On Old Cities and New

Going back to a city you've lived in is kind of like meeting parts of you that you've left behind. Same is true of meeting people who populated the streets of  your past. I'm going to Cal to meet someone very important after a quite sometime and I feel a mix of anticipation and dread at discovering how the city has changed, how my beloved has changed and how I have changed. I'll leave you with these thoughts from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

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“For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.” 

― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Dahi Baingan

Yes, everything in this blog isn't going to be 'profound'. In fact a significant chunk of it is going to be about food. Its funny but for me knowing a city is about weaving together a web of stories and eating places - you pretty much own the city if you can get to a place, have good food there, and tell an amusing story while you're digesting the meal.

Getting back to the eggplant trajectory: I had the two chief ingredients sitting around in my refrigerator and they had begun to piss me off and they had to go. Except half my family is vaishnav baniyaas and that means I'm genetically hard wired so that I cannot throw stuff away - they had to go in my kadhaai and then to my plate. The only problem was I didn't know how to cook Dahi Baingan and mom was busy so I couldn't ask her. I ended up asking google but I realized that everyone from the bongs, to the odiyas, to the kashmiris basically plonk fried eggplant in a yogurt gravy. So that was the one thing for today: fry and plonk.

I thought the end result would've done my maru grandmother proud. I kid you not, it tasted like a sweltering mid-May afternoon in Rajasthan (I could almost hear my maami exhorting us to eat hot rotis fresh off the stove "garam garam roti khaa lo!!" Come to think of it, I never really did understand her obsession with garam rotis and why I had to eat them.) My mom however said that she had never heard of Dahi Baingan and we make no such thing - she left out the part about me being an abomination. I Love you, mom.