Food and history in Old Delhi

Old Delhi has been one of my favourite places to explore. I love the old-world politeness of the people and the narrow gullies that make up the most fascinating maze. I've seen it on cold, wintry evenings, when Nan khatai vendors do a brisk trade, and if you listen hard, you can hear the crackles when sweet potato skins burn and blister over red coals, sending up an irresistible toasty smell. I've seen it on burning afternoons, when the roads are crowded with rickshaw pullers and busy shoppers, oblivious to the heat. That’s the time when the lassiwalas powder ice by heaving cloth sacks filled with it at the road, over and over again, and then scoop up the powder into earthen mugs filled with frothy buttermilk, scent it with rosewater, and top it with a generous smear of cream. Nothing quenches thirst better.

But I longed to see it in the morning, a time when there would be few tourists or outsiders, and the roads would be empty, save for the chaiwallas and the pigeons.

Since I write a food blog, and am acutely interested in all matters gustatory, it made sense to combine my wish to see Old Delhi in the morning, with one for breakfast. So it transpired that I met up with Haifa, Rahul and Richard at the Barakhamba Road metro station, at 8 am last Saturday morning, with a plan of renting bicycles and riding them to Chawri Bazaar. The idea was awfully clever: We’d cycle the five kilometers to Chandni Chowk, thereby working up an appetite and negating the calories we’d then consume. It didn't work out quite that way though. There were cycles aplenty, but not a single one with air in its tyres. The stand attendant was sleepy and seemed confused and subsequently baffled by my demand for a bicycle pump. We gave in and took the metro.

The Chawri Bazaar metro station is three levels below the ground and as you ride up on the escalator, the sounds of the morning slowly  become louder and clearer. We stepped out in the sunshine -below the familiar tangle of wires- to incongruously empty roads only populated by stray dogs and a few rickshawallas. I had a map and a list of places to go to, in sequence, much to the amusement of my friends. I led them straight to Shyam Sweets and without bothering with the menu, ordered us platefuls of bedmi aloo, halwa nangori, and earthen mugs, brimming with lassi. The aloo curry was thick and brown and spicy, while the bedmi accompanying it was crisp and fragrant. We broke off bits with our fingers and ate, with sighs of contentment. I tried not to estimate just how much ghee the halwa must have absorbed to turn just that shade of glistening gold, and instead scooped it up with shards of delicately crisp nangori. Cold lassi washed down a very fine breakfast indeed.

Noticeably slower, we walked up the Chanwri Bazaar road to the Jama Masjid. Richard, a history major, explained the mosque's history to us as we climbed up the steps to the massive entrance. We walked around the central courtyard -large enough that 20,000 people can pray there at one time- and then sat in one corner, to take it all in. The mosque was already filling with tourists and the devout, and the pigeons had a giant square, filled with grain, all to themselves. A pool in the center of the courtyard glistened greenly in the sunlight. A faint breeze was blowing, and flocks of pigeons swirled in the sky above us. We sat there contentedly for about half an hour.

As we emerged from the Masjid, right opposite the main entrance, I saw Mushtaq Panwalla, and had to stop. The owner was a smiling but not particularly garrulous gentleman in a pan-stained white kurta. I chatted away about how fond I was of pan, and how I hadn’t yet sampled a really good one in Delhi, at least not comparable to the ones in Hyderabad. He nodded sagely, smiled, and began preparing three meetha pans for me to take home. Once he began, I fell silent. There was too much going on. Bottle after bottle filled with strange looking ingredients was opened, quantities measured, and each placed precisely on giant betel leaves. I identified cardamom, sugar balls, coconut, rose water, chunna, gulkand, and saunf, but there must've been, oh, a hundred things more. Several onlookers joined us. I think we all released a collective breath we didn't know we'd been holding, when he finished. He rolled each pan up expertly, inserted them in paper cones, and put them in a bag for me to take home and share with Appa.

Still talking about the panwalla, we made our way to the Red Fort, paid our entrance fee, and walked inside. Now, this is a food blog, and I suspect my impressions on the fort are the substance of a full, rambling blog post by themselves, so I will content myself by saying that I could’ve spent all day there. In the blazing sunlight, filled with tourists with loud voices and cameras, stripped of its mirrors and precious stones and gold scrollwork, it was still incredibly lovely. The buildings had the sort of dignity that only comes with age and endurance. We walked through silently.

