Eating the burn

It’s been a while since I actually wrote something for this space. And that has a very good reason – a very close and dear friend was visiting from the United States and we had a lot to do in very little time. Apart from doing a good gossip every now and then and catching up with various crimes that we had perpetrated against people we knew and often didn’t, we needed to wander about a city I knew better than when she came here last and she had a craving to re-see. It was a fun albeit exhausting time and I was not happy to see her off at the Departures terminal at the international airport, even as I was glad to get my sense of routine and rest back from where it had vanished to for the time I was off from work and on a completely arbitrary though happy non-schedule. In all the chatter and giggle and the occasional tear, we did a great deal of eating. In fact, I am now on a fairly strict regimen of culinary austerity, just so that I can get back into my various jeans without busting through another zipper.

Perhaps one of the more memorable meals we had was a Gujarati thali in the heart of the traditional stronghold that is called Kalbadevi. We had been walking a while, going from market to car and car to market (different markets, though the same car each time) and we were hot, a little sweaty, tired and vaguely crabby from sheer lack of sugar and water, the two aspects that keep the self fuelled and ticking over. We had been in the presence of great quantities of food, from fruit and nuts to less easily eaten raw vegetables and a certain amount of canned, processed and otherwise difficult-to-access stuff. We had walked at a fast clip past small eateries and smaller street stalls, rapidly navigated around people chewing all sorts of snacks and briefly watched a vendor making sandwiches that I had on good authority to be absolutely delicious. And, in perfect syncopation with the beat of the small bells around a rather undernourished dancing monkey’s neck, our tummies had rumbled a demand to be filled with whatever was fresh, clean and preferably flavourful.

I had somewhere that could supply that in mind. It is a nicely swabbed and friendly-staffed restaurant in the heart of Kalbadevi called Surti and, like the name says, specialises in the cuisine of Gujarat. In fact, whenever I am there, which is about once in five years or so, I suddenly acquire a store of the Gujarati language that I never knew I possessed – it comes back to me from some long-buried primeval storehouse where all sounds are acceptable and can be produced by the vocal apparatus with much felicity. The best part of this was that the waiters could even understand what I said and didn’t merely stand by and smile avuncularly as I battled with the various phonemes I fondly imagined I could master.

We were ushered ceremoniously upstairs to the ‘Family Room/AC only’ and seated at a newly cleaned table. The two young men next to us goggled fascinatedly at my friend, whose marmalade hair glowed in the fluorescent light. The maitre d’ ambled to us and demanded to know what we wanted and raised a lethargic eyebrow as we asked for three thalis. They soon arrived. They were enormous. But we soldiered on and finished with a respectable emptiness of our steel plates but a deplorable fullness of our tummies. There were hugely puffy puris to start with and steaming khichdi to end with. In between came a series of katoris filled with vegetables – gently sprouted beans, spicy potatoes, cabbage with well-hidden chillies to assault the mouth, dal with a kind of dumpling and peanuts, dal with nothing except tadka, sprouted black-eyed beans, kadi, dahi, shrikhand and goodness knows what else I may have shoved into my groaning stomach and forgotten about. The meal was rich with ghee and masala, and we relished it even with the spice levels, our ears sweating gently as we ate a bite of this and a nibble of that, ending with a cool glass of water and that last lick of sweet-sour shrikhand.

My friend loved it. Father and I burned inside and out, but admitted that it was a pretty good lunch, with lots of vegetables and flavour, all sliding down smoothly in spite of the unwonted degree of heat that went with each bite. All in all an experience to savour for us all, and a nice afternoon to write home about.