Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, page 16
Shibbudada did return safely from Dr. Joshi's home, only to report that most of the city had turned into a hell. That did not stop him from riding out in his Chevy again and again to escort his Muslim musician friends from the inner city to planes and trains headed for Pakistan. Like many others, Bundu Khan, master of the sarangi (a bowed string instrument), left India with the greatest reluctance, after much urging from his family.
Delhi as we knew it ceased to exist. Its vibrant Hindu-Muslim culture, its nuanced rules of etiquette, its unfailing politeness, and its unique sense of hospitality began to fade away. Urdu, the language it had given birth to, went into a fatal decline. Depleted of many of its original inhabitants, and in a spirit of “the king is dead, long live the king,” Delhi began filling up with new citizens, refugees from the Punjab.
No refugee center could contain them all. They poured in by the thousands. Once a modest-sized ancient city of a little over a million people, Delhi was to bustle with more than thirteen million. The refugees took over all open spaces to set up little shops, markets, and shanties, anything to help them survive. The city began expanding haphazardly in all directions and without any of Lutyens's innate sophistication or the Moghuls' guiding principles of symmetry and grandeur.
On January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was shot and killed.
A few days before, my mother had asked me if I wanted to accompany her to one of Gandhiji's prayer meetings. These meetings were held with some regularity at the grand residence of one of India's richest industrialists, Birla. One edge of the landscaped garden was at some height and looked down, after a sheer drop, upon a large open field, forming a natural “stage” and “audience hall.” Gandhi came to this “stage” in the early evenings to pray and talk.
The prayer meetings were nonsectarian, nondenominational. Gandhi believed not in one nation under God but in a world, a universe under God—under the same God, whatever different names people chose to address Him by. He embraced India's Untouchables and included all faiths in his hymns. His lectures were about tolerance and man's common humanity.
Of course I wanted to go, I told my mother.
We set off in the late afternoon. The driver had warned us that huge crowds attended these meetings and traffic would be slow. It was worse than slow. Delhi dust mixed with January's uppala smoke swirled around thousands of unbudging cars that honked and beeped as if that would somehow facilitate a forward movement. All order had broken down. Instead of one neat lane, cars had angled themselves to the left and right, hoping to escape to a nonexistent magical, fast-moving path. There was no going forward or backwards. I feared that Gandhi's prayer meeting would come to a close before we could reach the field.
But we inched forward and got there. There was a sea of people. We joined them, taking our place, cross-legged, on the ground, just like everybody else. Gandhi came, in a white dhoti (loincloth) and shawl, escorted by two young women. We looked up at the stage. He folded his hands and bowed, and the hymns, sung by his followers onstage, began:
… Iskwar Allah taray naam
Sub ko seminati dey bhagwan …
(Ishwar [the Hindu name for God] and Allah
[the Muslim one] are but names for You,
O God, grant us some wisdom/tolerance)
We all knew the hymns and sang along. When Gandhi himself spoke, it was in a toothless whisper, amplified as much as possible by a microphone. We listened raptly. The sea of people—taxi drivers, farmers, carpenters, sweepers, film tycoons, and business moguls—was silent.
Just a few days later, Gandhi was shot three times. He was on his way to a prayer meeting with his usual escorts, walking towards the same “stage” at Birla House, where I had so recently seen him, when the shots rang out. He sighed “Hey Ram” (“O God”) and died. We heard of it on the radio. The whole city heard of it. Our family was in Number 5. We rushed out onto the street, as if an earthquake had struck. All our relatives were on the street, too. Number 7, Number 16, Number 14, Number 12, and Number 10 had spilled out all their inhabitants for an impromptu wake. We cried, sharing our shock and disbelief. Our fear, too. At that time, we did not know who had done the shooting. If it were to turn out to be a Muslim, more killings and riots would surely follow.
That night, our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke to the nation on the radio—“The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness now …”—his voice rising and falling in the soft, warm cadence that only he possessed.
