Á la cart

In Search Of... A Midnight Snack.

’Tis late. Hunger strikes. The fridge is either empty or far away. You are solvent, of sane mind and reasonably cast-iron digestion.All the “decent” restaurants are closed. If you want to sit down and eat, it’s either a shady bar, with loud music and, ahem, waitresses, or a 5-Star coffee shop, where the obscenities are all in the right hand column.

Fear not. For the price of a cab ride (or petrol money, if ye are of independent wheels), sustenance may be had without too much of a pain-in-the-billfold. For thou art in Mumbai, Urbs Primus in Indus, the city that never sleeps (borrowed, that, but true), but loves to eat. Just hit the road, and keep an ear peeled for the clatter of ladle against tavaa. Then follow your nose to the nearest cart.

For a start, there’s the pau-bhaji chappies who peddle their fiery fare near VT, on the edge of Azad Maidan. Also available, vada paus, eggs – bhurji, omelettes, half-fry, or as-you-like-it- provided-it’s-oily, and boiled eggs – and sweet, overboiled “cutting” chai. Churchgate’s environs offer similar fare, but not as late, and there’s less variety.

Moving on, and north, Mohammadali Road during Ramzan is a good idea. Especially if it’s so late it’s very early. The restaurants and carts are all abuzz, rustling up delicious, decidedly non-vegetarian pre-dawn sustenance for the faithful. Ditto for Mahim and the area near Bandra station.

Further afield, if you’re near Worli Naka, cast your eyes down the shadowy minor roads. If haven’t been shooed away by the cops, you’ll find carts with the usual bhurji and pau-bhaji.

Dadar station yields provender too. On the West, mainly bhurji vendors under the flyover, but the East, thanks to Central Railway’s terminating a few trains there, and even more thanks to the usual tardiness of the said trains, offers a leetle more. Eggs, of course, plus sundry dishes with “masala” tacked on to the end of their names - which means there’s gravy. A few minutes away, on the main road, there’s a sandwich guy - not a cart, a roadside stall, but he’s in this piece for variety and your cholesterol. Peer carefully - post midnight, his lights are off. But he’ll make you a simple sandwich - jam, cheese, or tomatoes and whatever other veggies are going, and i do believe i once saw baked beans. He’ll even toast it for you for a coupla bucks extra. He also has fruit juices.

In Sion, near the railway station, you kind find simple South Indian fare. Steaming idlis, dosas too. The sambhar is usually excellent, but be wary of the chutney; coconut tends to spoil easily. Yes, more eggs.

All the way into the suburbs, the story continues. Enough people stagger home from the sapping commute to keep many a cart in business. Which is why you’re more likely to find them near railways stations.

Don’t expect much more, though, than the greasy fare you find downtown. But, as consolation, you can wash down your meal with a little steel tumbler of coffee, retailed by entrepreneurial lads on bicycles. They’re easily spotted, here, and near traffic signals, because of the large stainless steel urn tied to the back of the bike, and rinsing bucket slung from the handlebars. Besides giving them a far wider range – they’re usually on the move from signal to taxi stand to bus stop – i guess the cycles also let them disappear more quickly down the nearest bylane when a spoilsport cop van is spotted.

(To be fair, the police don’t normally get tough with the night carts. They seem to recognise that they’re just hardworking souls catering to other hardworking souls and turn a blind eye. Besides, our tireless boys in khaki need food and caffeine too!)

Ah yes, the coffee. It isn’t filter, just a cheap instant, and the hot milk-water mixture in the urns is pre-sweetened, so sucks to you if you’re calorie counting.

But it’s strong, and hot, just what you need to keep you awake on your way home to your antacids.

Published in the Times of India’s Mumbai edition, In Search Of, under the completely grotty title, "Midnight Chowboy."
In Search Of was a weekly column that focussed on a different food-related topic each week. Another sadly discontinued TOI feature.

Tags: The Times of India, In Search of the Perfect..

And The Living Was Easy

Summers Past.

A drop of warm sweat meanders down my spine.

And I’m thinking basketball. Vest so drenched i could wring it, squeeze it dry, quadrangle floor so hot you had to play with shoes or blister.

I’m thinking long, hazy afternoons, a broad almond tree that was pirate ship, Tarzan’s jungle and so much more. I’m thinking chor-police, hide-and-seek and dabba futli over eight building compounds in the long twilight and no worries about being called home now, because the exams were over!