Once we emerged from the Red Fort’s spell though, it was back to gluttony. I was leading everyone unerringly (My nose was buried in my map, so I might’ve bumped into a few people along the way) towards Kake di Hatti, widely renowned to make the best paranthas in Delhi. We unfortunately paused at this small restaurant for cold water and Mountain Dew, and ended up sitting inside and ordering some of the fluffy bhaturas they were frying up in a giant kadai outside. The bhaturas were a disappointment, as were the unassertively spiced chole that accompanied them. It was a lesson to us not to venture into shops not previously recommended by those who know best.

The final stop we made was at Bade Miyan Kheer, a tiny shop without a board, with a cramped seating area and warm, smiling owners. Rahul and Haifa aren’t big sweet eaters and we were all still pretty stuffed, so we only ordered a single plateful. It came to us, tan and sticky, chilled to just the right temperature, in a small square bowl with four spoons. There was silence as we ate; the only sound was of our spoons scraping the bowl, again and again. The kheer was gloriously creamy and deceptively simple. It was rice, milk, and sugar, so masterfully treated that they had all fused together, to form a sum so much larger than the parts. The rice grains were visible but melted in your mouth. There was sweetness, but it was gentle and gave way to the subtler flavours of thick, fat milk and full, creamy rice. We ordered another plateful and polished it off in short order.

Then, deeply content, we boarded the metro and returned to the present.

All my research for this trip (And trust me, there were pages of it) was gleaned from this lovely blog written by Pamela Timms. She is inspiring, and each time I read her words, I want to race out, take the metro to whichever place she recommends, and eat till I’m surfeited.
I also got additional material from Rahul Verma’s columns in the Hindu. I want his job.

If you want the addresses to any of the places I visited, drop me an email or leave a comment to this post, and I’ll do my best to direct you there.  
 
PS: In case you were wondering, the pan was delicious, and really as good as any I’ve eaten in Hyderabad.

Morning Song

This morning, as I washed the sleep off my face, I heard the children singing their morning prayer. Our house shares a wall with the Army School, and at around seven thirty every weekday, you can hear the children sing. Six years ago, I was one of them.

In all Army Schools and Kendriya Vidyalayas around India, we sing the same song at morning prayers. It is a bhajan whose words have been carefully scrutinized for secularism. I first learnt the prayer in Jammu, where I’d transferred to the Army School because it was the only school at any reasonable distance from out house. Prayers were scheduled at 7 am and so K and I would leave home on our cycles at 6:40. I had inherited K’s old cycle, which was a miniature boys cycle, perfect in every tiny feature. I had however refused to learn how to ride it until it was painted in baby pink and K would wince every time he saw the desecration.

Winter mornings in Jammu were bitterly cold so I'd wrap myself in layers of sweaters, a scarf, gloves and woolen socks. Still, the wind would find a way in, whipping the tails of my scarf about and stinging my face to a hectic red. I would race to the school, to get out of the wind as soon as possible, determinedly pedaling my pink cycle as the wind tore at my pigtails.

I'd park my cycle and rush to the classroom, where my friends would be waiting. We would hold hands and try to get warm. The boys tumbled each other outside, the exercise keeping them warm while we girls shared our warmth and traded gossip. No matter how icy I was after that cycle ride, there would always be someone to rub my fingers and bring back the circulation.

Then a bell would sound and we'd all troop out for the assembly and there we would sing our bhajan to irregular beats on the PT drum. We would sing lustily in an effort to distract ourselves from the cold. Then we would recite our pledge, cold red fingers stretched ahead in a salute. Then there were excruciating readings of the news and the "Thought for the Day" before we were finally commanded to stand motionless during the national anthem.

I don’t think I ever really understood what we were singing then. The song is carefully chosen because it never takes any one God's name. Instead it asks a pretty generic God for gifts of knowledge, love and patriotism. The tune was a little tiresome, each stanza sung in exactly the same way. Our voices uplifted in chorus, were hardly melodious.

That school was built from modified barracks, with asbestos roofs and no flooring. After reading about how asbestos can be carcinogenous, I used to anxiously examine my skin for lumps. I was rather hypochondriacal those days. A line of termites spread over the walls of our classroom; the boys used to poke at them with compasses in an effort to gross us out. Snakes were common and their appearance in classes made for fervid lunch hour discussion.

