Poison
Prithvi Pudhiarkar
Illustrated by Shazia Salam
“Badi badi baatein/ Vada pav khaate jaake “
— Kaam Bhaari, from ‘Kaam Bhaari’
On an invented stretch of land between the footpath and the road outside my society is a carnival of food so good it is worth committing to paper. For me, it was out the main gates and to the left. For others, it might have been to the right, or straight ahead or roundabout according to where you found yourself in the carousels of Thakur Village, in Kandivali East.
It does not have a name which can be captured on GPS unlike other such popular stretches in the world. And it has not yet been adopted by the star system (Michelin/ Zomato) or made into a museum, like Muhammad Ali Road or Chinatown, where tourists and locals alike go to encounter the other. For all intents and purposes it only exists in the mental map of those of us who lived here, escaping the pimp gaze of a click. It was always there, and people always showed up in hordes after evening to cheat the day’s dreadfulness with the fullness of this food. Let me tell you about it, so you don’t get lost.
There were three major conglomerates amongst this stretch whose power remained more or less radiant through the years — the chaatwaala, the dosawaala, and the sandwichwaala. Each of the three had the seamless, frenetic rhythm so typical of street food in the city — hands and fire, butter and oil, and schezwan sauce all over the place. Everyone did everything: the owners were often also the chefs, cashiers and dishwashers, sometimes simultaneously. To an outsider this scene might seem impenetrable, dangerous even. But once hooked, no one ever had to wait too long or walked away unsatisfied.
The gulf in price between any item here versus anything at a restaurant was so vast that it was impossible to even think of them as analogous activities. The street occupied a middle ground between the routine of home food and the occasional luxury of a restaurant. You could eat a secret Mysore masala dosa or a bhelpuri and still have enough room to satisfy any domestic eating rituals once back home. In the bookkeeping of guilt, it was a minor compromise. But (of course!) there was a sense of illicitness, a dirtiness that the middle class cast onto anything from the street. The word hygiene was often thrown around like an unimpeachable accusation. Where have the ingredients come from? You’ll fall sick! Where have his hands been? Do you know how hard we work to put food on the table?
These weren’t allegations you could argue with on the grounds of logic. It was a kind of poison they sold, a border bending blend of impossible ingredients, including the soil of the very road these stalls lived on. It didn’t look good from the outside — and eating there became harder and harder to defend as the science textbooks in school grew thicker and more precise. You wouldn’t want to be seen there by anyone whose respect you wished to retain, so nobody lingered. Thus, for us to remain loyal customers for the best part of this millennium, the food had to keep meeting an impossibly high standard. And it did, day after day, as our palates grew richer and deeper, along with our bodies and tastes.
This was a society continuously mutilating itself with ideas of cleanliness and purity. Still, there was to come a generation who were sorting through inherited ideas with a whiff of suspicion. I mean, what was an idea when held before the pleasures of the street? I don’t know a single person who’s gotten sick from eating here! I don’t care where his hands have been. Who are you to say, anyway?
So, despite the brahmanical middle-class body-politic’s best efforts to malign these operations (a sore sight, a nuisance) — business grew and flourished like weeds alongside their manicured gardens. It was amazing for anything at all to be blooming on the concrete. There was no room for failure on the roads in this part of the world, where license and registration cost more than cars.
AND you always had to know somebody. These somebodies weren’t just anybody, but often caste relations botoxed by new money into new names, like ‘connections’ and ‘networks’. To know somebody was to have a safety net and open doors. This is why, when small-town heroes on the big screen arrive into the city, they sigh to the skies: “I don’t know anybody here!” before finding a way to eat, usually on a street not too dissimilar to mine.
These people were migrants like us: the sandwichwaala and the chaatwaala from Bihar and the dosawaala from Chennai down south, here to ply their trades. They wished to dip into the fabled waters of the city which had begun to rise to astronomical heights by the time they came, with their surfboards of tarpaulin, riding the wave of the first two decades of the new millennium for as long as it let them.
They had risen to the occasion, timed their arrival with the explosion of population and disposable income in the city. But the land they had occupied daily, for the better part of twenty years, was occupied illegally, in the eyes of the State. They were perpetual squatters, and would have no say in the matter of when the street opposite, bearing McDonalds, Subway, Pizza Hut and Starbucks, like a four-headed reptile, a junk food replica of Mount Rushmore, eventually bared its teeth and gobbled up their business, with its legitimate claims to land and hygiene.
