It was time to go to India and that meant I was on a shopping spree. I wasn’t driving at the time which meant I was dependent on Santa (husband). One fine morning I decided to hit the road alone, using the public transport service the VTA provided. I ‘googled’ the Mountain View address of Bed Bath & Beyond. Noting down the directions given by Google maps on a post-it, I went out after Santa left for office. Walking for a mile to the bus stop, I saw the bus whoosh right before my eyes, as I struggled to reach the stop. It was 20 minutes before the next bus arrived.
Usually I ask the driver about the destination before boarding the bus. But this time I was so confident I didn’t bother to ask him, neither did I tell him to inform me when my stop came. I thought the PA system was good enough. The address was one of Charleston Road. Sitting inside the bus I saw the bus whiz past Charleston Road without stopping. So I got down at the next stop which was Amphitheatre Parkway.
After getting down it seemed to be a deserted land at first. I took a right at Amphitheatre Parkway and walked down the sidewalk. The Google HQ extended on my right as far as I could see. I walked till the end of the road and hit Shoreline Boulevard. Took a right at Shoreline and kept walking when I realized that if I kept walking through Shoreline I would reach home, except for the fact that it was not walkable because the entrance to freeway 101 did not leave any space for pedestrians. So I turned back and retraced my steps. Everywhere I looked, I saw the glass buildings of Google. I walked up and down the road quite a number of times. Lunch time was getting over as I saw people filing back into their office with coffee cups and take away boxes in hand.
I entered all the roads I could enter only to be stopped by a sign saying 'Dead End' or 'No Thru Road'. I even asked two passersby where Charleston Road or Bed Bath and Beyond would be. None of them seemed to have any clue. I took the next bus home and as the bus crossed 101 I could see Bed Bath & Beyond from the bus but couldn’t figure out a way to reach it. All this happened without Santa’s knowledge.
The next morning I googled Bed Bath & Beyond again. It showed the same route so I asked Santa and he pointed out that the directions were wrong. For once I follow the map correctly and end up in the wrong place. Now that’s what I call being 'googlied by Google'!
Had been eyeing the new restaurant called NH8, on 80 Feet Road in Indiranagar, for quite some time now. Opportunity finally came when we ran out of grocery on a week night. Time to go to NH8.
The restaurant's on the second floor and as we were about to enter the lift, we saw a poster of the restaurant, which said it was a Rajasthani place and had some mention of vegetarian food. There was a phone number, so we called up to find out if they had non-vegetarian fare. “Is this a veg restaurant?” The friendly voice on the other side assured: “100% pure vegetarian, Sir”, which made us take a u-turn and walk straight out.
If only the man had known that we were hardcore non-vegetarians...
I can’t remember having touched the steering wheel of a car let alone driving one. But life in the US is not so smooth without a car plus I always have to be dependent on others – the public transit or my husband. So I had to learn to drive which was ok. Or so I thought.
The immediate problem was I had to obtain a learner’s permit first and in order to do that I had to scan the details of a 60+ page book issued by the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles). That was my main obstacle. I tried going through the book so many times. Remembering the blood alcohol content allowed in the bloodstream of drivers or the proper usage of fog lights and high beams didn’t quite appeal to me and each time I tried to read the book I either dozed off or found something else which seemed infinitely more interesting than the book. Even the history text books of school would have made my list of interesting things at that point.
Since my progress with the book was going nowhere the actual process of driving was also being delayed. Fed up with the delay Santa (shortened version of my husband’s name) took matters in his hands. Described below is a result of that action.
I was three months old in the US. It was almost ten pm on a weekday. We were returning home after one of our nightly excursions (read shopping for home goods) when a light bulb blinked in Santa’s brain. He suggested that I drive the car.
What? Who? Me? Drive? This car? Is he out of his mind?
He said he knew a desolate lane beside the Caltrain track near our house which had a speed limit of 30 mph, and not many cars travelled that road. I could learn to drive there. Though the idea sounded totally crazy to me it appealed to my adventurous side and I jumped in; as the Bengali saying goes uthlo bai to cuttack jai.
We changed seats and I buckled up for life in the fast lane. Now his car is a stick shift where you have to constantly synchronize your hand and feet movements in changing gears and pressing down/releasing the clutch. I had seen drivers in India change gears but who knew there was so much activity going on with the foot too? I mean I knew there was an accelerator and a brake and I somehow had this idea that you used one foot for the accelerator and the other for the brake. Now I found out that the left foot manages the clutch and the right foot has to manage both the accelerator and the brake. What if I press the accelerator instead of the brake? Mistakes can happen after all; car companies should consider redesigning.
With the police behind us I forgot everything about how to brake smoothly and with my application of the brakes the car just lunged forward and came to a sudden stop.
“Roll down your window. Put your hands on the steering wheel. Don’t make any movement. Always keep your hands in sight,” Santa told me.
This was all so scary. I did as he told me.
The officer went ahead in front of us and for a fraction of a second we were hopeful that he was after someone else. In our excitement we were considering switching places when the police car turned around, lights still on and came in our direction.
Damn!
“Sit still. Let me do the talking,” I nodded my head in response.
The police car stopped near us in the opposite lane.
“Are you guys lost?” the officer asked.
“No sir, we were just going home,” Santa replied.
