Author: anuchenji

And then there was the summer (why does it always seem summer and the holidays when you think of childhood? Existential question… ) when my mom learnt driving. I’ve talked about my mother’s penchant for ‘projects’,’new’ things, enthusiasms that came on suddenly – that made life with her so exciting…

And so, one year when she had crossed fifty years of age and I was about to join college, she decides that she cannot go through life not knowing how to drive. Not possessing a car does not deter her – my dad having met with a bad accident some years previously, cannot drive. So my mother sets off and buys herself a second hand – a very second-hand Standard Herald. Now, as anyone who grew up in that generation knows, a Herald is the boxiest of boxy little cars with a couple of wings sprouting up in the front, tipped with enormous headlights (see pic) – looking rather like a retriever with its ears standing up straight! And promptly enlisted the help of one of her office drivers to teach her. This lesson used to take place every morning and evening on the way to and from work – from Jubilee Hills to King Kothi Hospital – a distance of some ten or eleven kilometers along some of the busiest of Hyderabad’s roads.

Picture this – a novice driver, no second set of brakes (this is NOT a driving school car!), said novice driver over fifty years of age and never having been on any kind of wheels on any kind of road in her entire life – well… it made for some ‘interesting’ situations, to say the least! Not forgetting the fact that the car was at least ten years old and not in the best of condition! Well, the essentials were there – the brakes worked – just about… the horn was a temperamental creature and many times when we were rounding a blind curve, we had to resort to beating a tattoo on the side of the car with our hands so that the guy around the blind curve could figure that there was some strange beast around this corner!

One memorable summer, there were seven of us in the car – four well-endowed aunts (manchi personalities) and thankfully, three of us skinny nieces! The car started up one of those steep patches on the main hills road, groaning its way to the top… almost but not quite making it and then slowly slid right back down! With my mother heroically trying to manouver it, the car slid back in an S-shaped curve towards the end – a steep, ten foot drop on the right of the road… some of us struck silent with horror, one voluble aunt squeaking away and manouvering my mother’s shoulder as though it was the steering wheel! But did the lady turn a hair? Not a solitary one! The car slid to a halt inches from the chasm! Holding our breath, we got out from the other side carefully. My mom, having kept the engine going through this hair-raising ordeal (there was no guarantee that the engine would start again if allowed to die!), puts it back in gear and crests the hill triumphantly!  We climb the hill under our own steam and clamber back in, reaching home in one piece – where my mom coolly proceeds to tick everyone else off for losing their heads!

On yet another occasion, as my mom is driving, flames suddenly shoot out of the steering wheel! She quietly switches off the engine, pulls the car into gear and collecting her belongings, climbs out. Normal? So far! But then, she waits for the flames to die down, gets back in the car and drives back home! Not quite as normal!

Some few months later, she tried teaching me how to drive – I crest the selfsame hill from the other side – and drive straight into a flock of sheep – braking just in time and narrowly missing making a mutton biryani on the road! Lessons with mother stop. I join a driving school!

And thankfully, never having killed anything on the road, manage to stick to my Buddhist principles and ghaas -phoos diet… like this one… the classic…

CAULIFLOWER CHEESE

• 1 cauliflower – washed well, cut into florets
• Milk – 1/2 litre
• Salt
• Pepper
• Cheddar – grated – 1 cup
• Plain flour – maida – 4 tbsp
• Butter – 1 tbsp
• Breadcrumbs – 3 tbsp – optional

Boil florets in about 1 cup of water till just done but still crunchy. Strain out, reserving water.

Add the milk, salt, pepper, butter and maida to the reserved water and cook, stirring continuously till the mixture thickens. (If you make a roux first, with frying the maida in the butter, you will need a lot of butter – this way, we reduce the fat)

Add the cheese (reserveing 2 tbsp) and mix well. Switch off.

Layer the cauliflowers in a baking dish and pour the white sauce over. Top with the remaining grated cheddar and breadcrumbs.

Bake at 200C for 25 – 30 minutes till golden brown and bubbling on the top.

Quintessential comfort dish – after near misses on the road!

That is a summer I will always remember as the summer of MacKenna’s Gold – a movie that I saw seven times during the two months of the summer holidays! Sometime in the early ’70s, it was…

The last time I saw it, it was at the Liberty Theatre in the Basheer Bagh area (wonder whether it still exists?). There were three of us cousins – Arun, Naresh and me. Some kind uncle or aunt had tipped us – 3 bucks! Aunt’s house was in Gagan Mahal close to the theatre so we saved on bus fare by using bus no.11 (one of those corny references to using your own two legs to get around!) to get to the theatre. With three bucks, we had not much choice of seats – and ‘picked’ the 90 paisa seats – the second row from the front where you had to crane your neck up at an almost impossible angle to squint at the screen!

