Gole Bazaar 1960s - Devil's Dung

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Don tells us that Waldorf-KGP has been a great survivor and is still around. Nice to know that.

While composing yesterday's abol tabol, I recalled that I first read about Waldorf-Astoria (now with a double=hyphen) in one of PGW's. I Googled for it and came across this latest tidbit for Wodehouse lovers from:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/04/pg-wodehouse-life-in-letters

"...In 1904, Wodehouse fulfilled a long-held dream to travel to America, bunking up in a cut-price cabin. New York was, he wrote, "like being in heaven without having to go to all the bother and expense of dying". He returned in 1909 and landed some lucrative publishing deals. Letters written on paper swiped from the luxurious Waldorf Astoria show him as a newly confident figure..."

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Walking a few steps from Hotel Apsara (now defunct) you get to the T-junction and you are on the Big Loop of the Bombay-Calcutta Highway. The stretch here is heaven for iron-lovers, artists and artisans. The great Railway Workshop, possibly the biggest in the SE Railway (called fondly BNR for its colonial name Bengal-Nagpur Railway), frequently abandons its used up Rail Engines, first steam, then diesel, and then diesel-electric. The innards of a Railway Engine are much like the innards of a whale...so many unexpected trinkets come out when it is cannibalized and they find their way onto the pavement shops of this stretch of Gole Bazaar for peanuts...just bend down and pick up your choice...

Then there is this other great survivor of more than half century of history...the Seven Hills Masala Dukan.

To understand the significance of the wares of this shop buzzing and sneezing forever with a couple of huge Grinding Machines, you have to be born a South Indian Vegetarian, the essence of whose cuisine is: Spice.

The unending List of Items put up in this shop are ground and powdered stuff like: mirchi powder, dhania powder, haldi powder, jeera powder, sarso powder and dozen others. Apart from these pure elemental powders, there are famous chemical mixtures like: sambar powder, rasam powder, curry powder all with and without that prickly thing called garlic which, while it is infinitely tangy, is taboo in certain orthodox brahmin households. However there is one element common to all these mixtures...it is called hing or asafoetida if you want its horribly spelt English name. It is a resin of a tap root native to India. Wiki tells me it has the other names: Devil's Dung, Stinking Gum, Food of the Gods, Giant Fennel among others. I suppose it is the only thing that has both Devil and God in its pseudonyms. Wiki also says: "it has a pungent, unpleasant smell when raw but in cooked dishes it delivers a smooth flavor".

Much like the skunk's nauseating emissions containing smelly mercaptans which are its defense mechanism...but I read that, when diluted almost infinitely, they form the essence of several exotic perfumes. I think there is a lesson for us there...

To cut a long story short...I once carried a 50 gram packet of the famous Seven Hills Sambar Powder to my home in Gudur just to show it off to my folks there. The powder was in a small poly-bag firmly closed by that sealing machine of poly-bags...the one in which there is a blade like that of those French Revolution guillotines that descends on it and seals it by melting.

It so happened that in my suitcase, this packet got into the pocket of one of my shirts and made a quiet journey for 36 hours. When I fished it out and delivered the packet, it was good and whole and the contents duly became favorites.

But, the shirt stank like the very Devil, and my sisters smelt it and pronounced it as the stink of hing that is a tiny ingredient of all sambar powders. I examined the packet and found it good and sealed. And was wondering how the heck the hing scent could have escaped its imprisonment till I recalled my lessons on a weird process called Diffusion. If I recall well, Feynman has a good part of a chapter on it (maybe because he was working on the Bomb and he must have spent a good part of his stay at Los Alomos calculating the differential rates of diffusion of U-235 and U-238 through those infamous semipermeable walls).

Anyway, my sisters washed my shirt and dried it, pressed it and returned it to me. And the pocket stank as good as ever. I rubbed it with all my might using soap, then Vim, then Lux, then Surf, then Genteel, and finally, like Jerome, Harris, George and Montmorency did with that unopenable tin of pineapple juice, I drove down in my sister's moped to the river nearby and flung my shirt into the midstream.

I an afraid several fish gnawing at it died of suffocation...


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