Meri bhi Keri- Tulika Books Blogathon

There are few trees that catch as many a greedy glance as the Mango tree. Casually by the roadside, quickly from a passing car, longingly in your own backyard or slyly in the neighbour's, the laden branches of mango trees in summers are constant head turners.

And justifiably so. From its lyrical green and brown stance, its generous open arms, its leaves dusted with golden pollen, the summer bend of its annual cycle is the loveliest for this tree. But that was all the charm it held for me, as a graceful, lush sight in the blinding summer light. Unlike everyone around me, I didn't care as much about the yield. My summer fruit was never the mango. But to appreciate the contrast you must first know everyone around me..

The important twelve years of my school life were spent in Navrachana, in Baroda, a wonderful school built amid many, many mango trees. And the mango has a very exclusive place in Gujarat. In homes during the summers it makes its way gloriously down every course of the meal, even the sides, leaving a happy,sticky trace around gluttonous smiles from the face of the newest member to the wise ones of the Baas who meticulously prepare the mangifera goodies. But for school-going children, the chase for the mango begins not in the kitchen but before the fruit ripens.

It was the unripe mango, or the kachchi keri that was more coveted in our school. The injustice lay in the fact that we were all sent off for the summer vacations and we'd never once seen the mangoes ripening! Remember what I said about the sly glance towards the mango tree? Now multiply it by 2000 (I'm not even counting the carefully calculated anticipation and gaze of the teachers, no different from ours) and that's the pressure the poor mango trees in the nooks of our school had to bear! And not once did they flinch, in all their glory and limelight while swift as rodents, sneaky as monkeys, and sharp as birds of prey, the students would claim the prize of a bud much before it blossomed, common view points being classroom windows, the basketball court and over each others' shoulder as we queued up to make our way to the dining hall. 

Soon, the itchy showers of pollen gave way to little green fruit. And thus the strategies would begin to form. What time of the school day would be ideal to beg for a free period ? How many times can one be excused to visit the restroom? Which classroom had the ideal window and who among the many gifted cooks at the dining hall should we begin to butter up for the acquisition of a pinchful of salt and chilli powder that go best with the kachchi keri. 

And on and on it went until the fruit gathered nourishment,grew in mass and in its tailored green jacket peered down at hundreds of hungry faces.From then on, tension rose like fumes in the flasks of the Chemistry lab. Friends turned foes, people changed groups within the span of a recess and classes were stopped as students trooped to stand outside with salt-streaked faces concealing a sheepish grin, all for the want of a green slice of the keri. Not that they couldn't have gone home to baskets of  mangoes, not that keris couldn't be found on a vendor's cart at a price well within their allowances, not that scabby knees and dusty uniforms were the only concerns of their mothers, the fact was that the kachhi keri from the school trees tasted better than anywhere else. You can imagine the awkward lull when a keri fell right in the middle of the senior school assembly at the feet of the strictest teacher and the buzz of mental activity that followed, about how to inch towards it during an intense announcement or talk. In the process of calculating the trajectory of a thrown tennis ball, the best time of the week to stand under a tree, and a route to meander through classes to dodge a greedy bully, my schoolmates turned into the great Physicists, Botanists and Cartographers that our teachers could have taken great pride in. Meanwhile, did I miss out on all the fun?

I have to admit I did, most of it. I would occasionally eat ripe mangoes after lunch or with vanilla ice cream, but that joy was always overshadowed by my love for water melon while my mum would delve in the nostalgia of buckets of yellow-red mangoes at her Grandparents'. The unripe mango (or the amiya) in our kitchen only contributed to tangy green chutneys and panna that my mum is best known for. 

But that was that. For the many years I was in school, my interactions with the Mango trees were limited to climbing the branches. I never really understood the obsession with the unripe mango, wouldn't the sourness give one a tummy ache? In any case there were way too many contenders. I decided to lay off. 

And it remained so until my last summer in school, just before the 12th boards, when I knew it was time to say goodbye to the shade and fragrance of the mango trees and all the little nooks I'd come to know as my own in the past twelve years. I have been at war with the very phenomenon of growing up for a while now. I  wanted to make the most of school and during the last few months there were only a handful of us who'd attend everyday while the others studied from home. I spent these days at my backbench brooding and thinking of what was to come and what I was leaving behind. When out of nowhere a classmate of mine declared that a kachchi keri was found miraculously abandoned. We decided to make the most of a dull, free period in a class of four and made our way to the dining hall. I wondered what we would be greeted with and if we could walk into the kitchens as we pleased, certainly not? I smiled at the kitchen staff, the hard-working crew that day after day served us the food that we all still crave for and I wanted to tell them how amazingly well they do this task. Instead I gingerly stood by my classmates as they asked for a knife and were promptly handed one along with salt and chilli, for the staff knew our needs well. 