That was the first government school I ever went to. Till then I had been to an elite kindergarten school and a public school where the children were rich and everyone spoke English. In Army School. I made friends with many people far less privileged than I. Looking back, I was often thoughtless and vain those days, but those friends still stood by me and accepted me for what I was. It was cold, sure, but there were always smiles and pleasant voices to warm me up.

I've learnt many songs in many schools: Christmas carols, patriotic tunes, catholic hymns, complex classical pieces and even Irish drinking songs. But the song I'll always associate with my childhood is that monotonous bhajan I sang on a stony field in Jammu, as my feet turned numb with cold.

My Happy Place

I have traveled quite a bit around this country of ours, but whenever people ask me my favourite place, my reply is always the same- Himachal Pradesh. Perhaps it was because that was the first posting of Appa's I was old enough to remember clearly, perhaps the wild, cold beauty of the mountains appealed to something in my impressionable ten-year-old soul, but I have always known that some day I will return there.

We lived in a house on the side of a mountain. A road wound in lazy spirals around the entire girth of that mountain, hedged by wild honeysuckle that bloomed in giant sprays of pink and yellow. The valley was almost a sheer drop from the side our house was on, with only one steep gravel path leading down. A stream flowed in that valley- icy cold in the winters and angry red in the monsoons. The sound of that stream was a constant in our lives, I came to associate the sound of running water with silence. The view from our terrace was breathtaking. There were giant mountains all around. the nearest one was just across the valley- terraced mustard fields dotted with yellow farmhouses. Behind it were dark green mountains covered with fuzzy pine trees. And further behind was a giant, craggy peak always covered in white, even in the summer.

One winter Appa, Ken and I set off in quest of snow that we could see on that faraway peak. But the further we trudged, the more distant that elusive snow capped peak seemed. We walked through the pine forest and discovered a forgotten pool in its heart. We imagined leopard treads and collected pine cones to take home for Amma to exclaim over. We kept expecting snow, just after that next peak we'd cross. We stood in the middle of a cloud on a mountain peak and looked at the mountains around us, in the winter sunshine.

We never did find that snow- the fog rolled over and we had to turn back.

When I was writing that article on life in the Army, Appa hunted out a few photos of the Kangra valley for me. They reassure me that the valley is indeed as beautiful as I remember it.

Adventure Camp

I've finally finished that article on life in the Army that was harrying the life out of me. It took almost a notebook full of notes and two nightouts, but is still pretty terrible. It somehow reads like a bad recruiting brochure.

However, writing and researching it dredged up some long forgotten memories. Thanks R for that long reminiscing chat, it really helped. I recalled my experiences at the Young Lions Adventure Camp, that I attended in the summer vacations when I was 10 years old. I had quite forgotten about it (and this might've been my trauma response) until our chat that night. The camp was for the children of officers, to give them some experience of life in the wild. It lasted ten days, but after three, I called home and bawled so loudly, my parents came to get me. Three days were quite enough for me though K- trooper that he is- stayed the whole ten.

When they said the camp would provide hands-on experience, they weren't kidding. We lived in tiny tents pitched on grass. The facilities were rustic, to say the least. During the welcoming dinner, we were asked what our favourite music was. Everyone yelled either Ricky Martin or Celine Dion which were both names I hadn't ever heard of then. Their reason for asking was apparent the next morning when we were woken up at 4 am by Ricky Martin proclaiming his love for Maria. We had to rush, bathe in icy and not very clean water and then report for PT in the ground by 4:30. The end of some pretty vigorous exercising was proclaimed (rather ironically) by Celine Dion informing us soulfully that her heart would go on. It was in camp that I conceived my deep and lasting hatred for that song.

Breakfast would comprise muddy toast and a strange looking poha before it was off to the field for different sessions and workshops. In my three days, we had workshops on fire safety, horse riding, rope climbing and most interestingly, knot tying. Knot tying was most interesting because the first half of the workshop comprised only a lecture by this old JCO. He constantly mispronounced knot as nut. So, I spent the first half hour of the lecture wondering what thumb nuts were, till he finally whipped out a piece of rope and demonstrated.

