Fast food station

It all happened a very long time ago. I was in college in Mumbai for a short time and made friend with some very interesting women – it was, oddly enough for me, a women’s college – who showed me a very interesting world that was entirely new to an extraordinarily naïve me. They took me shopping in stores that I had never been with my mother; they showed me how to catch a bus in ways that I would never do with my father; and they taught me how to eat what I had never seen before, leave alone ever tasted. It was not that I was such a snob, merely that it was all outside my sphere of experience, for the simple reason that I ate very simple food that was, most often, made in a very simple way at home. Or else, as I have said before, I ate apples and chocolate, among the very simple pleasures of life and food.

These new friends introduced me to street food. That had always been looked at with some disdain in my family, since no one had the time or energy to spend on dealing with a bad tummy, whoever’s it may have been. I was kept firmly far away from anything that was sold by a not-too-salubrious-looking bloke who sat at the corner of the bend in the pavement selling stuff in slim paper cones. I was kept firmly away from anything that seemed to have liquid in it, since you never knew what had been floating in the container and when, if at all, the water it held had been boiled or otherwise disinfected. And I was kept firmly away from any food that was cooked – grilled, toasted or otherwise – on any sort of stove or tawa or grate that did not look like it had been scoured with a stiff steel brush and lots of detergent.

Perhaps the first step came from a vaguely affirmative suggestion from my mother, I can never be sure. We were sitting on the balcony one evening after I had come back from college and idly chatting about who had said what, done what and worn what over the day. And I told her and my father about how the girls went down to the gate of the campus every afternoon to eat the food that the small stalls there sold. There was dosai, I told them with some amazement, and lots of other things that I didn’t know. You should try it one day, Mother said, almost in passing, moving rapidly on to the taste of mutton samosas at the café on Marina Beach in Chennai when she was a collegian. Father must have laughed, as he always did, teasing me and then her about the need to belong and do what our friends did, instead of not being a ‘shoop’ and taking a different road from that the herd travelled. So, the very next day that I was in college (which was, I admit, not as often as it should have been), I went down to the gate with my friends and did the food thing.

It was revelatory. I opted for sev puri, something that sounded right from all the research I had done. And it was well worth the trouble, singed eyebrows notwithstanding. Those were a result of the high chilli level in the various chutneys and sauces that were spooned over the basic recipe. It was exotic, to say the least, for someone who knew her sushi and quenelles, but had no clue where more local delicacies like bhel, pav bhaji and ragda pattice were concerned. It began with a small leaf torn from a writing pad or old school notebook. On it were arranged six small stiff puris, obviously crunchy and deep fried. Then came a layer of crumbled boiled potato, topped with a little finely chopped onion and kothmir. Then a healthy sprinkle of crispy sev, over which was washed a little green chutney (put very little, my friends shrieked, knowing my rather wimpy tastebuds) and a little more brown chutney. Then a little more sev, for garnish, with more coriander leaves. And the paper with its contents were handed to me.

I ate, with a certain amount of exploratory delight and no little wonder. The textures end the tastes were most interesting, almost addictive, even with the overall cloud of fire from the chilli chutney. But the crunch and the softness, the sweet tang and the incendiary, the fresh and the fried, all melded wonderfully in my mouth. Though I ate that only once, and never really met the same sort of thing again (the stuff served up at work is dreadful, stale and dull), I was delighted. Maybe one day we will renew our acquaintance…soon.