I’m remembering gazing ardently up into mango trees, willing the fruit to ripen, knocking down a few just to check whether, perhaps, that small size and green skin was just the tree trying to fool us. And then the grimace of perverse pleasure as you bit and found so-uuurrrr.

And going up to one particular friend’s house for water, because they had a fridge.

I’m smiling about 25 paise coins hoarded from errands, splurged on little plastic tubes filled with flavoured ice, where you bit through the heat-sealed edge and sucked – pepsis they were called, with a lower-case ‘p.’ Soft drinks were rare – they cost all of two bucks, who had that kind of money? – reserved for restaurant visits with one’s parents.

And that long, sweet last summer between school and college. Three months of utter irresponsibility only now and then sullied with the quaking terror of SSC marks day. Badminton in the still cool, early morning air. Racing off to the lending library to pick up the daily fix of books and comics, and then, lying with them on the cool floor, legs propped up on the nearest piece of furniture, lost in faraway places of the mind. An evening of six, maybe eight innings of cricket, and when bad light – well, no light, actually – stopped play, sitting on swings vacated by the little kids and those strange creatures, girls.

College hols, the games stayed, but there were new preoccupations too. “Summer clubs,” that delightful suburban custom – a month of semi-organised competitions and fun, sports, plays, singing, dancing, cycle treasure hunts. Begging the use of houses and terraces to sit and plan, madly practising and rehearsing, borrowing props, stealing ideas, siblings in different teams not talking to each other all summer.

We’d moved upmarket by then, to the golavala. Almost drooling as he scraped ice into a glass, packed it around a stick, anointed it with syrup and dunked it into the glass, topped up with more syrup and water.

And cycles. Everywhere. Extensions of our bodies. Taking us further than we could run. From one frenzied arena to another. And then racing down quiet back streets, outstripping dogs, avoiding night patrol cops, composing excuses on the way as to why one was so late. Thinking also of how, one day, we too would have motorbikes. Maybe even cars.

And the sudden discovery that there was something compellingly, magnetically, irresistibly attractive about those girls. Twilight hours spent sitting on gates and bus stops in hushed discussions of the relative merits of one lissome lass after another as they passed by on the way back from whatever it was girls did in the evenings. Crushes and lust and heartbreak analysed threadbare, but seldom acted on, except by the bold, much-envied few. At least they said they did.

Which led to the summer of learning how to dance. Feet used to pedalling and running and jumping now having to learn how to take small steps, you idiot, and don’t pull so much.

And the beach, yes, the beach. Contract busses hired, lunches packed, and away, two hours of ribald songs and laughter, to the relatively safe sea of Gorai. Hours in the water, skin wrinkled on the fingers and burnt on the nose and shoulders. Eyes looking, and trying not to be seen to look, at girls in swim suits.

But summer ended when college did.

Yes, there was a certain kick to playing adult. To office clothes, and an office bag, and doing lunch andmaking a salary. But that attraction wears off in summer.

Because offices don’t give you a couple of months of summer holidays. You have to pass kids playing in the street. You can’t pitch hopeful stones into mango trees. Sweat is a social handicap. There isn’t time to idle aimlessly at street corners. There’s only corporate games and posing. They want you to work in summer.

Well, yeah, sure, I can afford more than golas now, but somehow, somehow, I can’t help thinking the trade-off wasn’t fair.

Published in the Times of India’s Mumbai edition, Snaphot,in a slightly edited version. Snapshot was a weekly column that aimed to "capture that quintessentially Mumbai state of mind." Sadly, TOI discontinued it.

Tags: The Times of India, Snapshot

Sex

Do we need sex?

If your instinctive answer is a fervent “yes,” you’re probably male. But then, that’s why you’re reading this magazine and not watching Oprah.

But hold your, er, horses, messieurs. ’Tis not the act of fornication that we’re discussing here. This isn’t about you giving up your sex life - such as it is.

We’re talking about what my father’s 1964 edition of the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary refers to as “the sum of the physiological difference in structure and function which distinguish the male from the female in animals and plants; males or females collectively.” Very disappointing find it was for a certain sweaty-palmed 11 year-old poring through the dictionary for the meaning of words his indulgent aunt said he should ask his parents about (and when he broached the topic with his parents, they in their turn shuffled nervously and changed the topic, which is why, remembering earlier parental directives about finding things out for oneself, he was scouring the dictionary.) The dictionary primly goes on to say, “(loosely) the sexual relationship,” which was as clear as mud to me - er, i mean, that 11 year-old.