Evenings were times of peace and quiet in the camp, we would gather in this communal tent and socialize. I made many new friends there, some of whom are in touch with me to this day. Camp wasn't all that bad, though I was horribly homesick and wanted my mother, after being woken up at 4 am two days in a row. Still, the event that pushed me over the brink was the snake's visit. On the second day, when we returned from morning PT (Celine echoing that her heart would go on) there was a tremendous commotion in the girls barracks. A snake had been found in a tent. Soon, these brave looking officers came running with pitchforks and killed it. After breakfast, the snake was displayed to us with its head cut off. We were all invited to touch it while an officer told us with relish that it was a harmless grass snake and that it would make a tasty meal on the field. I took the time to be quietly sick in a corner. That afternoon, the snake was cooked in gravy and served for lunch. That evening, I called home and bawled till my parents promised to come and get me the next day.

I was told that the day after I left, they demonstrated how to kill chickens. You're supposed to flick your wrist while holding a live chick by the neck, till the neck breaks.

Two weeks in Chennai

When I first decided to come to Chennai for a winter project, the thought did cross my mind that I'd get a few good blog posts out of it. But well, the two weeks end today and I'm yet to post about watching Bharathnatyam performances or eating at Saravana Bhavan.
Its been a wonderful two weeks, the kind of holiday everyone should have. I must admit, I was very reluctant to come to Chennai because the last time I was here for any long period of time, I fell very sick. But then I decided to give the city another chance, and boy, did it redeem itself.
Where else can even security guards spell my name perfectly? Where else do women dress up in Kanjeevaram silk and diamonds to attend a music concert? Where else do people speak exactly the same language (Tamil) but with so many accents as to be quite unintelligible to each other?

Its been two weeks of moments snuck away from work to attend concerts, of reading Kutcheribuzz everyday and sighing over the wonderful performances I'm missing, days and nights spent in an acid green lab poring over code, two weeks where the weather gravitated from school-closing-level floods to thirty degrees in the shade, of learning that "Parrottas" are very different from "Paranthas" and that people find my ignorance on this point laughable, of stopping my scooter whenever I saw a deer in the IITM campus and wondering at the innocence of their eyes, of teaching Sanskrit to my little cousin and discovering how much Geography I've forgotten, and of meeting wonderful new people who know so much and work so hard, they both shame and inspire me.
This post is perhaps too brief to give anyone a true idea of the impression Chennai left on me. I leave for home tonight, once I'm there I promise to write much more. There are so many tales to tell, freezing in the Central leather institute, traveling on a bus where the conductor refused to let me buy a ticket, a dance performance that gave me goose pimples, the caterer in the Staff Canteen who spoke French, and so much more.
But in the meantime, Merry Christmas everyone!!

Roots I never knew I had

I recently went on a three day visit to Coimbatore, where most of my mother's family lives.
Since I was sulking all the way on the train I stared out of the window most of the time and had plenty of time to notice how the scenery changed. I fell asleep after having stared the entire evening at red soil, dry brush and scorched grasses. I woke up to a very different sight. Coimbatore lies near the border between Tamil Nadu and Kerala and the land of coconuts leaves its unmistakable stamp on this place. The scenery outside looked like someone from the heavens had- in a careless fit of largess- upturned several buckets of emerald green paint over the earth. Fields and fields of banana and coconut trees rushed past us. The colour was almost blinding... only once have I seen such a green before, in the young mustard fields of Punjab.

We reached the sleepy station of Coimbatore and there I received the impression that never quite left me through the trip. No one speaks anything but Tamil there and several men scorn to discard their veshtis for the more modern trousers. The flashy advertisement boards outside show the latest designs in silk sarees as cows walk placidly amid the traffic. The smell is a mixture of the sickeningly sweet odour of fresh cowdung, mixed with the smoke coughed up from the bellies of busy vehicles, tinged with the intoxicating perfume of the jasmine flowers all women there wear in their hair. The whole place is like a town that should logically grow into a large pococurante metropolis but is held back by a rigid orthodox people who cling proudly but desperately to a fast fading way of life.

