Musings after paani-kum chai

At an Indo-Pakistani restaurant in a foreign land, a cup of tea transported me worlds away to my family and to Mumbai and Delhi

Yesterday, I teased myself into savouring a bite of pickle. When it appeared on my table, alongside a jhatak-green chutney and an overly sweet mango chutney, I wondered how long it had been since I last encountered the expected sourness. When the flavours finally sat on my tongue, I felt so oddly comforted. It tasted exactly like generic mixed pickle; the kind that is ubiquitous in dhabas across India, that orange-red combination of sun-dried mango, lime, carrot and karvanda with a smacking of synthetic flavour. It doesn’t remotely resemble home-made variations, but it always manages to do the trick when paired with a paratha or a papad, which is what also lay on my table.

It was on a whim that I decided to finally ‘bite the bullet’ and eat at an ‘Indian’ restaurant in Bozen. I have long-since been extremely judgemental not only of the fare served in places like these, usually named some version of Taj Mahal or Jaipur, or some such, but also of people who frequent such establishments. Yesterday, I swallowed my snobbish pride and simply sat down at a table overlooking one of the streets in the historical centre and allowed myself to be served.

When the waiter, a clean-shaven Pakistani man, came to offer me the menu, we communicated instantly in Hindi. I liked feeling confident that he would understand me, despite my atrocious grammar and my tendency to feminise everything. I decided on a piece of Tandoori chicken, because I hadn’t eaten anything that had been cooked in a tandoor in over a year, and a beef qorma and naan. I had asked quite candidly which of the meats would be the tastiest, chicken, lamb, or beef. His answer didn’t take me by surprise. He said the cook was also Pakistani, so the qorma was a safe bet.

So there I was, seated alone at this table eating ‘Indian’ food cooked by a Pakistani cook. I felt at home, comfortable enough to pick the naan apart with my bare fingers, something I have become apprehensive about doing while in Europe since most white people have an intense repulsion towards eating without cutlery. While it is amusing to watch them either dissect a paratha with their fingers or use a thousand tissues to keep wiping their fingers, I admit I deeply miss being in the company of this gesture.

I am sure I am not the only one who remembers not just the taste of each morsel that I was fed as a child but the complementary seasoning offered to my tongue through its interception of my mother’s fingers. When I was older and had niblings (a gender-neutral term for one’s siblings’ children), I fed them in the same manner by which I had been fed, using my fingers to create unique bite-sized portions by grinding, between my tips, a piece of vegetable and pressing it against rice and curry. One of the loveliest accommodations my partner made for me when he had come to India to spend time with me and meet my family and friends was learning how to eat with his hands. I watched him disguise his initial squirms. I watched him fail in the beginning. I watched him struggle to curl his fingers precisely enough to hold a morsel in without it breaking apart. Then I watched him succeed with elan. It is his preference for this method of eating the regional Indian dishes I cook that makes me feel more comfortable using my fingers.

When I had licked my plate clean (the food was average, it had, predictably, been customised for white tongues and was simply not spicy enough for my desi palette) I ordered chai. The other waiter, a younger man, asked me in Hindi whether I wanted it done ‘our way’. I said, ‘of course’, and I knew to expect not masala chai, but the cardamom-infused, paani-kum variety that I am even more partial to because that is how we have always made it in our home. I didn’t expect the memory that overcame me when I took the first comforting sip.

Perhaps because I had been shopping, and because the summer sales were on, my body had been already primed. But suddenly, out of nowhere, I was in Bandra, at Elco’s, drinking chai right after having wolfed down ragda pattice and sev puri. I had that same tired-from-shopping ache in my feet, but it was astonishing, the range of details my imagination supplied.

I was on Hill Road. I was a child, then a teenager, then a college-going girl shopping with my friend, Ashita, and then this person flitting between Mumbai and Delhi. I remembered, vividly, the particular kind of eating one did with parents and friends on such shopping trips.

Suddenly, I was worlds away from where I was, from the Indo-Pakistani restaurant, from this street in Bozen, from this strange bi-lingual region I now call home. I took a photograph of my half-full-half-empty glass because the whole experience was so South Asian, the kind of cup and saucer that you find in South Indian restaurants, that thin malai that forms atop the chai that you have to dexterously blow away, and the way the inside of the cup gets stained with that orange-golden hue. I realised how privileged I was, as a writer, to have you, my dear, loyal reader, with whom to share this moment of alienation, when one is both out-of-place and firmly rooted in the span of the same hot sip.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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