We are, senõrs, wondering whether it’s necessary for our species to have human beings of the male persuasion. Or the female for that matter.

There was a time, I will grant you, somewhere after our distant ancestors mastered the art of splitting themselves into different cells - but before cellular phones - when having two different sexes made sense.

I mean, what’s the next step after you divide? You divide again. And then again. After a time, monotony sets in. I’m willing to bet if some bored cells on a drunken weekend hadn’t chanced upon this business of getting together with other like-minded buddies and forming (trumpets here) the first multi-cell organism, life on earth would have pretty much had it.

But evolve they did, and evidently had a lot of fun doing so, since here we are, still doing our best to mingle cells at every opportunity. Then some curvaceous protozoa invented the headache - but i digress.

Let’s stay with homo sapiens. When we first got up on our hind legs, dividing up the work made sense. The larger, hairier ones got to go out in the cold and kill things, while the smaller, smarter one stayed home, snug and warm, and had babies and headaches. This way, despite the fact that ones with the dangly bits between their legs frequently made errors of spatial judgement and went after beasts much larger than them and quickly became breathing-challenged, or, as frequently, got lost because they refused to stop and ask directions, the species as a whole continued.

Those differences have persisted, becoming more complex, more stylised - I can show you an in-box full of gleefully vicious email forwards that alternately rip apart men and women. For gosh sakes, we’ve even got different magazines!

The only real need for different sexes now is for, well, sex. And how much time, deo, depilatory products and tight pants do we devote to the pursuit of a few minutes of frantic coupling? Think of the all the more productive uses we could be making of our time and money. Not to mention the arguments, fist fights and wars caused by our aggressive instincts. Hell, the differences between the sexes has lead to reams of terrible love poetry and, even worse, country and western music .

Time, methinks, for us to evolve.

After all, now that we’re the second most evolved form of life on this planet (happy trails, Douglas Adams), no longer needing to ensure survival of the species by pursuing and subduing sundry mammals, birds, fish and reptiles, there is no real need for us to persist with this stubborn notion of different sexes.

Look at the social insects - all female colonies, a few token males around to impregnate the queens.

And there’s a particularly clever kind of fish that is all female. Until they feel the need to procreate, whereupon the larger ones turn into males and do the needful.

Snails have it all - hermaphrodites every one, doing unto one another as they have done to them. Think about it, multiple orgasms and the ability to pee standing up.

But let us get serious now. Science is already coming to the rescue. A while ago. some boffins scraped a few cells from the udder of a sheep, and hey presto, Hello Dolly!

Well, ok, i’ll grant you that having one’s udders scraped isn’t the most pleasant form of procreatory activity, and the fact that it only creates a genetic carbon copy, a clone, and therefore what price diversity and the elimination of weak characteristics and the enriching of the gene pool - after all, how many Jayalalithaas can this planet handle? But there’s more.

Those men in white coats, after questioning Murlitharan’s action, have also mapped the human genome. I’ll leave it to erudite gentlemen like Mukul Sharma to explain the finer points of that, but it won’t be long before they’re doing cut-and-paste with DNA. Along with eliminating cancer and acne, they’ll soon find ways to combine the excellent X and Y chromosomes of, let’s say George and Barbara, eliminate all the weaknesses and come out with something far more interesting and advanced than W.

Is that so far-fetched? I think not. Someone said it better than i can, and i misquote, I’m sure: the science of today is the magic of yesterday, the magic of today is the science of tomorrow.

Imagine the faces of your great-grandparents a century ago if someone had given them a sneak peek into the future and they had seen, as a random example, cybersex.

So, kind sirs, remember where you read this first.

Because, not long after we get the letter “Dubya” right, if we have any sense, we’ll create a super wo/man. A creature that is the best of both sexes. Whose mind isn’t cluttered with thoughts of who it is going to ask out on Friday night. A being that is complete in itself, not needing another one to make it so. That will procreate when it wants to, with whom it wants to (with mutual consent, of course). Deciding at the time whether one, or both, should have the baby. Sharing responsibilities for the offspring in every way.