Because the rent of a storefront was beyond their means (and connections), these eateries run by the hafta system — part of a predatory deal between the owners, the local police, and the behemoth that is the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Hafta, literally meaning week, was the bribe paid to the police in order to preserve their spot on the street. This system, which governs an innumerable amount of informal operations in the city, with its quartering of time ensures that even if you had been in a place everyday, feeding its people for years and years, you would remain in a continual state of precarity, your fate left to the whims and graces of the men in uniforms and badges who came and went like seasons.
Sometimes, you might be in the middle of engulfing a pani-puri whole or smoking a cigarette when, suddenly, in a flurry of activity, the stalls around you, including the one whose services you were currently engaging, shut down into tin and tarpaulin, as the giant (disgusting) trucks of the BMC make their way through the streets a minute after the disappearance — the showstoppers of this elaborate social drama. A show put on as a random reminder to these stalls that Mumbai wasn’t theirs yet, on paper. For a solid minute, the stretch is robbed of colour and life, and a ghostly nothingness unsettles the air. With the disappearance of everything illegal, including hawkers of fruits and flowers and second-hand books, and juices and junk jewellery, the desolation of the city chokes the lungs like exhaust from a truck.
It never took long for the operations to restart. These were seasoned actors in the city of dreams and an important aspect to success here was to be lightweight — everything necessary (ingredients, utensils, gas) must all fold down and fit into a table not bigger than a man, at the end of each day, as well as during these random inspections. So in case it didn’t work out or you had to run, you didn’t have much to lose. You could always start again, on a different spot in a different street; anonymity was part of the appeal.
What this life in business lacked in security it made up for in dynamism. Students, teenagers, workers, office goers, business owners, across ages and economic levels, everyone ate here. Profits were enough to cover the haftas, and nobody who came to eat bothered about your caste, or asked about your past.. What mattered was the very immediate satisfaction that lay before them, real fast food, made before their eyes, by earnest men and women and (sometimes) their kids, that was so tasty it could kill somebody.
*
The people they fed belonged to such varied demographics that to design a reasonable menu for their tastes would be a focus group’s worst nightmare. Forgoing any impossible strategy of appeasement, the cooks instead went for the eccentric. Prices were kept low enough to be almost negligible, otherwise customers would just eat at home. The middle class was only just getting used to casual expenditure. Their spines had been formed in a crouch, with a taut belly and a tighter fist, their fingers not yet cosy with the motion of notes leaving hand.
The first (prescient) decision was for all preparations to be vegetarian. This had to be the case because there was no cold storage or running electricity — but also helped avoid the ire of anyone with any special ideological appetites towards meat (there were many). These complex culinary and economic equations had to be worked out fast and on the fly, by men and women who were really boys and girls with maybe a spare grasp of Hindi, without anybody to teach them the formulas of running a business.
These conditions were less than ideal for learning. Yet, it took an astonishingly small amount of time for a system to emerge for each stall within itself, and amongst themselves. This involved everything from the samurai precision of the knife and sauce work, to the monkish mental resilience it took to make meaning amongst the sweating, relentless cacophony of customers and the evening traffic — that blew the narrow road up, like clockwork — upon whom they must depend to make a living. Everyone soon knew their roles in the assembly line, and the customers joined, working around the so-so ambience to appreciate the rowdy magnificence of the food.
This formidable machine, like a junkyard transformer, ran for years and years like a little secret, where in this little pocket of the country the owners of the means made more money than they could have imagined back home, and the customers too left un-bullied, getting for once what was promised. Around them, Thakur Village, tucked away till now, exploded into a truly 21st century suburb — and the people in the societies around got around to their degrees in new fields like computer engineering and hotel management and cashed all the credit for the intelligence of the city.
Each eatery had a single, distinct base ingredient (dosa/ bread/ puri) and other staples common to the whole stretch (butter/ cheese/ schezwan sauce) which were then, by way of sheer creativity wrought into truly a thousand possibilities, a thousand ill-begotten hybrids, each customised at the end, just that little bit for your expectant tongue. That final bit of tweaking gave the customer a gesture of power they might not come by otherwise at their home or place of work. Complimentary — the highest compliment for a buyer — “I like you, so I will not charge you for this. Come back tomorrow.”
The important thing to note is that these experiments, wicked as they may sound, were all successful in the mouth. Nothing was out of place or there just for the sake of it. Neither the owner nor the customer could afford to give the other an inch. If onions cost too much one day because there was a new prime minister, they had to go. If raw mangoes were in season, they were sprinkled in. What they sold only slightly resembled the original.