“Ok. But you can’t drive so slowly when other people are around. And the way you stopped you almost caused me to hit you.”
“I am sorry officer.”
“You should be more careful.”
“Yes officer.”
“Drive safely.”
We nodded our heads and waited for him to leave while I pretended to get the ignition started.
When he was safely around the corner we exchanged places as fast as we could and rushed off home. Thank god he didn’t ask for my license. On second thought, that’d have made for another interesting story; or not. I wonder how interesting life in prison would be!
Seven months after this incident I finished reading my driver’s handbook and was finally ready to take the test, i.e. after rescheduling test dates a couple times.
Went to the test centre, took the test and failed the first time. 6 mistakes were allowed in a set of 30 questions, I had 7! Damn!
Santa, the ever optimist that he is, forced me to take the test again—immediately. His logic was that I know all the stuff and of the two errors one was a ‘silly mistake’ (didn’t people make silly mistakes in math?) and I ‘misunderstood’ the other question. “So you see…you can clear this. Take it now, since you are already here,” he kept telling me.
“Ok…but if I flunk this time you are responsible,” I told him and walked reluctantly to the test area.
After spending forty minutes on thirty questions I walked to the examiner, a Chinese lady, with my answer sheet. She goes tick, tick, tick on page one. Only one mistake. Good. She turned the page. Tick, tick, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong…oh my god…I lost count of the crosses. “Seven mistakes…too bad”, she told me with a smiling face. Not again.
“You can take the test two more times,” she told me. “Next time study hard,” she said as she turned my answer sheet and saw that this was my second time.
“Oh…this is your second time. Only one more chance left. Study hard and then come,” she told me.
Now it was time for Santa to face the music. I gave him a stern “I told you” look which transformed itself into a verbal form as soon as we exited the test centre. What did he have to say? Let’s not go into the details and just say that he dropped me off at Michael’s, my favorite art store, so that I would cool down.
That evening I went through my answer sheet again. I was pretty sure I had made the right choice regarding the meaning of a road sign. The sign was of a ‘two-way traffic’ but the examiner marked the correct answer as a ‘divided highway ahead’. Didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know driving but I had been going around in a car for the past nine months and at no time did the particular sign look like a ‘divided highway ahead’ sign. I checked with the DMV book and yes! I was right. So that reduced my errors to six.
Once Santa came home he went through the answer sheet once more and found out one more error on the part of the examiner regarding a lane changing question. That reduced the number of errors to five. He told me, “Let’s go to the DMV tomorrow and straighten things out”. I wasn’t so sure if they’d accept but the reminder of one more test promptly made me agree with him.
The next day we went to the DMV. A different person was at the examination centre. He agreed on the lane changing question and gave it to me. Down to six. I could have my license now. I’d have left matters there, not bothering about the other question. I could’ve lived with one more error as long as I got my license. But the stickler that he is, Santa wouldn’t let go and he took up the sign question with the examiner. The examiner didn’t accept the sign question and tried to feed us some logic which neither of us understood. (I wonder if he heard himself speaking.) So Santa asked to speak to the supervisor.
The supervisor accepted that I was correct and admitted that there was an error in their answer sheet stencil, the corrected version of which the examiner did not have. So the errors were down to five officially and I came out beaming with my learner’s permit. What better gift could I have given my husband for his upcoming birthday? The actual driver’s license, maybe. But for now the learner’s permit was enough.
By the way, on his next birthday, I drove him to a restaurant as a licensed driver – my gift to him. Though the gift was a good one (as Santa admitted) what transpired between us in that one whole year as I took driving lessons from him could very well be made into a soap opera.
My relationship with food goes a long way back. Way back to my childhood days. I've always loved to eat. With eating I am always in love but my relationship with cooking has been a love-hate kind of thing. I have fallen in and out of love with cooking. As a kid when my mom used to cook I used to stand beside the stove and watch her perform her magic. A bit of this, a bit of that, stir a bit, simmer a little and the end product was so good. Watching her I would sometimes help her by stirring the pot, or watching over a dish so that it didn't get burnt. In return I got to taste the food. And if the food in concern was a meat or fish dish nobody could make me budge from the spot. This was when I was in grade five or six. After I grew up, i.e. when I was in grade nine/ ten I was considered a cook amongst my peers. The reason being I could make omelettes and egg rolls and chili chicken and fried rice. Once in grade twelve I invited my friend for lunch and cooked a meal of chili chicken and fried rice for her. And it was done entirely by me, except for the rice. My mom cooked the rice and I turned it into a fried version. The same me went to this same friend's house one day when her parents were not at home. We were very hungry and decided to boil some eggs. After a lot of thinking we decided on the appropriate pot, measured out the water, put the eggs in the water and put it on the stove. After a while both of us decided that enough time had passed and the eggs should be ready by now. So we promptly turned the stove off, drained the hot water from the pot and put the eggs under running cold water in the sink. As we tried to crack open what was supposed to be a hardboiled egg by now, out came a whitish liquid. The shell still stuck to the egg and it was a total mess. All our combined efforts couldn't even produce a proper boiled egg, not even a half-boiled one. Not knowing what else to do with the eggs we left them in their current neither-solid-nor-liquid state for my friend's mom to come back and take care of it. On her arrival at the scene she was flabbergasted that the two of us couldn't boil an egg. What will