We’ll all have the same moving parts in exactly the same places, then. And, being controlled by the same hormones and body cycles, we’ll all understand one another much better, instead of relating to, at best, just 50% of the human race.

Perhaps then, we won’t need theories about Mars and Venus. Because we’ll all just be from earth.

This was one side of a debate, "Do We Need Sex?"

Published in It’s a Guy Thing (GT, for short) the Times of India Group’s Men’s magazine.

Tags: GT (It's a Guy Thing)

Cinderfella

Travelling Late

I’m a Mediterranean kinda guy. I have black, curly hair, love olives, red wine and cheese and I know more about Greek and Roman mythology than about Indian epics. And I wake up about four hours after India does. Which can be a bit of a problem when one lives in Mumbai.

A gracious Providence has surrounded me with people who understand: bosses who permit me to start my day a few hours after everyone else; clients who considerately ask only for afternoon or evening meetings; friends for whom my tardiness is the provider of many witty one liners (and they think nothing of calling me at 2 a.m. because I’m the only one guaranteed to be “both awake and alone” at that hour); girlfriends who... come to think of it, there haven’t been that many. Hmm. Wonder why?

My awry biological clock, a pathological dislike of crowds and a strong parsimonious streak, have, while ensuring that I have a laughable social life, made me something of an expert on getting home in the wee hours, on the cheap.

So, last trains, last buses... they have become my lifeline, ferrying me back from the magazine offices and ad agencies that have underpaid me over the years, rocketing up the silent length of this stretched out city to my bed. But I write here of buses. And ’tis not because I love trains less, but that I love buses more.

Trains I use when I travel, not when I commute. There’s romance in the sound and rhythm of a train chugging through the night, long deep whistle blowing, strange stations with different local flavours of sweet tea and terrible coffee.

Trains get me home faster in this city, but when I look out between stations, my eyes pass over the same things they would have seen at more respectable times, only darker. And the stations are lonely enough to break your heart.

In a local bus, however, things change in the night.

As you wait for them, you have company. A bus stop is a fraction of the size of a railway station, so you’re in closer proximity to your travelling companions.

Beside you, mill workers stand silently, tired, second-shift men with blank eyes. Next to them, boy-men in black trousers and white shirts smoke cigarettes, laughing as they dissect the evening’s happenings at the five-star hotel they work in. Perched on the railings a pair of college kids self-consciously hold hands, whispering to each other, and you can bet they’re not talking about the late show they just didn’t watch. Off to the side, two waitresses from a ladies’ bar (they always travel in pairs), chatter like exotic tropical birds, ignoring with practised ease the male eyes that strip them of their gaudy plumage. Drooping against the slim metal pillars of the bus stop, a young couple, a sleeping toddler in his arms, hers weighed down with a large bag, balance the temptation of the taxi that waits invitingly a few feet away against the straightjacket of the monthly budget.

And a bus arrives, its engine sound unrecognisable from its peak-hour grumbling and muttering of stifled oaths at squawking gaggles of white Maruti 800s. Now it roars impatiently, complaining about the length of time you’re taking to get in.

The bus is in motion now, and the engine shrieks and bellows, like a class of adolescent schoolboys, voices breaking, greeting the last bell of the last period of the last day of term. It races joyously through the night, double rings from the conductor chivvying it past deserted bus stops, hurdling speed-breakers, vaulting potholes, its rattling windows joining the raucous symphony of loose rivets, while a solo horn raises its voice above the din to tell the world to getoutofthewayNOW!

Don’t fall asleep – unless you’re a regular whom the conductor will wake up. It’s your stop now. Move to the front of the bus, and quickly. The bus slows, you’re expected to jump off, not impede its progress by waiting for it to come to a complete halt. And as your feet touch the ground, it speeds away, making rude jokes to itself about your lack of atheleticism.

And you wish you had one measly glass slipper to throw at the baying mongrels that serenade your slow trudge home.

And when it’s really, really late? Heck, just hang around and keep doing whatever it is that’s kept you away from home till now. In just a few hours, the city will wake up again. Way before the sun comes up, there’ll be the first trains, the first buses...

Published in the Times of India's Mumbai edition, Snaphot, 31st May 2001.
Snapshot was a weekly column that aimed to "capture that quintessentially Mumbai state of mind." Sadly, TOI discontinued it.

Tags: The Times of India, Snapshot