The memory remains with me to this day, the first time I enjoyed the kachchi keri, peel and all, with a bunch of classmates whom I'd soon be parting ways with. I rediscovered the joy of sharing found treasure over a small walk to the dining hall and back. Needless to say, it tasted great, and I don't remember if a tummy ache followed or not. 

It did take me a while to get to the bottom of this fruit, but I'm glad I did, I couldn't have left the premises of my school without having accomplished this feat, and I'd put it on the school prospectus if I could.It meant more than having passed the twelfth boards.That summer, we were all hit with the finality of finishing school and the oblivion that was to follow.We were safer and surer here, of belonging and knowing that if we fell several times before we matured, there would be someone who'd still value us. Like the keri, we wouldn't be seen ripening under those trees that summer. But we'd all have something common as a keepsake, long after the summer was over. Our own kachchi keri experience, even if a tad too late.

(For more Mango stories, check out http://tulikapublishers.blogspot.in/2012/05/i-heart-mangoes-tulika-summer-blogathon.html  soon.)

The Anytime Sandwich

It's past 2:30 and I'm hungry and I'm lucky that our PG fridge is well stocked.
So I will whip up (more like clumsily assemble) myself a sandwich.

Here's a list of my top 5 anytime sandwiches:


Egg salad (usually over-salted, with ketchup and chunks of cold butter. Eggs slices-cold and hard boiled)


Cucumber and cheese spread. ( Black pepper is the trick.Also, I don't get why some people grill their cucumber sandwiches. It loses the crunch and gets soggy. And anything with such high water content when grilled like that will stay hot for long and keep you waiting/burn the tongue.)


Haldiram's Sev Bhujia. (I mostly over-ketchup it. Always better with cheese. Like most things.)


PBJ (chunky, grape/strawberry/mixed fruit, with milk)


Tomato Onion and Cheese (My mum's usual midnight snack, I dunno why she abstains from onion and cheese?)

And if you go to Baroda, the Grilled Chicken and Cheese at Goodies' Cafeteria in Fatehgunj is what you should try out because it's made by Gods, is shaped in semicircles, NEVER seems microwaved and oozes with generous awesomeness. There're vegetarian alternatives and it comes with chips. I crave it quite often.

I also remember an amazing open face mushroom sandwich I ate quite long ago at The Tea Centre, Mumbai. It's such a wonderful place to sit in even if one isn't a tea drinker. Lots of great information on the walls.

Now, my top 10 reasons to eat a sandwich:

1. They cover most food groups.
2. They're messy and fun and require no cutlery (If I had it my way, no plates either)
3. There's very little or no cooking involved so almost anyone can make one.
4. There's so much room to experiment. And so many condiments to combine.
5. They can be stacked or stuffed as high as one wants. It's great exercise for the jaw.
6. They're a good way to make someone eat their crusts because they tend to ooze.
   
   (making sandwich)
7. Some like it hot, some like it cold. There're ways to make them taste amazing either way.
8. They're  a very easy way to disguise ingredients like leftover veggies, healthy greens, split chillies.
9. They're the right size for a snack box, specially the snug, flat, squarish tupperware.
10. Sandwiches can be split with friends. And in any number with no consequential loss of ingredients in any given part.

And late night hunger is reason enough and there're things waiting in cupboards and refrigerators to be consumed before sunrise. I decided to make a Bhujia sandwich. I had just what I needed!

With the exception of cheese spread. 

But it was delightful! Here's what we need:

Haldiram's Sev Bhujia. Haldiram's. Nothing else. 

Amul Butter (the butter was so soft right now, I could use it for icing! However, cold chunks are serendipitous fun)

Bread of choice.

Ketchup. Loads.

Sliced Onion  (optional, recommended)

Take two slices, butter one, spread cheese on the other. Mound first the onions, then the bhujia. Squirt ketchup. Slice into triangles and munch. Ta-da!

This sandwich has a joyful crunchiness to it and is very filling. It was something my mum would make for my brother very often for breakfast and like most tastes that I acquire as a hand-me-down, I developed one for these, I didn't think I had room for one and I just had two. 

Now that I'm fed.

I think I'll go to bed.

BUT...only after I watch this Dexter's Lab short: 

Always cracks me up.

Rot-a-trot

Yellow, putrid,

Stained door

Open wide

Open more

Open, gasping like a mouth

Open like a seasoned whore

Llike the fangs of an angered God

Open like the morning shore...

I could try pushing harder or pound on these doors with the pure strength that my body saves, in recesses so deep that I have barely heard their pulse. The strength I save for an extreme need of survival. I dispel the slightest fear that resides in my knuckles. The idea of getting hurt is more painful in thought. The act of it is a numbing rhythm. A grateful release from the swelling veins of my knuckles pushing against doors that I cannot defeat.