The assassin was a member of an ultra-orthodox Hindu party that demanded a Hindu India, not the secular, tolerant country of Gandhi's and Nehru's dreams. In our family, there was some indefinable sense of relief, but great anger as well, at any version of religious certainty that could lead to such a senseless murder.
We were all present at Kingsway to view Gandhi's funeral procession, standing at the same spot where, just a few months earlier, my father and I had seen our new national flag unfurled. We wanted to attend the cremation at Rajghat, by the river, but the crowds were so thick we just got close enough to watch the white smoke from his funeral pyre dance upwards to meet the clouds.
TWENTY-THREE
Punjabi Influences • Food with New
Attitude • Bazaar and Tandoori Foods •
A Taste of Spam • Sunday Lunchtimes
Refugees from the Punjab settling in Delhi had brought with them their own language, Punjabi, their unique entrepreneurial spirit boosted by a hearty physical energy, and their own culture. Delhi succumbed and became, to a large extent, a Punjabi town. The martial Sikhs, who were once Punjab's fearsome horsemen, monopolized another kind of vehicle, becoming the movers and shakers of the newly created Delhi taxi service. Because it was the capital city and housed a central government that drew civil servants from around the country, Delhi began to develop a national consciousness. As new embassies slowly established themselves, Delhi picked up the heady air of international sophistication as well.
There was a major change, a revolution really, in the city's food. Before Independence, most upper-class and middle-class families ate at home. Among Hindu families like ours, cleanliness was certainly next to godliness. We bathed at least once a day in the winter and at least twice a day in the summer. And always in flowing water. Bathtubs were anathema. “How can those people sit in dirty water!” my mother would exclaim, gesturing her head in the general direction of the West.
We ate only home-cooked food and washed our hands and mouths before and after meals. Eating out was not condoned. As my father said repeatedly, “Who knows what germs lurk about in outside food? Perhaps a dirty finger has been poked into a bowl, or perhaps clean food has been removed with a jhoota [previously used] spoon.”
“Jhoota” was a big word in our home. If someone 's mouth had touched a food, it was taboo to anyone else. It was now consid-ered jhoota, or tainted by the mouth. I never shared a whole apple or pear or peach with anyone, not even my sisters. Once one of us had taken a bite, it was definitely jhoota and unavailable to all others, even if the person who started on the fruit could not finish it. My mother then just said, “Oh, how could you waste it like that,” and threw it away. If one person drank from a glass of water or soft drink or whiskey, it was theirs. No one else could take a sip. Not a soul in our family was ever heard to suggest, “Taste mine. Take a sip of mine.” (Even today, if a friend in America or England says innocently, “Taste my Bloody Mary. It is wonderful. It has something unusual in it. Tell me what it is,” I am at first paralyzed into a Hamlet-like state of inaction. I then fall on my sword and taste it as every atom of my body yells, “No, no, noooo.”) As children we played dirty rotten games with each other, one of us quickly licking the fruit or chocolate or sandwich we all had our eyes on and then singing wickedly, “It's jhoota now. You can't have it.”
A few strange contradictions did, however, manage to work their way into the fabric of our pure, clean lives. They took the form of special bazaar foods. There were, of course, the afore-mentioned parathas our mother let us eat on the quiet—these definitely slipped under the radar—but others were officially sanctioned, too. The first of these was the aloo bedvi (sauced potatoes and stuffed pooris) we got on the odd weekend from Ghantay-wallah Halvai for breakfast.
This halvai, or sweet-maker, who had his shop in the very center of Chandni Chowk, the Main Street of Moghul Delhi, specialized in sweets and savory snacks. It was the savory snacks I was interested in. Most of the time in Number 5, we had eggs for weekend breakfasts, with ham or bacon or sausages from the English shop, Spencers, in Kashmiri Gate. But every now and then my mother prevailed, and my father let the driver go out to procure a breakfast of her choice from the Old City, the very Hindu aloo bedvi. My father justified this indulgence by saying, “At least the food is cooked and hot, and therefore free of germs. Besides, we serve it on our own clean plates, which have not been washed in filthy bazaar water.”
