array of chocolate at the dessert buffet did little to tempt my temperamental tastebuds, but the slices of delicious fish, soft and pale veined, peachy pink and gleaming, made my tongue do a happy tango with each bite.

Then there was the stuff that my friend’s cook dished up. For me, there was fibre, leafy, green and delectable, fresh and fragrant as it came off the pan and on to my plate. Eaten with hot and fluffy rotis, it was delicious more for the way in which the cook, an old friend himself, urged me to eat more, frowning when I refused and beaming happily when I held out my plate for more. We chatted over the stove, bemoaning the lack of fat in my friend’s diet - and kitchen – and exchanging recipes and methods that did their gustatory magic every time that I visited.

One lunch at a Chinese restaurant in the centre of town was again memorable, more for the company than for the food itself. An old friend was host, and he smiled gently and affectionately across the table at me as we ate our way through a collation of noodles, spicy chicken, tender fish and dimsums that lit up my insides as they brought back memories of a dimsum festival in a strange city in a country that I was visiting for the first time. And as I swirled hot jasmine tea in my mouth to unglue my back teeth from the steely grip of caramel-coated cashewnuts, I thought of a small boat bobbing on the largest river in the world and people who had a wonderful history and an incredibly interesting present….