Let it be then, let it stand in merciless, unchanging hold. I turn away. I turn instead to the window in the laboratory to face the pure, blinding white where a soft gray would bruise and blossom underfoot as I would walk upon it. But the fury that brews in my head creates a heavy cloud, making it harder to see through the oily panes. So I let it go. A fleeting cloud of red escaping and losing itself in the stark white landscape that preserves everything imaginable under its snow. A swirling, plasmic red. What I made of the hate you left in me

Like a bookmark in pages too boring.

Like a swizzle stick in something that tastes of nothing.

Like fish food. 

Like a pest-stricken bunch of grapes.

Like a bottle of medicine for a once-upon-a-time disease.

Forgotten at a state of toxic potential.

When hate rots and its open sores gather venom inside you, the easiest thing is to strike at something relatively unresponsive in the way. To wait at the pavement for the next slow trickle of strangers to snarl at. Or the next insect to crush underfoot. Or the next day's papers to shred. Controlled unleashment thrust upon us by modern human ethical societies, when in another life I could be a poisonous beetle striking at fellow beings.

Instead we leave ourselves with no choice but to shrink into cocoons that we weave around us and let them slowly consume us. As though there wasn't enough binding us anyway. 

There  always is a smaller form of existence that will feed on what rots. And because the parasitic sting you left in me feeds your sickly sniggers, you should know how small you are. But you are many and enjoy multiplying in infectitious pools around me. Feeding, breeding, thriving and ploughing the poisoned skin that I can't wait to shed.

If I could exit this mad lab I would. If I could crawl out of this loathsome culture of rancid emotions I would. If I could, with a loud swash and thrust, escape this pool and this uncomfortably warm, itchy controlled environment to tear open the feverish pulse and drain myself of the venom, I would. If only I gathered the salvage and strength to break open these doors. If only I could uncover the snow instead with the exhausting effort to imagine what lies beneath it.If  I could gather it in mounds and preserve in it all that is decaying. And I would never turn back to your laboratory where you could inject me with your hate.

If only I knew what I sought that made me rot.

And even if you tell me it's ok to dream about it again

I would not.

In the Sloe Mo World

In the Sloe Mo world,

Babies stay babies longer,

Everybody can't help but wave back,

Strobes lights don't affect the epileptic,

All stitches are in time,

There are at least 4 generations who can compare
 their childhoods at one time,

Popsicles melt slower,

Popcorn stays crunchier,

Food chews itself,

Food stays warm longer,

There's more of food,

Which is a good thing because like happy 15 year olds

everyone is always hungry,

People always forget what page they were on,

instead, they read the ribs and spines and veins of books,

like it should be,

It's easy to keep track of the phases of the moon,

And the sea washes everything ashore that left home,

It brings me back to being a simpler life form that

has the time and willingness to evolve,

(but only in another lifetime)

and is happy to eat and be alive.

(maggi break)

In the Sloe Mo world,

Skirts are delightful,

Implants are frightful,

And the perpetual return of fashion keeps everyone

satisfactorily in mode.

Uno goes on forever,

Board games stretch across 4 tabletops,

Crayons have a mind of their own

And clumsiness is a certified state of being.

There are two good listeners to every conversation

And it takes rudely long to figure out if the next person

is a he or a she, so people have stopped caring.

No one spends free time on narcotics

because they finally take the time out to see the world for

what it can do to the senses, if given time.

Everyone can put out fires in time and still gaze at the

mad beauty with which this unfathomable state of matter

consumes every other.

In the Sloe Mo world, there are no deadlines,

And you don't hate yourself for prioritizing,

So a-waste-of-time becomes far more subjective,

And know this, that the people whom you'd

traverse time and space for, never are...

In the Sloe Mo world,

everyone has a time for a cuppa

what they like

and a spoonful of what the tongue feels

happy under

and you and I have time for a chat

that lingers

longer.

Good Ol' Days of Yolk

The monotony has set in. Week after week I carefully plan a 10:30 am wake-up, for Sunday breakfast at my PG mess. But today was different,I did get up at 10:30, but something made me forgo breakfast. Later, I had a small bowl of muesli to keep up with the barrels of work that keep rolling ahead, taking my eyelids with them.

But Sundays aren't about muesli, even with candied fruit. They're about two eggs (as you like them) and toast and hastily spread Amul butter among sleepy faces in the PG mess, with greasy newspaper with Amul butter thickly spread. I happened to go without eggs, as I like them, this morning by some strange vociferation of will that I don't quite believe now. If I meet that nasty urge of will right now, I'd punch it till it chickens out.