happen to you girls, she sighed. And then she turned to me and said, what happened to you today? At least you can do better than your friend. I don't know what she made of those eggs. I felt ashamed to ask her. A few years later in high school and college I developed an aversion to cooking. I still hung out near the stove on and off but when it came to real time cooking I was nowhere to be found. Instead I opted to do every other household work starting from mopping the floor to cleaning the dishes. And when guests came I helped my mom but not by cooking. Instead I played the role of assistant. I chopped the vegetables, cleaned the meat, ground the spices, made all the pastes and cleaned the house. Our house was perpetually in a mess. Amongst the four of us my brother was the one who kept his room in a more or less mess free condition. Mine was sort of messy with books strewn on the bed and clothes piled high. But the winner was my dad. The entire house was his playground, rather dumping ground. He'd come from office and his office bag would be the first thing to sit on the dining table followed by all the cash that he carried in his pocket. In his entire life he has never used a wallet. He just carries all the money -- coins, bills, everything -- loose in his pocket. So at the airport when it is required to empty your pockets he has a hard time fishing out the last coin from the depths of his pocket. Coming back to the point. Throughout my college life and even after, I had an aversion towards cooking – sort of. I avoided it as much as I could. I made the occasional alu tikki and the dimer chop, which took so long to make that my father commented that people would die of hunger if they were to wait for me to finish cooking. Now come on, dimer chop is a complicated recipe for a young girl like me. It is basically a croquette made of hard boiled eggs, potatoes and a combination of spices. Even when I stayed with roommates I avoided cooking as much as I could. People considered me a fool because any other job other than cooking was a thankless job in the sense that you didn't get any appreciation. Nobody lauded if the dishes were sparkling clean or the vegetables were chopped uniformly and symmetrically. But still I preferred it that way. Why take the trouble when there were four other people who were eager to show off their culinary skills? So four of us stayed in a rented house and all of us were foodies. Other than me the rest loved to eat as well as cook. I was the one who only ate. All I made were salads. And when everyone else was either too busy or didn't have any energy left, which was very few, I cooked. Once there were only two of us and I gave my friend the privilege of tasting my food. I cooked a dish of spinach and baby corns with soy sauce and vinegar. But, the overdose of vinegar led to a frantic search for antacids which weren't that effective and my friend spent the rest of the afternoon throwing up. So much for giving her the privilege. After my marriage, cooking was no more an option. It was a necessity now. I heard stories of my husband's culinary skills from his sister-in-law. Apparently he was famous for his Kashmiri Pulav, which his sister-in-law vouched for. It was definitely good to know that he could cook something complicated like that. But you can't have it every day. That's party food. What about the regular food…you know daal, chawal… By the way, speaking of the Kashmiri pulav, I am yet to have it and it's almost three years now. I am not too hopeful about it now; then again hope is what keeps us going! Anyways, without putting much hope on my husband I set out to cook. After marriage I moved to the US and the cooking system was entirely different from what I was used to (mostly seeing) in India. Here my kitchen had four burners and they were all electric ones. I had never used an electric range before. The four burners with their controls seemed quite daunting. I had to think very carefully before I turned on a burner. Quite a few times I have put a pot of water to boil on the right rear burner and gone off to do something. I come back after 15 minutes to find that the water is just as I had left it. as I extend my hand to feel the water in the pan, I feel the portion between my elbow and my hands starting to get warm. It is then that I notice the red glow of the right front burner! These things happen even now though. And then there was a huge oven. I had never seen such a huge oven in my life. I had heard of ovens and seen them but they were tiny compared to this thing. For the time being I forgot about the oven. Our next concern was to buy cookware. All my husband had was a pressure cooker, which had some melted blue plastic stuck to its side, and from its very look you could tell that it hadn't been used in a while, and by while I mean in a long while! And a pasta pot. The pasta pot was in good shape and it served me well. And he had a complete dinner set. So we didn't need to buy plates immediately. A short story involving the pasta pot. My husband's brother lives 20 minutes away. They helped us move in and after all the shifting was done, we freshened up, got dinner from outside and settled into sleeping bags for the night. Now the next morning, it was time for tea. In what do I make tea? All I had was the pasta pot, and a frying pan and a 2 liter pressure cooker, (which I brought from India, both of which were wedding gifts, and useful at that). Isn't one always surprised at the weird gifts one can receive at weddings and other occasions. This is where the concept of a gift registry comes in handy. So I take the pasta pot and put in four cups of water for four people. The water comes to a boil, and after it had boiled I put in the tea leaves. Now I am used to measuring out the tea leaves, but this time I just eye balled it and dumped the tea leaves. Not being a tea addict, I forgot about it and when I rushed into the kitchen after remembering I realized we didn't have a strainer. So I pour the concoction into the big mugs, add sugar and serve them. After a few sips, my brother-in-law said it was too strong, so he poured half of it in a plastic glass and added water. But nothing could correct what I had made. In the end we decided we were better off without tea. I am sure my husband was very embarrassed at his wife's tea fiasco, because I remember he asked very mildly, in a casual sort of way, "Have you made tea before?" How was I to explain to him that I had made tea before, that I used to make tea almost every evening for my father. My problem here was that things were