Masala bhaat

Mumbai, 2007

Masala bhaat

Bhaiya, ek aalo kitne ka hai? I ask the vendor sitting in the roadside vegetable market on one of the bylanes of the Eksar road, near Borivali station.

The market has braced itself up for its consumers (most of them coming back from office). While the experienced sellers have their places booked along the road already, the novices were trying to adjust in between with their baskets of bananas, coriander, chikoo, beans etc.

Here I am, banking on my innocent expressions and damsel-in-distress kinda dialogue delivery. And I have already shooed Tenzin away, who was quite skeptical of my technique initially.

He looks up at me; I repeat my request for that ‘Mother India’effect.

And voila, it worked! He has given it to me for free. I repeat that with another potato seller. We now have 2 healthy potatoes. Enough for the dinner.

By this time tenzin, convinced that it works, has joined me for further veggie-shopping. The outcome was one onion, two chilies and three beans. I kept putting all of them in my bag, trying to avoid taking a polythene bag and getting that split second look from the bhajiwala. But even in the pre-recession era, not everything’s for free. For tomatoes and lemons we had to shell out five rupees from our common kitty, coz they are expensive.

Never mind; five rupees for masala bhaat isn’t much. Ever since a colleague at our office had shared the recipe, it had virtually become our staple diet.

Back home, it's time to get started. Heat oil in a cooker, and put some jeera. And I can already hear Tenzin in the back ground. “You always have to put jeera in virtually anything you make, woman!’.

You know that right! , I replied.

Even as we barter those words, the jeera had already spluttered, so we can’t do anything about it except smile.

Tenzin had been our unofficial master chef from the beginning. Every now and then, I tried to learn from her the art of cutting onions the way chefs do, without even lifting the king sized knife.

Cooking together, we have traded whatever culinary skills we had. In the process, I discovered quite a few things. I always used to wash the onions after peeling and cutting them. But not after these girls convinced me that peeling two layers off the onion is equivalent to washing it. And I gulped down the idea of squashing the tomatoes in the pan itself with your hands rather than dicing them and then putting them.

Coming back to the masala bhaat. We had already got a whiff of how it would come out to be from the steam coming out. …….

Few more minutes and we had it on our plates.

No sooner had we taken a mouthful, when Tenzin realized something.

She put down her plate and went into the kitchen. A few noises of bottles being brushed aside and she appeared again.

And I didn’t even have to guess. Living together (literally from the word go) for more than six months, we had acquired each others’ sense and perception towards any situation.

‘and you always have to pepperise any food you take, isn’t it; so what, if it is masala bhaat!! ’

‘You like it too this way, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do!’

‘’