The sandwich, ostensibly English, becomes Bombay when stuffed with potatoes, Chinese when filled with chillies, capsicum, spring onions and schezwan sauce, and God knows what most other times. The dosa from Karnataka encounters similar detours upon its rice canvas so that you may find every other state’s cuisine performing an unforeseen dance wrapped in soft butter on the steel platform. Cheese, paneer and schezwan sauce were the popular additions. These were hurriedly made and hurriedly served to customers perched by the road on a scooty or stood against the platform that doubled as a dining table, on a sliver of banana leaves with two kinds of chutney, carrying the faintest memory of coconut.
The owner and workers spoke amongst themselves in frantic Tamil but soon knew enough Hindi to get business going. The plain dosa cost eight rupees for a long time, and along with the masala dosa (twenty rupees) helped initiate a large clientele of north and west Indians into the cult of dosa and the civilisation that led up to it. It wasn’t uncommon in school to see tiffins from Gujarati or Marwari homes revealing mini-idlis — with ketchup. Later some of them might have visited Chennai, or Europe, and realised that some of those inventions might otherwise be classified as a small war crime. Like a tasteless remix that makes you angry every time you hear it.
But not many eating here could afford to make such mind altering trips. This would have to do.
*
When you were little, going outside the main gates was a sacred activity, close to taboo. The world beyond was teeming with tabloid worthy dangers unless you were accompanied by an adult.
Being allowed to go out alone was a rite of passage with a timeline unique to each household. Some had to mature early to help out with chores — an extra pair of hands, however small, meant a lot in the race to make ends meet. Others waited for this fated age to arrive, where something unknowable would happen, indicating to the world outside that you were ready to meet it. Others still went out regardless. In Vasant Sagar, we weren’t big rule-breakers. Sometimes we’d flick a coin from under a couch and scatter out for an ice candy after cricket or something but nothing more than that. Mostly, we waited for instructions to arrive from the top.
I had a friend of the same age whose hands were needed earlier than mine. His parents ran a garment store nearby so he had to help raise his sister, who was even younger. He was familiar with the sights and smells of the world outside, and soon became a small connoisseur of forbidden pleasures. It’s what teachers would describe, in a parent teacher meeting — where only one of the parents could make it, tapping her legs nervously, because there is so much more to be done and how much can mid-semester grades really matter for a bloody twelve year old — as a mischievous child.
One late evening, with a mischievous smile, this friend of mine, like the snake in Eden, told me about the frankie outside. As the shadows gathered, I listened as he listed ingredient after ingredient, too many to be true, too fraught to possibly be in harmony, that made up a frankie. His pitch was evocative and detailed, and its sauce was abundance in relation to price — you get ALL of that for JUST this much.
Many of the things he described were luxuries you would normally have to pay extra for in the proper frankie shop, outside the main gate to the right. Even then, you could often only afford to splurge on one extra condiment (they were nice, but nothing was complimentary, each culinary decision was to be made by the books). They were the ones who loudly lay claim to the invention of the frankie, including the rights to the name, and the storefront inside whose safe, hygienic and family-friendly premises it was prepared.
Here, to the left, on the other side of the gate, it was all part of the deal — schezwan sauce, two versions of fried potato, schezwan noodles, onions, spring onions, — stir-fried on high heat and ladled along with grated cheese (and more schezwan sauce) inside a crispy circle of flour, wrapped to the contours of a fist. I had often glimpsed at that witch-like operation, running under a tree — in between the dosawalla and the juicewaala — always steaming with angry fumes from the stove, but never indulged. I don’t know where this frankiewaala was from but it didn’t matter — it was a hatchet job, made up: the idea and the name stolen from the branded store, then turned into its own Sino-Indian monster.
As such, it was the least credible of operations even amongst this stretch of food fated to be incredible. The one dish least resembling something you could serve to someone you loved. I had no reason to believe I might have the stomach for it. But now, in my mischievous friend’s evocative mouth, it had become irresistible. Even now, the idea of her firstborn son, whose body she raised carefully with crossed fingers, eating what was made THERE brings my mother serious distress. There used to be days when nothing was cooked at home, and we, as a family, made a little adventure out of going out to eat chaat, a sandwich or a dosa and we might have even experimented— but never that much. The frankie resembled nothing known to us, and at a time when our parents were trying to turn us into tiny white people, this filthy thing that would most definitely kill a white person immediately upon consumption was a reminder to them of a past where people still died of diarrhoea, fevers, and poisoning.
It is undeniably my favourite thing to eat in the whole world. I have eaten it so much and with such delight that it must line my insides like blood or bile. If I die of cholesterol, I won’t mind because I’ve been immunised to the taste of the night on the street outside my house.
***
About the Author
Prithvi Pudhiarkar lives and writes in Kandivali, Mumbai. His writing has previously appeared in Himal, Berfrois, Nether, The Helter Skelter Anthology of New Indian Writing and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.