China syndrome

The Chinese would probably laugh with a mixture of horror and embarrassment. I almost did. In fact, I probably would have, except that if I had opened my mouth to do anything, I would have burped, with all the gas that the lunch had endowed me with. And the irascible boss and I made amusedly disparaging remarks about it, too, standing in the middle of the corridor, as the late afternoon bustle scurried around us with people getting work done, pages made, the paper published. ‘It’ was a plate full of food that the canteen downstairs in the office fondly believed to be ‘Chinese’. It was in some way related, I will admit, wandering aimlessly between Beijing and Ludhiana with a gustatory ambivalence that even a TV show host who recently focussed on this aspect of food could not pin down. But we, me and irascible boss, ate it to the last limp twig of red pepper, and enjoyed the freedom to make comments as tasteless as the contents of our plates had been.

I came in late to work today, right in time for the canteen boy to beam happily at me and offer me the day’s menu – fried rice, he listed, and noodle. I have always had a passion for the noodle, from Instant Ramen to carefully handcrafted threads, and I concurred: noodle it would be. I knew what it would be like; I had seen it before and even tasted of it on an earlier occasion. But asking for the whole helping was a new one. It came soon after, gently steaming (which does help make up for a lot of untold and untellable woes), on a large plate. It kept company with a small katori of ‘Vegetable Manchurian’, the chappie said cheerfully, and a large spoon. “Thank heaven for Nina and her gift of a matched set of cutlery!) the noodle was not in the singular in any sense of the word. It lay there along with a number of its kin, all in various lengths and, occasionally, in such close proximity that it adhered firmly in clumps, and it was bathed with a patina of brown – a blend of soy sauce, oil and I-don’t-want-to-know-what-else. It tasted of not much – the starch of the noodle clogged most else out of existence, with the rare tinge of onion and an infrequent hint of pepper adding interest.

But it was the Machurian sauce that put the bite into the bungle. It was redolent with garlic, the flour-based brown gluey semi-liquid studded generously with finely chopped bulb. And the pakora swimming in it, dense and stodgy, held more garlic tenderly in its oddly misshapen mass. Combine the noodle with the sauce and it worked, though perhaps not in any way that the Chinese would recognise, being even a delightful way to soothe a week-frazzled system and a spiky-harassed mind. Comfort food in one of its many avatars, sliding gently down a very sore throat and softly bathing a stressed sinus with a gummy duvet of mildly-flavoured pap. Ideal for a day that wavers between searing hot outside and semi-frozen inside the office. Ideal for nerves that do not want any more edge to an otherwise jagged existence.

That makes it good food, never mind the culinary qualities it may pretend to possess. And never mind its provenance, its constituents or its consistency. As something to fill the stomach and line the mind, it was a perfect lunch.