On the curds

Many years ago I wrote a lot about yoghurt. Apart from anything else, I was charmed by the idea that Methuselah and Genghis Khan were fans of the soft white stuff and managed to live to ripe old ages with it as a healthy and regular part of their diets. It was also chock-full of tryptophan, that wonderful natural sedative, a component that promotes sleep naturally, easily, with no side effects and no chemicals (not the kind we speak to today, at least) involved.

Around the time I first went off to college in the United States, when I found myself alone and wandering the grocery aisles with little clue on what I needed, but knowing full well what I wanted, I found that the concept of non-fat yoghurt had caught on. It was, frankly, dreadful. It looked white, quivered and promised much, but it gave off a lot of water and tasted oddly dull. But the worst part was that it had the texture of talcum powder badly mixed into a paste and left your tongue feeling dry and somehow seared by something acrid. In contrast, the full-fat version, which I insisted I would stick to, was thick and rich, settling into the mouth with a cool, soft, luxurious feeling that I had found only in home-made dahi from whole-fat milk.

When I was much younger, still in school, my parents and I went to this small mountain village called Sihor. From there, we hiked up a couple of hours to the temple town of Palitana. We left the guest house where we were staying bundled up in jackets and scarves and walked long and hard and breathing heavily up the hill to the very top. From there, the barren hillside suddenly transformed into a veritable tumble of temples, large, small and barely-there, each a prayer in itself to the Jain monk or avatar it venerated. Marble roofs, elaborately carved, jostled for space with more stark and simple stone stupas. The entire hillside was a sea of shrines, one dwarfing the next, every one of them a song in stone. And there was a whole symphony there, with 256 or more of these little pagodas.

But even better than that awesome early-morning sun-rise view was waiting for us at the main archway, the entrance into the small city: a host of yoghurt sellers, touting their wares in piercing tones, one louder than the next. When we tried, tentatively, the creamy white milk set firm in shallow pottery dishes, we stopped at the first bite…savoured, and then demanded more. The earthenware had allowed water to seep out and kept the contents of the dish cool and fresh. The dahi itself was quite solid, sprinkled over with tiny shards of rock salt, amazingly energising and mercifully, wonderfully, superbly exactly what we needed to rejuvenate us after the walk up and before the walk back down.

And today, when I see all those plastic cups and cartons of yoghurt stacked on supermarket shelves, I remember that glorious winter morning on a hilltop…