huge. The cups were of enormous size. Tea cups in India are probably 1/4th of the size of the mugs we were using. And on top of it, I had no measuring spoon. I was not used to making tea like this. But necessity and circumstance is the best teacher and you learn from them. I don't remember exactly what I cooked each day but there are two things which I remember distinctly. Both of us are very fond of shrimp, so one day I decided to make a spicy shrimp curry and rice. The rice went well. Now for the shrimp. One major thing with shrimp is that it has to be cooked perfectly, otherwise it can be tough or it can disappear inside the gravy. Now how to do that? Using a pressure cooker would be perfect except I had no idea how to use one, in the sense how much water was required and how many steams you needed. So I gave up the idea. As I was settling in I had found a big plastic colander and a nonstick pot which must have belonged to the previous owners. They seemed fairly new and I had washed them with hot soapy water and they were good to go. So now I had two pots. In one I put the shrimp, some oil and water, covered it with a lid and put it on the heat. Almost an hour passed by before they were anything near tender. Next in the pasta pot I made the gravy. (I couldn't use two burners at the same time then.) After the gravy was done I dumped the shrimp in it and let it simmer for a while. When it was dinner time my husband was very happy to find out that it was shrimp night. We sat down to eat and I had to literally fish out the shrimp because there was too much gravy. You had to scoop it from the bottom of the pot. The pot was a deep one and my estimation skills weren't quite right yet. They are not perfect even now, but they have definitely improved. I asked my husband how it was, and while fishing for shrimp from the pot he said it was very good. I was a bit surprised that he said it was good, because though it tasted good, there was obviously too much liquid in it, but I believed it to be his honest response. I needed to believe in it. It was later when I had improved that he told me how scared he was that day. In his mind he had already started looking up Indian restaurants which served home style meals while hoping that I'd improve. Another day I made khichuri – a one pot dish of rice and lentils and a few spices. It is usually made when the weather is all rainy or cold and anytime you mention khichuri and ilish mach bhaja to a Bengali, just wait and watch him drool. There was a problem with the liquid again, only this time it was drier than it was supposed to be. And then there was the issue of quantity. We ran short of khichuri. Time and again my husband told me, "Remember I am a guy. We guys eat more than girls. So please make some more next time." I nodded but I just couldn't get it right. Having four girls for room mates for two years wasn't helping here. Almost after a month or so after I came to the country I was to cook for the first time for a guest. The guest in question was my husband's friend whose wife was visiting family in India. his friend called up one Saturday afternoon, and before long I heard my husband saying into the phone, "come over for lunch tomorrow". And my brain screamed "what! Lunch? Tomorrow?" I kept hoping that his friend would refuse, at least for his own sake, but apparently he had accepted very happily. You don't go to friend's houses for food within the first few months, unless you know for sure that the cook is a good one. By this time we had bought a cookware set and I managed to cook a simple meal of a curry, lentils and (hold on) fish! Luckily, for all of us everything turned out well. They were very simple, not quite what moms would dish out for guests, but I was nowhere near the level of moms. Apart from the food being simple this time there was no shortage in quantity, except for the lentils. I had made one big pot of lentil, and was pretty confident that this would be sufficient. But the way the two men gobbled up the lentil, I actually stopped after one ladleful, and that saved the day. And after all the friends it was the turn of the in-laws. My in-laws came over to spend the summer with us. After all the great food cooked by my mom-in-law I thought I should treat them to something. So one Saturday afternoon I decided to make a tray of baked vegetables. I had made this before once with excellent results. I chopped up all the veggies into big chunks, drizzled olive oil, seasoned them with salt and pepper and then put it into the oven. It was to be a matter of an hour before lunch was served. But after two hours at almost two o'clock, when I opened the oven the vegetables were shriveled up, dry and half burnt. I didn't quite remember the temperature right and that was the reason of the disaster. Luckily for everyone bread and eggs saved everyone from starving but it didn't quite save me from embarrassment. To this day my father-in-law remembers the fiasco and asks me if he'll be able to have some decent food the next time he comes over. And he's visiting us this summer. Let's keep our fingers crossed. .
As a kid I had a fascination for the fried potatoes without turmeric. I don’t know what it was that enthralled me about this dish being cooked without turmeric. Maybe because it was the norm to cook with turmeric, it was what we had every day that I wanted something different. The first time I saw those non yellow potato fries was in a friend’s lunch box. Probably that was the source of the fascination. At age eight or nine it is what others have that is always much more interesting and better than what you have. It was also escalated by the fact that my mom never cooked without turmeric; primarily because my dad didn’t like food which looked pale. He always ate with his eyes first, as do most of us. So food which didn’t have turmeric didn’t appeal to him and it automatically lost its taste.
And then one day my dream came true. My dad was away on an office trip and mom made the alu bhaja without turmeric. It is a very simple dish where the potatoes are seasoned with salt and turmeric and then shallow fried with some sliced onions and green chili. Dinner that day consisted of bhaat (rice), daal (lentils) and alu bhaja without turmeric.
Much as I love the dish, one fine day I discovered that I wasn’t any good in cooking it. All these years it looked a pretty simple dish until I tried to make it myself. I knew the theory of cooking it perfectly well. Cut the potatoes into strips, heat oil, and fry the potatoes with onions and green chilies. How difficult can that be?