To the left and right of us was the rest of 90-pip audience – rickshaw pullers with a taste for Westerns, cheering and hooting every time Omar Sharif smouldered across the screen! Since girls those days did not frequent these seats as a rule, I was the only girl – barely ten or eleven years old, with my two even younger kid cousins sitting each side of me for “protection”! After all, we had come to see a Western and our minds and hearts were pumping to the beat of the pioneering spirit of the Wild West – pumped with a liberal dose of J.T.Edson and Louis L’Amour – I felt like Calamity Jane herself, shaking off the social convention of not sitting in the cheapo seats!!

And sigh… Omar Sherif was worth every paisa of our entire fortune – of three bucks! Oh wait, popcorn was exorbitantly expensive at some twenty five or thirty paisa each packet so we settled for the chikki – three pieces at ten paisa each!

Movie-going was serious business those days and the number and quality of theatres that dotted the twin cities was out of all proportion to the population of the place – the Hyderabadi was enthralled by the big screen! Heaven consisted of three words – movie, popcorn and dinner – to be able to afford all three together was to enter jannat (heaven)! And if you could have the sandwiches at Sangeet, then it was a veritable seventh heaven!

The walk back from the theatre alternated between reverential silence as we contemplated the heroics we’d just seen and excited chatter about the rival merits of Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif – an agony to make up one’s mind on this! Either way, our hearts were full… till we passed the bandi noodlewallah – the itinerant roadside vendor of the most delectable thing that ever happened to Chinese food – India! The smell of his tawa fried rice and noodles wafted across nostrils sustained by nothing more than a piece of chikki each and with a dinner of dal and rice to look forward to… and suddenly, Omar Sharif began to lose his charms! We inhaled and inhaled stomachfuls of the air around the cart – which was all we could afford to do anyway!

Even today, the smell of roadside Chinese stalls brings back visuals of the collapsing canyon of gold – from MacKenna’s Gold!

ROADSIDE CHINESE TAWA FRIED NOODLES

• 2 -3 cups Chinese noodles – cooked and mixed with a tbsp of oil to keep the strands separate (The instant variety won’t work for this)
• Cabbage – 1 cup – shredded – essential!
• Mixed other veg – julienned carrots, beans, cauliflower, broccoli, mushrooms – 1 cup
• Capsicum – 3 tbsp – julienned
• Spring onions – 2-3 chopped
• Green chili – 1 minced
• Ginger – julienned – 1/2 ” piece
• Garlic – 2 -3 flakes
• 2-3 eggs – optional
• Pepper – 1/4 tsp
• Salt
• Soya sauce – 1 tsp
• Vinegar – 1 tsp
• Green chili sauce – 1 tsp
• Sesame oil – 1- 2 tbsp
• Ajinomoto – 1 large pinch – controversial but the jury is still out on this one!

Heat a very LARGE wok or tawa and pour in the oil. Add the ginger, garlic and green chili and fry for a minute. Add the rest of the vegetables and fry, stirring continuously till your arms begin to feel they want to drop off 😉 – just kidding – 4-5 minutes till they are just done but still crisp.

Add the salt, pepper, cooked noodles, ajinomoto and stir well. Scramble eggs separately and add to this just before they are set. Mix well. Switch off. The eggs will finish cooking in the heat of the noodles.

You can do the same thing using cooked rice instead of noodles.

Best is to eat it watching a grainy old copy of MacKenna’s Gold!

 

And once upon a time, very long ago… about forty five years ago or so, we – the three of us children – were being sent on a trip to Vizag for the summer. There was no one to take us there and drop us and the parents were very busy so, as was so easily and generously done those days (sigh… ), our neighbours – Auntie, mentioned earlier in these chronicles, offered to take us all the way to Kakinada where they were spending the summer and someone would take us on to Vizag from there. Or maybe someone else would come from Vizag and pick us up. Maybe.  This sort of delightful vagueness was characteristic of most people those days – after all, journeys were uncertain things and what was the point in worrying too much. Something was bound to happen. Someone was bound to turn up. And if no one did, well, the kids would have had a holiday at Kakinada anyway!!

I must put a caveat here – this delightful vagueness is NOT at all a characteristic of people south of Andhra! In fact, my vagueness about plans and life in general was a source of great worry and complete and utter confoundedness in the family into which I married – how can anyone go through life without knowing exactly where they are going to be every minute of the next twenty years?!!! And of my own perplexity – how on earth does it matter that I don’t KNOW what i will be doing this weekend!  Ah, but that is another story!