For as long as I can remember, eggs have been my second fuzziest comfort food, and at most times just the best thing to trigger nostalgia. When I was very small, and despite my Dadiji's discomfort at my eating eggs and onions in the same meal, had grown fond of omelettes for breakfast it would take all of my mum's effort to keep me from having too many. Two a day and no more was the rule and rightly so, high protein is hard to digest and I have a troublesome stomach. It helped that omelettes can disguise the number of eggs and serve disillusionment beautifully with the size of the pan. My mum was probably very pleased I asked for seconds, even thirds for any form of food at all and she knew the feeling well, that of loving omlettes...

...because no one spins an omelette like my Naniji, my mother's mother. They're sinful, widely known, and are better at drawing you away from under the sheets, from the painfully organised archival chests of drawers or from the bookshelf at my Grandparents' home at Kanpur than anything else can. The.Smell.Of.Those,Omelettes. The simplest but best of everything goes into them and they go best with everything else.

Eggs taught me how to handle cutlery. It was mimicking my Nanaji, whose indifference at the table I'd irk by reaching out for my omelette with bare fingers, that I gave up a finer sensory experience for a fork and knife, (which being left handed I would prefer to keep switched but not anymore). The only time I'd raise my eyes from my plate of eggs was to watch Nanaji gulp his pills with tea before leaving for his clinic, it couldn't have been very hot tea, but every morning it was that one thing I wanted to excel at when I grow up. I wasn't on any medication myself but my aunt, who had just finished studying medicine would feed me digestive biscuits saying they were dog biscuits, but only if I behaved like a pooch for most of the day. Now I know this form of adult tactic as one-of-those-things-to-shut-kids-up.

It is over one of these summer vacations at Kanpur that I decided I had had enough of omelettes and I announced that I had to test my taste buds and the deftness of cutlery on fried eggs, runny side up. I had a sick sounding name for them that I cannot disclose. But that texture and colour was the delight of my seven year old life. It was a shocking change for the table from Naniji's omelettes, but there was a short hush and not much else against the sizzle of determination.

Then there are egg rolls,in Calcutta. I don't remember much of them from the 3 years that I spent there when I was very young. But my parents and brother have memories that pour out each time my mother makes egg rolls or egg paranthas at home. And since I happened to visit Calcutta very recently, I see exactly why the pleasure of having a piping hot egg roll on the pavement, in all its chat masala and butter paper splendor, would stay with one forever as a memory that you can't help but revisit. I think my mum mastered the art of them and someday I hope I do too. Or else there's little else I need to give me a reason to keep visiting Calcutta.

Well, I ping-ponged through all of childhood between omlettes, Spanish omelettes that got slightly ruined for me because of a bitter capsicum, and sunny sides (which was a phase and took far too long to eat) with bhurji now and then to add to the scramble.I even helped my mum make eggs.But in my early teens, when I decided to wander in the kitchen for longer than to ask my mother about a school assignment, I discovered the ease of boiling eggs and making egg salad sandwiches. My mum says that she let me take my time with kitchen tools to let me choose which hand they should go in. And soon after, I was addicted to my messy,drowned in ketchup, over-salted but all mine egg salad sandwich.

There's a certain memory of burnt fingers, calcite odour and care to keep the shell in halves that I attach with shelling boiled eggs. It's a lovely feeling that was sometimes paired with seeing the grey of a boiled yolk which was a fascinatingly distinct change from the yellow of cracking eggs. And cracking eggs if one is allowed, any child will tell you, is one of the most triumphant feelings. Shelling eggs also meant cooking egg-curry, that I discovered both my parents are absolutely amazing at and would never refuse to cook even  though it was a tiresome task compared to our quick TV dinner of bhurji.

And it has been so every time I have come home from college in my vacations. Except that now I am simply, utterly grateful to be eating eggs at home, in all shapes, colours and sizes. The thought of it makes me smile and the act of it is so fulfilling that I could be smothered cozy under a giant mother hen. I am as amazed as discovering that there are eggs for any meal at home as I was when I found out that an egg could even go into things that are sweet (this dates back to 1.When I first saw my Nani's divine chocolate cake being produced. 2. When papa was checking the packaging of a swiss role for the vegetarian green dot before we could serve it to my Dadi.). Eggs + home = the same feeling you get when you kill the last nasty squeaking red demon in a cave in Diablo II and the gold spills out of nowhere.

I am very very fond of eggs, it's my favourite form of poultry produce, yes, more than chicken. But now in college, I've met people who are far bigger egg lovers. I moaned and craved eggs during the bird flu but I don't remember complaining a whole lot. And I've met people allergic to eggs. Sundays however, remain the only time when egg lovers appear from all crooks and holes of our PGs and I see for myself the wonder of eggs that makes people rise a little earlier than they would've on a Sunday morning. I wouldn't miss it for the company either. Amid sleepy, happy faces at home or in the PG, amid people I know and love. That's how I like my eggs.

Tough to chew

Q. What do you call an omelette  with bits of chicken in it?

A. A momlette.

I sense some very hateful avian vibes.