In my first attempt I used russet brown potatoes, cut them into fat matchsticks, and for some extra flavor I decided to add scallions (in the style of alu-peyanjkoli bhaja). When my cooking was over, it looked more like chunky mashed potatoes with scallions. The potatoes were overcooked and they no longer retained their matchstick like shape. The scallions had lost all their texture and looked like green specs scattered here and there. And the worst part was a friend was coming to dinner. It was too late to make alternative arrangements so I had to serve the lumpy thing.
After this incident I have made alu bhaja a couple times, each time with more or less the same result. After that I gave up the thought of trying to make alu bhaja and somehow managed to forget about my favorite dish until one day my friend mentioned that they were having bhaat, musur daal and alu bhaja for dinner. As my brain registered the words my mouth started watering. But I didn’t make any attempt to cook the damned thing. I was very much tempted to invite ourselves over for the alu bhaja but felt a little embarrassed. As it is we frequently drop in to their place with just a phone call’s notice and often invite ourselves over for the awesome chicken biryani my friend cooks. The invitations are usually for lunch, but we end up having dinner too, and when the invitation is for dinner you can well imagine…Due to all these reasons I felt a bit shy in asking her. Added to that was a sense of shame at not being able to cook such a simple dish.
Then my parents came in the summer and for the Labor Day weekend we decided to visit the Grand Canyon since my dad was very much interested in it. “Since we are going all the way we might as well visit the national parks in Utah,” was my husband’s proposal. So the weekend turned into a weeklong holiday as tickets were booked from San Francisco to Las Vegas.
Since we’d be out for seven days we had to empty the fridge of all perishables. Most of the stuff was taken care of, except for a few potatoes and two bell peppers which were lying there sadly in the fridge. So my mom made alu bhaja and also threw in the bell peppers. In my mom’s hand the russet potatoes looked as good as our desi potatoes and they stayed firm and looked just like they should look – crisp and firm. There was no lumpy mess. So the culprit was not the potatoes as I loved to think.
Our flight was to land in Las Vegas at 8 pm, just in time to gorge on the buffets. The three of us – me, my husband and his brother – had already started arguing on which buffet to have. Since my parents weren’t accustomed to the food here and the buffet would prove too much for them, we decided that it would be best if we took food from home for them. So we packed the fried potatoes in a Ziploc along with some achar (pickles) and parotas (Indian flatbread).
On reaching Las Vegas the hot weather and the traffic jam took away our enthusiasm for the buffet and the five of us gobbled up the home made dinner in our hotel room. While we ate all of us agreed that not having the buffet was a good idea. The fried potatoes tasted awesome. Spicy, firm and crunchy – they tasted just like I remembered them from my childhood days. I felt so contented and I doubt the buffet with all its varieties would have given that sense of satisfaction.
*****
Things were going along fine until one gloomy Friday afternoon a few weeks back. The craving for alu bhaja surfaced. I tried to get over it but the harder I tried the stronger the craving became. When I thought of it I could almost feel the taste of the salty crunchy fries my mom made a few months ago. My mouth kept watering. I could smell it in the air – in the house, in the corridors of our building, even in the car. This was bad. I had to do something about it.
So I gave my mother a call. “Ma, how do you make alu bhaja?”
“Alu bhaja? It’s very simple…” and she went on to explain the procedure.
I did what she told me and voila! I had alu bhaja that looked like what she used to make, and tasted just as good.
For recipe see alu bhaja
Now where did I go wrong? According to my mom, cooking is a form of art, and as with all other art forms or for that matter anything you do in life, there are no shortcuts. That is her opinion and I disagreed thoroughly, especially when it came to cooking. Since my childhood days I have had a reputation for being a phankibaaj (n. one who is lazy, always seeking shortcuts) and that phankibaaji applied to cooking as well. When I cook, I optimize the process so that I don’t have to stand there and babysit the dish. For instance, when it’s time to fry the masala -- a paste of ginger, garlic, onion and few other spices -- I put everything in the pan, give it a stir and go off to do something else. Ideally you should stand there and stir it continuously until the raw smell of the ingredients is gone and the paste turns brown in color. Typically this process takes 30-40 minutes and I can’t imagine myself standing there for the whole time while it’s taking its own sweet time to cook. I did try doing that but I got impatient and that resulted in a curry smelling of raw onions and garlic. So what I do is add some water when the masala starts to dry up, and buy myself time, because once it starts to dry up it can burn very easily. This process continues until the masala is cooked and starts to brown. That is when I put my full attention and do the rest of the task. This walking away has backfired a few times as I forgot about the masala. A burnt smell helped me remember but it was too late as the whole thing had to be thrown away and the entire process repeated and once I had to scramble because there was a dinner party that evening. Did I learn from those incidents? No. Because as they say, once a phankibaaj, always a phankibaaj. I still cook in the same process but try not to forget that something’s cooking and hope that it won’t burn on me.