My father's own choice of bazaar foods, and he certainly had his indulgences, were far more questionable, especially in light of his own articulated standards. He—and my brothers, for that matter—all loved Muslim foods from another inner-city bazaar area, the one that surrounded the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan's seventeenth-century mosque, Jama Masjid. They liked the kebabs, especially the satiny, crumbling-at-the-touch, tubular seekh kebabs, made by wrapping very finely ground, perfectly seasoned meat around thick skewers and grilling them on charcoal braziers. They also enjoyed the hamburger-like shami kebabs, made by boiling ground meat with spices, making a pâtélike paste with the mixture, forming patties, and browning them. But shami kebabs could be made at home; our family excelled in them. What we did not do was the grilling that seekh kebabs demanded, or the baking that the accompanying Muslim breads required.
Over the centuries, Kayastha families like ours had acquired the dubious reputation of being sharabi kebabis, lovers of liquor and kebabs. That applied only to the men; the women almost never drank, they imbibed only “soft drinks.” My mother spoke no English but she did know how to say “soft drink,” two words that were required frequently in company. Even though they did not partake of the liquor, many of the women had taken to relishing their meats. One rather large, exquisitely beautiful, green-eyed cousin of mine was asked if she cared for sweets, to which she replied languorously, “Nooo, not realleeey. If I have any roooom left in my stomach at aaall, I just eeeat another kofta [meatball].”
Whenever we had a big party—and sometimes it was just a large family gathering—the men demanded that their much-loved kebabs and Muslim breads be sent for. A driver was dispatched, but not before he was given clean platters, clean tablecloths, napkins, and dishtowels, so that when the food reached us it upheld the family's standards of cleanliness, at least outwardly.
The driver made sure that the breads, the roomali rods (handkerchief breads, breads as thin, soft, fine, and large as a man's handkerchief) and the bakarkhani (dense, thick, multilayered, buttery flatbreads), were wrapped in the tablecloths. He handed our clean platters to the Jama Masjid kebab-maker and supervised as the seekh kebabs were arranged in neat rows and paper-thin red onion rings spread generously over the top. The onion rings were not only a much-loved accompaniment but helped to keep the kebabs moist. The onion rings were raw (my father supposedly mistrusted raw bazaar food) and they had been soaked in water— filthy bazaar water?—to erase some of their sharpness. Yet the finicky men in our family devoured them without a care.
Until then, that was the extent of the “outside” food we ate, other than the odd pastries and cakes we bought from Davicos and Wengers, English teahouses, or the semi-Western meals we ate at our parents' clubs. Then a restaurant called Moti Mahal opened on a main road in Daryagunj, on the edge of the Old City. More a set of rough-and-ready stalls than a real restaurant, it had embedded in its floor a set of large clay ovens shaped like vats. These were known as tandoors. Delhi was entranced. It had never seen the likes of them before, or eaten the tandoori foods these ovens produced.
Young, whole roasted chickens emerged so tender and moist they could be pulled apart and devoured in seconds. Light, bubbly naan breads, made by slapping elongated teardrop shapes against the heated tandoor walls, were pulled out with long hooks. These could be torn and wrapped around the meat. Kali dal (whole black beans) provided the accompaniment. It cooked overnight in an earthen vessel partially buried in the tandoor's fading embers. The only condiment offered at the table was a bowl of small, whole pickled onions. This was food with a new attitude. Its very simplicity and freshness was modern and enticing. There was nothing like it in Delhi. Moti Mahal was packing them in.
This was Punjabi food, from what had once been India's North-West Frontier, near its border with Afghanistan. When India was partitioned, fleeing Hindu refugees from the newly formed West Pakistan gathered their valuables and ran in an easterly direction. They carried their tandoors with them so they could cook along the way. One such family that fled all the way to Delhi had decided to open Moti Mahal and offer its plain village cooking to a city of culinary sophisticates. The rest, as they say, is history.
