food, nostalgia, and longing

Kay shared a PDF with me, and extracts from it too…

“A writer is forever trying to get his reader to taste. Taste my world, he says, smell it, ingest it. A novelist involves himself with the raw materials of the world just as a cook does with an onion, a carrot, an egg. Both the cook and the writer season and simmer their material for good long stretches, until they have accomplished something worthy (hopefully) of intake. Readers, alas, are finicky. They might taste a morsel, a sentence here, a chapter there. The trick is to convince them to stick around for the entire meal.”

Upon reading it I realized that I have felt a similar kind of satiation. Like the other day I was feeling hungry and I listened to moh moh ke dhaage and felt stated. This happened in Poona on an evening after work, in 2016. I remember tweeting about this to varun grover, the lyricist of the song. This in turn links me to the wafty, butterpaper memory of my room in Pune. And this trail makes me think how i had felt sad on only one occasion in Poona… among several other things that i attribute to the city, maybe my room there also had something to do with it.
The house was on a bustling street which i dont remember ever as being a problem. And my room came with two windows and a balcony. I remember sleeping with the balcony door open on rainy, breezy nights. Maybe that kind of ventilation also reflected in my personality, and the general positivist diaspora and mirth around there.

You know to be able to love a city like that is something else.

Maybe my naivette of a first job, that too the exact profile that i had asked for, the kick of civic reporting as well the joy of doing fulfilling feature stories, these things along with the jovial atmosphere in office, which was boring but not more than any other office in general. And then came the monsoons and I was the weathergirl for the year. Miserbaly so, parsing sense out of the IMD emails and more so the officials groaning at me because understanding Marathi was a task for me.

I'd also suggest the connivance of my friends there in wanting to have as much fun possible as one could, helped. One day was attributed to having cheap chinese from Kopka, and heaves forbid if they shave that place off FC road, i will cry. The gaiety and general lightness of the fruits, of the overrated coffee at Vaishali, of the grungy looking boys always smoking right outside the backgate of my office, girls in ganjees, and the edifice that the structure of the place was, the mist in my eyes when i would read a longform article without a break, and share links to songs of Sia and the likes with friends, those things can still be recreated.

But the moment in time that was held ever so delicately, unknowingly of course by a thread of circumstances falling in place one after the other only added to the spright. That the doctor who treated me at the local hospital knew my full name owing to my fervent bylines, had cured half of my viral infection that morning. Meowing from one part of the city to another, the friend who I had hitched with on rides to the megapolis next door, under the vastness of the star-filled sky, vrooming across the city, in the alleys along the highway, standing on the bridge from where the next city had looked like a next dream, so long Poona… The friend had become a constant without the slightest effort.

Now that i think of it, where the meals came from never really mattered, we never had a cook! The hills i wanted to sit atop but never trek through still remain unchallenged, the food, most of it, remains eaten though. Poona was the city where i made prawn fry for the first and only time in my life and realized how easily things transcend into existing with friends being around. Akin to wishful existence? Or maybe willing something to sheer existence?
Small apartments of actor friends, rooms of cinematographer dosts in FTII, the cinema hall at NFAI, and Durga cafe on Law College road were hang joints de rigeur. One beef pizza and two harmless pints of beer on a drizzly morning at the once bombed bakery were enough to make me foggy and spuriously drunk. The dribble outside had made me and another friend opt to take a rick, and reach home which was three minutes away in several more minutes.

Coming across a friend's sibling on the road, while taking a ride to the hospital with another buddy had seemed surreal. The weakness had my back, so falling off the bike was off the cards. Often feeling strange owing to not knowing the language of the Puneris, I had marveled at times at how i could second guess the meaning of a marathi words out of nowhere. Rains punctuated the city and my sparse living there, blurb-like garbling of the muse-y rain seemed like the mise-en-scène of life as it was lived. Making upma, preparing chai for myself while painting on a few mornings, or while reading Indian Express on other futile mornings had seemed the way to be. On other days the clamourish kids from a nearby government school would pound my senses out of a Jerry Pinto novel or the Toni Morrison I had my nose into, into the balcony where i looked at them from the second floor. They. the children in unifroms of blue and white, looked like a pack of marbles spilled on the ground. Unleashed upon the world, their noise was musical, like the rhythmic flapping of the pigeon's wings in the kitchen's window.

Every room a visage of vast windows in that house. Air conditioners not needing our approval, floors carpeted with plastics that were cleaned with utmost care, no plodding or kneading on the househlep's head.She was a kind maushi, as we would come to call her, making rotis for me on rainy off-days when i would make baigan ka bharata. I still have a photograph of her I made on one such noon, in the hard memory of my Pune muses.

The night rides returned on the night of my departure of the city. Bustling with red velvet cake, and a crate of Kingfisher Buzz, four samurais riding on two two-wheelers, we had zig-zagged our way through the pulsating veins of the city on that night, into the throbbing outskirts, buzzing with drunkards and revelers of the extra hours, bingeing on late-night hours, making merry of the times when no one had a thing to do. Sitting in the bar at the height of a hill, overlooking the highway we had scurried for alcohol, on tables left vacant with empty bottles by truck drivers. Poor quality food that tickled our taste buds I had come back home, dotted with the happiness of being given a farewell, riding high on the giddiness of having written a love poem to a lost lover and of finally having come to terms of making my own strides.