Now I applied the same process when it came to making the fried potatoes. I heated up the oil, threw in the potatoes, added a pinch of turmeric, seasoned them with salt, covered the pan with a lid (so they would cook faster and easily) and spent 30 minutes with Rachael Ray. When I opened the lid…you know what it looked like. So that was the problem of making alu bhaja my way. If I were to have the real alu bhaja, I had to babysit it, just as my mom told me to. With no other option available, that is exactly what I did. Sometimes you need to go that extra mile. Does that mean I am no longer a phankibaaj? Now what did I say earlier? ‘Once a phankibaaj, always…’
The other day we went to pick up Chinese food from a nearby restaurant and we took our 4 year old nephew Orko along. (He spend the weekend with us sometimes.) As long as he’s not in the house he’s very happy. And when he says he wants to go home that means he’s really tired. It was a Friday night and the downtown was abuzz with people and the neon lights from the restaurants beckoning them to their station. Sitting inside the car, peeking from his car seat Orko told us that he wanted to eat in that restaurant with the purple light or the green light or whatever light caught his attention. I explained to him that we were taking food home and the next time he came over we’ll eat at a restaurant.
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While walking to the restaurant he kept asking me, “Amra kon restaurant e khabo?” (In which restaurant will we eat?) Once inside the shop he started looking around, searching for a good place to sit while we paid the bill and picked up our food. Then it was time to go. “Come on Orko, let’s go.” I told him. “But I want to eat in this restaurant,” he told us in his childish innocent voice looking at his Kaku (uncle) and Kaki (aunt) very hopefully. “Come let’s sit here,” he said and started pulling my hand. In response I pulled him back and we walked out of the restaurant distracting him with the discussion of all the yummy food we were carrying with us. Pizza and noodles are his favorite food, and any time of day you ask him what we wants to eat, “Pizza” pat comes the reply.
What struck me in this entire episode was the fact that a four year old wanted to eat at a restaurant in addition to the fact that he could pronounce the word ‘restaurant’. A couple months back he couldn’t pronounce his own surname. When I asked what his name was he would say “Shreyaj Pal Chudhuri”, totally ignoring the ‘a’ in the Chaudhuri. (I admit Pal Chaudhuri is a long and tough one for a kid to pronounce. He’s able to say it right now.) And that sent me into a thinking mode.
When I was a kid eating out was a rare thing. For one there was a dearth of restaurants. Nowadays in my hometown, eateries, English medium schools and engineering colleges have popped up everywhere like mushrooms. Our eating out meant having outside food -- the occasional phuchka, egg roll or the shingara and alur chop. This changed though during my college days as I ate out more and more frequently with my friends. Much as I ate out with friends we never ate out as a family except for one or two rare occasions. This was primarily because my dad isn’t much of a culinary explorer (he likes his meals home cooked) and my mom isn’t much into food. And then there was the cost factor too. Back then the restaurants that were there were not meant for middle class families. Times have changed now. What was once a luxury has now become something of a standard (albeit for a selective group). India is developing fast now and with development comes a change in people’s lifestyle. The consumerism bug has bit the Indian society and each day businesses are devising new ideas on how to make people spend their money. And need I say they are succeeding. But I digress.
The point I am trying to make is that even a four year old now knows the concepts which we acquired at a much later stage. And he is not responsible for it. We, adults are exposing him to a whole different world. Not only could he say ‘restaurant’ before he could say his name, at age three he could click photos on a digital camera, and it’s not that he kept clicking randomly. He focused on people and then clicked. He is now the primary photographer of his parents when they go on vacation. And by the time he was four he could play songs on my ipod, was an expert in browsing his Kaku’s iphone, and seek out the games he wanted to play, and even taught me how to browse folders and play a movie of his choice on the Sony Vaio. The times they are really a-changing!
I am sure this has happened to all of us, sometime or the other – waking up in the middle of the night and then being unable to go back to sleep. Now what do you do when you are awake? Usually I fight to go back to sleep. I keep tossing and turning…keep telling myself 'go to sleep go to sleep'. More often than not this doesn't work. The same thing happened yesterday night. All of a sudden I found myself looking at the ceiling. I turned sideways and the bedside clock said 3:05 am. As is my habit I started tell myself to 'fall asleep' when all of a sudden an idea came to mind. I decided that today I won't make any effort, I won't struggle. I'll just lie there, silently, quietly and see what happened. Did I succeed? Yes. The blinds on our door were not rolled down yesterday (which was good) because it was a full moon night and the moonlight flooded the balcony and also half our room. I looked at the silhouette of the huge trees standing tall and straight, the plants in my balcony, their leaves swaying ever so slightly and shining bright when it caught the moonlight. It was all so quiet, which was broken down occasionally by the whoosh of a car. And then my ears caught a steady rhythmic sound pattern. It was my husband breathing -- in and out, in and out, with the occasional sighs. Listening to the beat of his breathing I thought what would it look like if I started plotting his breathing pattern on a graph? And when I tried to imagine the graph pattern the stock market graph patterns came to mind. (This I'm pretty sure is a result of all the stock market review we do first thing in the morning.) Considering his breathing pattern yesterday it would have looked like the graph of Cisco – stable with minor deflections. I know there have been days when his breathing pattern very much resembles that of Aruba (his own company), swinging from highs to lows, stable for a brief while, then back to swinging again. And somewhere in the middle of all this Cisco and Aruba graph plotting I fell asleep, only to wake up at the sound of an emergency siren which was nothing else but our alarm!