Tandoori food—good, bad, and mostly indifferent—has been produced by almost every major Indian restaurant since then. The trend started first in Delhi and then spread throughout the globe. In Delhi, other Punjabi entrepreneurs took note of Moti Mahal's success and felt they could do better by serving tandoori food on starched tablecloths. They would add Moghul delicacies, even Western hors d'oeuvres of baked beans and sardines to the menu, and have a fancy bar that served all manner of liquor, including hard cider. They would also offer the occasional weekend dinner dance. Gaylord in New Delhi was one such place. It, too, was very successful. The new, independent Delhi was in an extroverted, celebratory mood, and restaurants became the place to express this new freedom. The more conservative, effete Delhi-wallahs were soon following the more outgoing Punjabis and eating publicly. New restaurants, coffee shops, and dhabas were opening daily.
The dhaba was entirely of Punjabi origin. Once a simple routier for truck drivers on the road, or any passersby, it turned into a fixture in the small shacks and stalls of Delhi's newer markets set up by refugees. It served Punjabi staples such as chana bhatura, spicy chickpeas with deep-fried leavened breads, as well as quick stir-fries made in the karhai (Indian cast-iron wok) with paneer (very freshly made cheese) and tomatoes.
Punjabis, like Texans, did everything bigger and better. If the entire nation had a passion for dairy products, the Punjabis indulged in them even more. They preferred rich milk with cream floating on the top and drank it in large amounts. When they made yogurt, they used water-buffalo milk, with its higher percentage of fat, often reducing it over low heat until it had the texture of cream. This they set into the richest—and tastiest— yogurt you can ever hope to eat. If they made lassi (a yogurt drink) with it, they added some cold milk for extra richness and then served it in tall glasses, each with the capacity of an average blender. (I use the few Punjabi lassi glasses I own as vases for long-stemmed flowers.) They not only used ghee for all their cooking, frowning on oils, but smeared the most generous dollops of homemade white butter on their rods (flatbreads) and greens. One of my twin cousins had married a Punjabi, who impressed me greatly by telling me that as a child he was given a spoonful of ghee in the morning to make him big and strong. Paneer dishes were also Punjabi specialties: mattar paneer (paneer with peas), saag paneer (paneer with spinach), and paneer bhurji (shredded paneer stir-fried with onions, ginger, green chilies, green coriander, and tomatoes). The first two of these would become a firm part of the Indian-restaurant repertoire, in Delhi to begin with and then around the world.
Most grocers now carried big wheels of paneer, made by curdling milk with the previous day's whey, collecting the curds in a cheesecloth, and pressing down briefly on the bundle. Anyone could buy a chunk of the fresh cheese, along with the peas, onions, and ginger they needed.
World War II was over, but we in India were belatedly being bombarded with its leftovers in the form of mysterious boxes known as K rations. Delhi was awash in them. It was almost as if the rectangular brownish khaki boxes had been dug up from some forgotten hoard and then floated down to us on a million parachutes. This may actually have happened, as we were also awash in parachute “silk,” which was being transformed quickly into blouses, skirts, sarees, and curtains by Delhi's masses.
I never thought then of checking the expiration date on the K rations. All I remember is that my cousins and I tore them open as if they were Christmas presents, pulling out each carefully fitted can or package with the greatest glee. Thus I was introduced to my first olive, my first fruit cocktail, and my first Spam. I rolled mouthfuls slowly around my tongue and pronounced each of them to be exotic and wonderful. I had never eaten canned fruit or canned meat before.
Although we, the younger generation in our family, now routinely picked up tandoori foods from Moti Mahal for our picnics, stopped now and then at a dhaba for a snack ofchana bhatura, and regularly patronized restaurants like Gaylord, our meals at home, controlled by the adults, remained steadfastly the same. No Punjabi influence filtered in. K rations stayed out of the dining room and, like doll's food, were dismissed as children's rubbish.
