A certain lanky friend of mine has an unintelligible passion for lunching on chaat *ignore red squiggly line* and it’s the itty-bitty inspiration I get from him, which, paired with an English lecturer’s suggestion to write about food, makes my mouth water at the thought of having an accomplished piece of food writing. I can almost imagine her petite visage cracking up into a smile. No idea why I said that.
Chaat was never raste ka khana back home in Bahrain; we’d get it in Sameira Snack Bar—regular hunger-buster on our way home from church—served in clean, air-conditioned restaurants on nice, shiny stainless-steel plates; I’d be so full of seeing myself in them that snacks such as these became dinner. The meetha khajoor chutney and meetha ras still lingers about the old store room; probably, looking at me growing up, feeling jealous when I eat chaat here in Bangalore, and haunting my taste buds into weeping for them.
The Great Chaat Childhood has tiny bursts of memories, just as a great plate of bhel puri has little bits of tangy raw mango on the top; my favourite is the art of sacramentally lifting the sacred pani puri, our own beautiful creation at the table, and placing it whole into the mouth, and the first crunchy chomp and—it’d be a success if all the ras stayed in—meetha and khara bringing on a whirlpool of flavour and the soft seasoned aloo and channa is just falling and filling you like manna from heaven while you’re gyrating in awe with the middle of the current, like a magical trance.
And my dad telling my mom and me how it’s done, every single time.
Since I’ve some down to India for college, I’ve been cursing the ‘indianisation’ of some things I loved eating—particularly, fast food. Like that bloody birizza, which makes my taste buds want to pop out and go maim the taste buds of the people who came up with it. But what I never considered was the subtle ways in which Bahrain tweaked the whole street-food context on which they served us chaat—you know, street food on a silver platter. Maybe because of the higher cost of living. Or perhaps the laid-back Indian culture. Or the national language which is something like “Yalla monae, come jaldhi”.
The only hint at the street-food experience of chaat would be the Hindi serials I used to watch with my mother: some laila-majnoon or miya-biwi, or perhaps a triple of college girls chomping down on pani puri and overreacting with expressions which attempted merging the ancient comedy and tragedy theatre masks, pout-kissing the thin air and fanning themselves vigorously with their deafening chudi-ridden arms.
And now I’m here with classmates, eating out of those single-puri leaf-bowls and gulping down the ras at the end.
There was a finiteness back home, the finiteness of the stainless steel plate and the definite number of puris surrounding the small katoris of ras. But now the rasta makes me a new kind of oblivious; to his replies for my questions on how many puris in one ‘plate’ and how much it costs. When he tells me I’m done, I mostly end up saying “Bhaiyya, Ek aur”.
And walk back to college a few rounds later, relishing the complementary, passionate sukha puri.
Just Blahgging 