After successfully putting off going to the zumba class for 2-3 months my success rate fell to zero as I succumbed to the persuasive qualities of my husband's smooth talking. It's amazing how he could make me believe that there's no harm in giving it a shot. And you would be surprised if you knew me. To say that I have two left feet is an understatement. And the one person who'll believe that without any doubt is my mother. Being a trained oriental dancer, she tried early on to pass on her skills to me. Like every other Bengali parent, she also had the wish that her daughter would know how to sing and dance and paint, the three things I found all of my friends and class mates engaged in, if not all three of them at least two of them with painting being the common factor. My painting, rather drawing skills at grade four convinced my parents that their money would be better spent in any other project than sending to me an art class. Since I could not draw at that time (I can copy pictures decently now and that too with pastel. If you hand me a brush I'll end up painting something like a 3 year old) all my science drawings were done either by mom or my bro, who is also a good painter. The day I drew the cow, I had a fight with my brother and he refused to help me. Proud that as I was, I drew the cow all by myself, and I can't quite describe to you how it looked. Any angle you turned the picture it didn't resemble a cow. At best it could be described as the symbolization of some pre historic animal. After seeing that picture my brother took pity on me, and drew the cow. Coming back to the point, one fine day my mother decided to teach me how to dance. I was nine or ten years old. I think she tried to make my body move to the tunes of a rabindrasangeet. My body moved. But the way it moved was enough to convince my mom to say, with great sadness, that I don't have it in me. Dance is something not meant for me. And with that she had to let go of her dream. If circumstances were different she would either have been a professional dancer, or at least a dance teacher. And I could do nothing but feel sad to let her down. Some things are just not meant for you. After that there was no more dancing for me, other than the occasional group dances in college fests and stuff where basically you are having fun. Then came my husband into the picture. Like my mother, he also had dreams that his wife would go to dance clubs and do the salsa and tango and you name it. To give him credit, he does know the salsa. in grad school he had taken salsa classes. I wonder which hot female in the class was the inspiration for this (sshh). So after two months in the U.S. he finally coaxed me into going to the downtown club which offered salsa lessons. So we went to the club and the lady who would teach us gave a performance before the lesson started. As she and her partner danced they were the epitome of sheer grace and rhythm. Their bodies moved in sync with the music like flowing water. Looking at them I realized that I had made a terrible mistake in succumbing to my husband's pressure. He did not know my skills. But I did. Anyways since the club had charged a fee of 20$ per person which was enough for me to gather up my courage and hit the dance floor. And contrary to my expectations I didn't do all that bad. Things were ok, I'd say though my hips didn't move as vibrantly as they are supposed to in a salsa. The best part was I was enjoying myself, until the time where we had to switch partners every few steps. And that was enough to put me off from salsa. I remember a few of my 'partners' – among them was a guy who trembled quite a bit and was so nervous that he couldn't hold my hands properly and I could feel the tremble between his fingers and there was another who probably had had a burger just before entering the club and he reeked of raw onions and sweat. I was relieved when my husband came along but that relief was short lived. So that was the end of my salsa and also my husband's and he very much rues the fact. It is probably from this fact and the more important fact that I have gained some weight, actually a lot of it that my husband again found the enthusiasm to persuade me to go for the zumba. Upon entering the class I saw that most people were very fit and athletic but I also found a few who were in much worse shape than I was. Or so I loved to believe. Anyways the class started to the beats of salsa music and after staring at people for a while, trying to figure out what was going on I joined everyone. And once I let go off my inhibitions, put all those previous experiences behind me, I actually had fun. I didn't do it right all the time…when people went left I went right, when they bent down I stood straight like a sore thumb…but I found the rhythm that is part of dance. And at the end of the day that is what matters, finding your rhythm. And in this endeavor I even formed a camaraderie with a Chinese lady who was next to me. Judging from the movement of her hands and feet I figured she was as good as a dancer as I was and her shy smile when our eyes met seemed to confirm it. We formed an invisible bond and smiled at each other when our eyes met while one of us was turning in the wrong direction. What struck me was the energy of the whole exercise. At home the very thought of exercising for an hour, coupled with seeing the youtube videos on zumba made my body ache. But out there on the floor the beats of the music, the energetic 1,2,3,4 of the instructor and the energy of the people around totally changed the scenario. Yes I did get tired, and I did pause frequently to catch my breath but I never felt like walking out of the room. And to think that I shook my hips to Shakira's 'Hips don't lie'…come on after all I have told you about my dancing abilities you have to admit that it is no mean task! (Luckily there was no video tape of the whole thing or else it could easily have made it into the funniest home videos show.) And then there was J.Lo and a whole bunch of lively music including 'Jai Ho' from Slumdog Millionaire and 'Yeh ishq hai' from Jab We Met. In the manner of exercise it also helped me brush up my almost forgotten salsa steps and introduced me to Bollywood dancing. The Yeh ishq hai number was quite exhausting with a lot of bending, stretching involved but the fact that it was a familiar desi number gave me that extra boost of energy. And later that night I called up my mom and said that I had been to a dance class. Did I detect a subtle amazement, a flicker of happiness in her voice? Or was it just me in my still excited state?