And so, back to my Kakinada katha. We set off, very happily, with “auntie” from downstairs, loaded with goodies for the journey – one needs fortifications for a journey of some four hundred kilometers,even if it is by train! The first delight at Kakinada – we were met at the station by a jutka bandi – a horse-drawn carriage, rather than a boring car! Immediate and secret plans were hatched about what we could do on horseback later – sadly someone read our faces all too well – and strict injunctions against climbing on to, hanging on to underneath or cutting the pony’s mane – were issued! Ah well, we’d find something else…

The house we were taken to was an old village style mansion built around a large courtyard – the life of the entire extended family was lived in that courtyard…

It was summer and as everyone knows, summer is pickle making season, or used to be, for every self-respecting Telugu household! Pickles of many varieties were being made. One of these was the sun dried mango pickle called maagai. Sour and salty, it was a guaranteed staircase to gustatory paradise. Tried one, then another, then another… finally decided it was a waste to get up from my perch on a tree where i was reading to fetch one piece at a time and munching away and took up a permanent seat right next to the drying pickles. Through that warm afternoon, when the world was asleep, I must have munched my way through a couple of dozen pieces of the semi-dried pickle – LARGE pieces.

The rest of my two or three days was spent primarily in a tiny room which served as the ‘outhouse’ recovering from the after effects of the marathon pickle eating session. I was game to try it again but the matriarch of the house put her foot down very firmly!

Decades later, “Auntie” on a visit to Madras, brought me this simply-to-die-for vegetable pickle… most unusual pickle –  both the vegetables and the masalas…

KAKINADA VEGETABLE PICKLE

VEGETABLES

• Cauliflower – 1 large – cut into florets. The rule for buying these is “white and tight”! The flower should not be discoloured and the florets should be packed tightly. Wash the florets by soaking in salted water for ten minutes, rinsing out well and drying
• Dondakayi/kundru/kovaikai/tindli – 100 gm – washed, topped, tailed and quartered lengthwise
• Carrot – 1 large – sliced
• Bajji mirapakaayalu/thick green bajji mirchis – 50 gm – washed, dried, stalks removed and slit

Dry all these in the shade for two to three hours

OTHER INGREDIENTS

• Juice of 6 lemons
• Tamarind pulp – 1/3 to 1/2 cup – depending on the amount of red chili powder
• Salt – 2 tbsp
• Red chili powder – 1 cup or less – depending on how hot you like it
• Roasted methi – 2 tbsp – powder roughly
• Sesame seeds – roast just a little and powder
• Sesame oil – preferably cold pressed – about 2 cups
• Garlic – 1 full pod – peeled and dried and chopped roughly – optional

Mix the salt and lemon juice and drop the dried vegetable pieces in. Add all the other ingredients except oil and mix well. In a clean, dry bottle, drop in fistfuls of the pickle, adding about a tbsp of oil after each such addition. Top off with the rest of the oil. Shake about a bit and cover. Mix well the next day and the day after – the pickle will be ready in two to three days.

Too much of this has consequences – if there is more than one of you and only one the little ‘outhouse’ thingies, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Dethmond hadh a ballow in the mathethplathe

Molly ith a thindher in a band

Dethmond thayth to Molly waiting at the dool… 

aaanh, aaanh,aaanh aannnnh aaanh… 

…sings my one and a half year old daughter, lisping her way through the lyrics to the Beatles “O bloody, oh blada” – these are the lullabies that her dad sings to her from the time she is born!

I’ve been chasing her the whole morning with a cassette player set on ‘record’ trying to get her to perform – she obliges for a few seconds at a time – reluctantly – till she decides she’s had enough of this new avatar of her mother trying to get her to do things – what has gotten into my amma??!!! – and goes aaanh, aaanh aaanh – thus making recording history!

A serious lisper, Arch could lisp her way through the three languages she spoke by the age of one – perfectly, without mixing up any words – the lisp however meant i was the only only who could understand everything she said!

And so, occasionally, I’d get a call at the office when I was in the thick of a sales negotiation, “The baby wants something and I don’t know what she’s saying!! Could you talk to her please?!!” Stifling a grin, I’d manage to excuse myself occasionally but not all the time and confusion would have reached a crescendo by the time I called back!

Terrified of loud noises as a child, Arch used to try to project her fear of thunder and lightning on to other people “Thatha (her grandad) ith thaled (scared) of thundel and lighthning, Appa ith thaled, Amma ith thaled, Aani (her nanny) ith thaled but… paapa (herself!) ith NOT thaled!!” as she went off into peals of merriment! As good a way of dealing with fear as any other – at the age of one, i guess!

