Anu Chenji

I’d just joined my first job and was in training – at Ranchi. Had never travelled much in that part of the North earlier – my one earlier trip up North had been from Hyderabad straight up to Delhi, Kashmir and back down – like a plumbline! East and West of that plumbline was new country – to be marvelled over.

There were just two or three of us new recruits initially – a new initiative the company was trying out from the Institutes and therefore not much excitement. Then another batch of trainees – very senior General Managerial types landed up and life began to look up.

Lunch and dinner table had conversation and much jollity. The only older men I had been around were my family – dad and various uncles – and as we were not a very formal family, much ribbing had always been the order of the day. Not being too familiar with the heirarchy of the company – a very tall structure back then! – I was soon pretty much at home with the very senior trainees – giving as good as I got and playing carrom till late into the night.

The assistant manager who was in charge of our training was horrified – i laughed it off initially till he hinted it was just not “the done thing”! And so, taking his advice seriously, I was very formal at breakfast one morning. Many enquiries happened as to the state of my health – tabeeyyat tho theek hai, beta? Are you quite well, child?!  That was how very formal corporate organisations in India used to work then!

The head of training who was in charge of the centralised training organisation for our very large organisation – took his job very seriously indeed. To the extent that meals would be planned to maximise ‘training impact’!!

Lunch would always be ‘continental’ – bakes and grills and very light desserts – so that people who were used to their afternoon ‘thali meals’ wouldn’t eat too much and snooze through the afternoon sessions – this was particularly true of the older, senior trainees! A couple of times, I caught one these guys trying to chat up the cook – “Arre yaar, just make two rotis for me, na? Kya pharak padega aapko?” What difference will it make? And the cook shaking his head sadly, “Nahin, saab… that S sahib maarega humko!” Will flay me alive! Both parties would then shake their heads over the unreasonableness of S sahib who would not understand the necessity of a “proper” lunch and a little nap afterwards!

I, being much younger, was quite happy with the ‘continental’ food at lunch but the chef’s real brilliance shone out with his Bihari fare!

Some of it is incredibly simple and incredibly tasty, like this quite extraordinary…

BHUNE TAMATAR KI CHUTNEY (ROASTED TOMATO CHUTNEY)

• Ripe tomatoes – 4
• Garlic flakes – 6-7 – mince
• Green chilies – 5-6 or more – mince
• Coriander chopped – 1 cup
• Salt
• Mustard oil – 2-3 tbsp

Roast the tomatoes on an open flame or a grill. I skewer a line of them and roast them on a gas flame, turning over frequently till the skins turn black – 4-5 minutes. Investing in a skewer or shanghai-ing a steel knitting needle is a great idea for the kitchen!

Gently push them off the skewer into a steel dabba with a lid. Lots of recipes call for covering it with cling film and so on – but I am rather plastic-averse! So just push them into the dabba and lid immediately – for about 5-6 minutes. When you open the dabba, the skin slips off easily because the steam would have cooked the tomato skins. If you’re feeling lazy, just leave the skins on – it’ll taste just as good!

Mash the tomatoes with a potato masher or just chop very fine. Mix in everything else and voila- you have a smoky, yummy tomato relish with the sharp bite of mustard! An absolutely authentic Indian salsa!

Serve it as a side with khichdi or thick Bihari moti roti.

The year is 1985 and we are on the verge of leaving college. Having had a blast throughout the three years we were there, we decide to go out with a bang – a slap-up party. Yet another party? After having partied our way through three years? But how else??!

And so we plan – a “not too big” party because we don’t have a place big enough! Word spreads and people invite themselves or appear to think that they’re invited anyway – we are too polite, too bred in the Hyderabadi tehzeeb and also too young to figure out how to contain numbers! And so finally, as the day of the party dawns, we are not quite sure what the numbers are likely to be – anywhere between twenty five to fifty seems likely! The venue is my friend Priya’s house – her cook is the VERY BEST in the business, you see! Expenses we share – anyway in the Hyderabad of the ’80s, expenses were rather peanut-ty! And so we set to with a will the morning of the party, cleaning up, washing up and wiping cutlery and crockery , shifting furniture and generally creating havoc! We are so busy we don’t notice we haven’t had lunch and suddenly it’s time to get ready for the party. All D2K (dressed to kill!), we powder and puff and preen and prink gloriously in the mirror!

A friend – Gautam Sinha – has very generously offered to mix a really mean punch for us for the party and tells us what to get – some rum, some fruit juice, lots of lemons and loads of ice. We are efficient!

Gautam rushes in, hurriedly mixes the punch, adds ice and leaves it to stew in a big steel cask – we need a really enormous cask and a chai urn usually used for serving tea to the jawans is the closest we can manage…

Being hostesses, we are ready early to receive the earliest guests. Pangs of hunger strike – remember we’ve been too busy to have lunch! The urn beckons. Let’s try this stuff to check if it’s good. Shreesha and I down a quick glass – yum! Teenage hunger is not so easily assuaged. One more? Sure, why not? And another? But, of course! Priya has stuff to see to so she samples just one glass.

Gautam rushes in – just before people start to arrive – hey, awfully, awfully sorry but I seem to have mixed up the proportions of the ingredients. It’s supposed to be three parts of juice to one part of rum – and I’ve mixed it the other way round! And so, in the space of about fifteen minutes, we seem to have imbibed the equivalent of nine shots!

For two extremely tiddly teenagers who are as teenagers are wont to be, normally giggly and right now, uncontrollably so, this sounds completely delightful! Giggles multiply. Reach a crescendo. Priya comes rushing in, takes one look and hustles us off to the frig where she stuffs bread and butter down our reluctant and giggly throats!

The giggles turn into an uncontrollable desire to dance and dance we do – for the next eight hours without sitting down, solemnly making a pact not to sit down at all!

And the numbers finally roll in at over 75 people – the party of the year!

Gautam Sinha makes the meanest rum punch ever! Having tried for years to reproduce it and finally coming to the decision that it was teenage and an empty stomach that made it so delectably spirit-ed, I’ve finally come to my own…

RUM PUNCH

• 1.5 cups dark or golden rum
• 3 cups orange or mango juice – chilled
• 3 cups pineapple juice – chilled
• Juice of 3 large lemons
• 3 cups soda
• 1 cup ice cubes
• Sugar syrup – 1/2 cup
• 2 tbsp grenadine – see note below on how to make it at home in minutes
• Mint leaves – crushed
• Lemon slices

TO MAKE GRENADINE

• 2 cups pomegranate juice – fresh or canned – unsweetened
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 1/2 lemon

Boil the juice and sugar together for about 5 minutes till slightly thickened. Cool, squeeze in lemon juice and bottle in a dry bottle. Freeze. Voila – grenadine with NO preservatives!

FOR THE PUNCH

Mix in everything. Chill. Serve over crushed ice with mint leaves and lemon slices.

Dance. Sing. Do whatever. BUT PLEASE EAT BEFORE YOU DRINK this very potent brew!

I cannot tell you what we ate that day – having no memory of the dinner menu whatsoever, but the punch is gloriously etched in my memory!

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!