It’s raining pakoras!

Well, actually, it’s not really. But it is in a manner of speaking, if you will allow me to explain…

It has started raining in Mumbai and the weather has turned from being unbearably hot, humid and oppressive to being breezy cool and, well, kinda soggy. Mumbaikars have exchanged one set of woes for another, but are not yet seeing them as woes, just being overwhelmingly relieved at the lowered temperatures and cooler nights. We optimistically see this time of year as being a complete turnaround from the recently-past days of not exactly wine and roses, but more sharbats and tummy infections. And, even as the rain streaks down the windows and brings in a new crop of mould on the kolhapuri chappals, there is this overall feeling of “Whew! The monsoon has come!”

With the first storms of the season comes a new hunger, a major change from the times of heat-induced nausea and a reluctance to look at anything that might even remotely resemble food. It means the expected appearance on the streets of bhutta sellers, the people who sit in front of tiny charcoal-fired grills roasting fresh corn on the cob. They huddle under enormous umbrellas and wave sheets of paper or corn husks at the embers to fan them into firing up the corn kernels to a dark, almost-popped deliciousness. They nestle the roasted cobs into a twist of husk and sprinkle them with a flecked-red mixture of salt and chilli powder. You walk away into the drizzle biting on sweet-charred-salty-spicy corn that warms your insides even as it catches on your teeth and sharpens your appetite for more.

Everyone issues dire warnings about what should and should not be eaten once the rains arrive. Stay OFF the street food, the newspapers and magazines yell, it will give you everything from cholera to salmonella poisoning. Stay OFF eating out, Father yells, you know your tummy will misbehave and you get very crabby when you do not feel good. Stay OFF Stay OFF eating junk, my doctor yells, I do not want to keep giving you medicines to get well again. So all that is just what I crave, even though I would never normally even consider eating any of the above.

Instead, I make what I like eating at home. We eat hot, spicy, rich khichdi, a soft mixture of rice and lentils redolent with ghee and studded with nuts, vegetables and whole cloves, cardamom and star anise. We eat garam-garam pakoras, soft with besan and strung through with methi leaves, sharpened with ginger and crunchy with cashewnuts. We sip hot rasam, sparked with pepper, tinged with coriander and fragrant with garlic smashed gently into hot ghee. And we eat hot pudding – caramel custard spiked with nutmeg, warm kheer spotted with golden-fried raisins, hot apple pie with warm vanilla custard.

The rain never fails to make me want to eat, even if I am not hungry. The traditional ‘rain food’ is pakoras and masala chai, manna from a heaven that is preoccupied with sending down all the manna it has to soak us and the city we live in. Which is where the problem starts from, isn’t it? When it rains, it pours and when it pours, you think fond thoughts of food that everyone yells at you to stay off of…