Over the next few days, I recorded tales of the “thidel” (tiger) who came to eat up evelybody but listened to Paapa’s entreaties to pleeez not eat up evelybody, the story of the ‘thothaloath’ (cockroach) found under ‘one man’s house’ mixed up stories of Vinayaka and his elephant head, of the plane which lands do-you-know-how – like this “Pichik, pichik, pichik… pichik” as her voice reaches an impossibly squeaky register and many others!

And so to celebrate my daughter, I am letting out the secret of of one of her favourite foods – anything involving fruit, of course! And here’s a very Indian fruit in a very Western dessert…

NO BAKE SAPOTA/CHIKOO CHEESECAKE

Time to make – 15 minutes

Time to set – 1.5 hours

Time to eat – none at all!

BASE

• Biscuits – 8-10 – doesn’t matter what variety as long they’re not salty!
• Butter – 3 tbsp

Whizz together in the mixer till you get a fine crumb. Press into the base of a springiform mold.

FILLING

• Peeled, chopped chikoos/sapotas–  1 cup
• Condensed milk – 1/2 tin – 3/4 cup
• Whipping cream – 1 packet – 200 ml
• Gelatine or agar agar – 1 1/2 packets – melted with 2 tbsp of hot water – set aside after whipping really well.
• Juice of 1 lemon

Whip everything together with a handheld blender till seriously well mixed and pour into the biscuit base.

Set for an hour and a half or less till firm.

You than have youl theeth-thathe and eat it too!

Two little girls are watching their great aunt change the diaper of her new born grandson.  One is about seven the other three. The baby is, as babies do, kicking out lustily and generally making the grandmom work for it! The little girls  are interested – very interested – their Barbies don’t behave like this so life is definitely looking very fraught with possibilities just then!

K takes her fingers out of her mouth to ask the inevitable question, “What’s that thing?”

Explanations follow – about boys and girls. Then my aunt asks, “You have other little boys as cousins, don’t you? Haven’t you seen this before?”

Pat comes the reply – “Yes, but this is so small!!!”

Phew!!

P.S.: All names in this story have been changed for reasons of not incurring teenager wrath!

K used to be fascinated by little babies when she was rather small – i think most small people are fascinated by people smaller than themselves, in fact by everything that is smaller than themselves! A question of perspective maybe? In a world where almost everything is larger than themselves, and definitely most people are larger than themselves, the sudden introduction of a small but moving, live thing is bound to excite curiosity! And thus is born the let’s-see-if-we-can-change-this-thing’s-diaper, bathe-this-small-thing attitude!

Our neighbour who already had a little girl of about K’s age, had a baby – a little girl. K couldn’t wait to get back from school every evening – the only time I had no problem getting her to put away her things, have tea and change before she rushed across to the opposite house, yelling to them to wait, she was coming and to NOT start the baby’s evening bath before she arrived to “help”! She was quite convinced that the mother relied completely on her – otherwise she (the mom) couldn’t have gotten the baby bathed!

The kind lady humored her! “Mrudula’s baby” (Mrudula being the older sibling of said baby) was favourite topic for about six months till she suddenly realised that Akka (Arch) thought babies were very un-cool – end of baby fad – and sadly, it hasn’t reappeared so far!

So I ask Kanch – since this story is about you – let’s have a recipe… she comes up with something quite inedible involving rice and eggs and cheese! And so, in the interests of saving my readers’ insides, here’s an authentic…

CALCUTTA EGG ROLL

• 1 paratha – the very flaky, full of fat kind made with maida – like a Malabar paratha or the Tamil veesi paratha – the making of which is an art in itself! Just buy it!
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp milk
• Green chili – minced – 1/2 OR
• Red chili powder – 1 pinch
• Salt – 1 pinch

FOR FILLING

• Onions – very finely sliced – 1/2
• Green chili  minced – 1/2
• Cucumber – sliced – 1 tbsp
• Salt – 1 pinch
• Chopped coriander or mint – 1 tsp – optional
• Lemon juice or vinegar – 1/4 tsp
• Sugar – 1 pinch

Mix all these together and set aside.

Beat the egg with everything else except the paratha, of course! Pour on a heated, greased tava. As soon as it begins to set, place the paratha carefully on top.

As the egg cooks, flip the paratha to which the egg is now stuck – over. Let it cook till the egg is set. You now have an egg paratha! Place the filling down the middle, squeeze ketchup over (if you like it, I don’t!) and fold over as shown in the picture!

Am sure even hens are fascinated by their eggs – their little ones!