A meal in one

Happy VP day!Today, the newspapers tell me, is Vada Pav Day. Which is, in itself, a triumph of clever marketing and the best way to gentrify a snack that is a Mumbai street speciality that everyone from the Common Man to celebrated chef Anthony Bourdain has nibbled on. I pass a name-brand outlet (one started by the company that started the hype of today being a special day) every day and often wonder what it would be like to wander in, order one of the many versions on the vast roster of food available and then eat it as a meal or just an in-between or whatever I feel like calling it.

I had never heard of a vada pav until I started working in Mumbai, soon after I got out of college abroad. Since I am rather a fusspot – in many ways, but about food in particular – the local-found delicacies were all strange to me, foods I had never eaten, had never wanted to eat and would probably never eat…except for the friends I made. One of them, in particular, a very tall and lanky gentleman who straightened out the tech-mess that the websites I worked on invariably got into, decided that I had had enough of being a sheltered darling and needed some toughening up. He began with the locally available thali, then worked me into puri-bhaji from a nearby streetside eatery and then, almost as a grand finale – or my farewell from the newspaper office I had spent so long in – the vada pav from a small café just down the road. But I was rather daunted by the fact that the plate he lovingly placed in front of me was home to a large, soft white-bread bun, stuffed with what I knew as a batter-coated deep-fried bonda, rich with potatoes, onions and green chillies, and cushioned by a thick layer of brilliant red powdery chutney that seemed to hold all the fire of a full-of-life Vesuvius on an especially grumpy day generations ago. I quailed.

Some years late, I was re-introduced to the vada pav. This time, it was in a more upscale dining establishment in Delhi, actually a franchise of a fast food chain of American origin. I had insisted I wanted to try the vegetarian offering just introduced to the country and was told that it was just like a vada pav. Which made me even more determined to bite into it. It came, nicely wrapped in labelled waxed paper, with a tiny plastic dish of ketchup to make it slide down faster. I had asked for mine with cheese, and it clung to the roof of my mouth with the first bite and, I suspect, would never have let go if I had not swallowed some of the hot coffee I drank in those days. It was called a ‘veggie burger’. It was a vada pav with painfully pedantic good manners. And about the most disappointing thing I have ever eaten.

So today I should celebrate the existence of something I have rarely been in the neighbourhood of. Which is a pity, since most of Mumbai seems to thrive on it. One of these days, I tell myself, I shall live dangerously, dive in the deep end and go all out. All for the sake of culinary experience and the chance to wish people “Happy Vada Pav Day!” and really mean it.