Holud (in Bengali), an essential ingredient in Indian cooking is better known to the world as turmeric. Indian cooking can't be done without turmeric. It gives that distinct yellow color to foods -- curries, fries, anything. Every savory food you can think of has turmeric in it, even if it is just a hint. But as a kid I was not too fond of the yellow color food. Maybe because it was the norm, it was what we had every day that I wanted something different. One thing which I craved for was the alu bhaja (fried potatoes) without turmeric. I don't know what it was that enthralled me about this dish being cooked without turmeric. The first time I saw those non yellow potato fries was in a friend's lunch box. Probably that was the source of the fascination. At age eight or nine it is what others have that is always much more interesting and better than what you have. It was also escalated by the fact that my mom never cooked without turmeric. Primarily because my dad didn't like food which looked pale. He always ate with his eyes first, as do most of us. So food which didn't have turmeric didn't appeal to him and it automatically lost its taste. And then one day my dream came true. My dad was away on an office trip and mom made the alu bhaja without turmeric. It is a very simple dish where the potatoes are seasoned with salt and turmeric and then shallow fried with some sliced onions and green chili. Dinner that day consisted of bhaat (rice), daal (lentils) and alu bhaja without turmeric. To this day it remains my favorite dish, my ultimate comfort food and whenever I don't feel like cooking I always boil some rice and lentils and make some potato fries, though surprisingly I do add turmeric now. That craze about eating pale colored foods has left me, probably for good as turmeric is said to have many medicinal properties and known to treat digestive and liver problems. One other source of my rebellion against the turmeric could be the fact that during fall every year, I was forced to eat an inch of raw turmeric root with some gur (a sort of molasses). The raw root has a very bitter taste and it leaves a strong aftertaste in the mouth. In India, fall is a fleeting season with a nip in the air, and a time when people are caught unawares by the change in season. Everywhere you look, you can see people coughing and sneezing and blowing their nose. The purpose of the turmeric was to make the immune system stronger, to help the body stay healthy and sound. The days when dad gave it (sometimes mom would give it with a generous helping of molasses) was bad because he was very stingy with the molasses. He practically preferred to give just the raw root. But when he saw that it was impossible to make me eat without the molasses he would just brush it lightly with the molasses. And the worst part was I had to sit in front of him and chew and swallow the entire thing right before his eyes. So there was no way of escaping. And all the time I chewed, I would grumble about how my teeth would look yellow and how my friends would tease me, and my dad would go on about how this was good for health because it was a blood purifier, and how it has been used since ancient times and so on. Much as I hated it at that time I do miss the routine now, though I don't miss the bitter taste. And it did help in preventing sickness during the change of seasons. Though my parents always talked about the medicinal aspects of turmeric I didn't quite believe in it until I sprained my leg. I was in high school then and I slipped down the stairs and sprained my right ankle. Within seconds I saw my ankle swell up to the size of a soft ball. "Great!" I thought. "Now I can miss my Shakespeare test tomorrow." But that happy feeling didn't last long as turmeric played spoilsport. My mom heated up some turmeric paste, combined it with some quicklime, applied the mixture to the swollen area and tightly wrapped it up with a piece of cloth. Within a few hours the swelling had decreased considerably and I had to concentrate on Shakespeare once again. The next day I limped to school and took the test. Turmeric also plays a major role in the cultural life of Bengalis. Any auspicious occasion like a puja (worshipping God) or a wedding can never take place without turmeric. In a wedding the use of turmeric starts right away at the invitations being sent out. When invitations are sent, a corner of the envelope is first smeared with turmeric. This signifies good luck. Mostly the younger people in the family do this job and I remember doing it, along with a bunch of other cousins, for my uncle's and my cousin's wedding. Both the weddings took place when I was in school. It was fun as well as tedious. Fun because we could skip studies and tedious because there would be two to three hundred cards per wedding, sometimes even more. I did the same during my marriage too. Usually we would take a card, smear it with turmeric on the top left hand corner and then move it aside. Then one of my cousins devised a method. He laid out 15-20 cards, each overlapping the other in a way that their top left hand corners were exposed. Then he took the turmeric and just smeared it through in a straight line thus covering twenty cards at one go. And it was more fun to do it this way. After it was smeared with turmeric we had to write the address, attach stamps and seal the envelopes. In other words, make it ready to be posted. And for all this we were treated to something. For my uncle's wedding I negotiated a quarter for every invitation that we processed, to which my dad, who was the organizer, agreed. And for my cousin's wedding I got treated to loads of ice cream. The beginning of a Bengali wedding is marked by the drawing of the Hindu symbol of swastika on a wall with a paste of turmeric and vermilion. It is supposed to bring good luck to the new bride and groom. And then there is an entire ceremony which consists solely of turmeric. It is called gaye holud (applying turmeric to the body). This is a fun and elaborate ceremony. In this ritual, turmeric roots are ground to a paste, mixed with mustard oil, applied to the groom's body and then the same paste is sent over to the bride's house to be applied on the bride's body. I had lots of fun at numerous weddings of friends and cousins smearing them with turmeric paste. All the turmeric I had smeared on numerous cousins, relatives and friends' at their weddings came to haunt me as my friends and family made it their mission to turn me into a yellow ghost with success. And after they were finished with me they suddenly turned upon each other, each attacking the other with turmeric paste until suddenly the place was filled with shouts and squeals and laughter, and everyone looked yellowish and like creatures from a different planet and then there was no mistaking the fact that there was a wedding in the house.