Coimbatore overflows with relatives I never knew I possessed. Tamil is such an exact language that every relative has a specific name that I must call them by, not like English where Uncle and Aunt would suffice. My grandmother was one of a brood of eleven, three siblings and seven half-siblings (my great grandfather having remarried after my great grandmother's death). To complicate matters still further, my mother's sister married her uncle, my grandmother's half-brother. I'm informed that such marriages are quite common in Tamil Nadu where people are still painfully proud of their caste. Indeed love marriages are still looked upon very disparagingly. Several times have I been told things like, "She had no character, raced into a love marriage at twenty three!" or, "She was a good girl, she waited until her father found a suitable groom for her".
However that may be, I was drawn into a bewildering maze of relatives all of whom wanted to see me and remember when they'd seen me last in the days of my infancy, and to see how many of my mother's features I had inherited. These are all educated people, there are high school principals and chartered accountants and mill owners among their number. But in every house I went to I found that though at their work they might compromise to modernity, their lives had always been rigidly traditional. Several husbands I heard praised for being so lenient as to "let" their wives work. I was highly praised everywhere I went, not for getting into IIT-no... but rather for my singing, my alleged knowledge of cooking and the docility of my behavior. One aged relative very nearly risked receiving a plateful of sweetmeats in his face when he sampled my cooking and said by way of blessing me, "After all, what does a man need but a wife who cooks well and keeps the house clean." Now, when I have had time for reflection, the incident seems more humorous to me than anything else. A couple of years ago I would have impetuously exclaimed at such antiquated notions, and engaged him in an avid debate on the rights of women. I am, I hope, slightly wiser now.

Most women there are housewives, and even my mother- college lecturer that she is- is looked upon as a modern miss. The women begin their day with making breakfast and seeing their husbands off. The morning is spent in prayers, gossip, cooking and the ubiquitous Hindi soaps. Ekta Kapoor is an influence that not even the most stringent Brahmins have been able to keep out. The women may mot understand much Hindi, but come one thirty they are glued to the television. My Grandmother herself who speaks not a word of Hindi, told me the entire story of Tulsi and of all the persecutions that much maligned damsel has undergone. In the evenings when their husbands return, they retire grandly to rest, while the wives who have meanwhile dressed freshly and threaded jasmine buds through their hair, bustle about to prepare dinner. After dinner is a time for conversation before bed, which is in many households, still a sheet spread on the ground.

An outing to a temple is the preferred pastime of a Sunday morning and accordingly, I was woken up at 5:30 am to accompany Perippa to a temple atop a hill. Too groggy to protest my atheism, I listened to Perimma's animated description of the beauty of the idols. I was warned that I was in for a very thrilling ride as the route up the hill comprised several hairpin bends. What I was not warned of was that Perippa at his at his most dashing traveled at 40kmph on his Honda Activa. Conscious of me, a delicately nurtured female, as his cargo, he never exceeded twenty. As we drove along the sun rose, women washed doorsteps and buffaloes ambled past. When we reached the hill finally, Perippa slowed to almost a halt and we negotiated the aforementioned hairpin bends with hair-raising caution, tooting the horn loudly as we inched along while mules looked at us in mild surprise.

That evening I accompanied my Grandmother to our family temple. In Coimbatore, every street has atleast one temple. This one belonged especially to our family and believe it or not, only brahmins are allowed inside! As I made my way into the dimly lit interior, I was shown photographs of my ancestors as my grandmother told me of how when she was a girl, a hundred brahmins would be fed at a time inside that very same temple. She spoke of how musicians would sing there and my great-great grandfather would perform all the pooja rites himself in front of our family idol. Now, it is dark and silent. The priest lives in a room at the back with his wife and two young children. There is a smell of incense and grease, the very stones seem weary. Their time is past.

The next evening, my last there, was spent in a very different way. I was taken to Chennai silks, that Mecca of all saree buyers. They have floors for different fabrics, sarees in just about every price range and a bewildering array of designs. The attendants all speak only Tamil and patiently help as you sift through saree after saree. Women sit there for hours arguing over prices and fabrics and designs. I wandered over all five floors as my mother bought her favorite cotton prints.
That night I was taken to visit the last of my mother's Mama's. He had recently given his daughter in marriage and was extremely proud of the wedding video. Unfortunately he also owned a new fangled DVD player that he did not know how to use, as a result of which I was inflicted with the footage of the bridegroom's Kasi yatra ceremony three times. By the time we staggered out of there, three hours later, I was firmly determined that if I get married it will be in a registrar's office and no videography will be permitted.

As I sat in the train the next afternoon and watched that verdant scenery roll by, I thought of the past three days and of the blog entry I would write when I got home, of the relatives I never knew I had and of the life I was returning to.
But most of all, I thought of those people, clinging determinedly to a fading past and of watching the sun rise from the rear seat of a Honda Activa, as buffaloes ambled past.