************************************************************************************************************
************************************************************************************************************
Smelly_by_Rick_Ruiz-Dana.jpg
Talking of baby spring onions as I was yesterday, there is this other onion product that I used to love in my village, Muthukur.
Onion, I am old, is not a tuber like potato although it grows underground. Apparently it is a bulb. Well, what difference does it make to me as an avid consumer of potatoes and onions and their vibrant mixes like in the aloo parantha that I am living on these days. Whenever I am alone in our Nile Valley here, I don't cook at all...I don't mind cooking but it is the cleaning of utensils that bugs me. Instead, I ring up Flat # 3014 here and place an order for 5 aloo paranthas to be delivered at 8 PM...3 for my dinner and 1 for my next day's evening snacks and 1 as a reserve if I get too hungry in the dead of the night. And they oblige me without fail.
The paranthas come in nicely packed tinfoil wrappers and I don't use any plate...who will clean the plate? I even don't mind if they place the paranthas straight into my cupped hands...it would be even better...just wash the hands and wipe them on the towel on the rail...if not the lungi I happen to be wearing. That is how a brahmin is supposed to eat after he takes sanyas (renunciation).
Yes, in Muthukur, farmers used to pull some of their onion plants out of the ground much before the bulbs grow into full-blooded onions. The result is a bouquet of four or five green shoots or stalks of onion leaves held together by a tiny white baby bulb at their bottoms. These stalks used to be so tender and soft that one would be tempted to chew them raw like we do betel leaves. But they are basically cellulose I guess, and only cows and buffaloes can digest them raw. They can instead be cooked into a curry or boiled in a dal or even fried and ground into a chutney. And the resulting dishes are just delicious. But they do need a tooth or two...so I 'pass' them by as if in a game of contract bridge nowadays.
For all of the first 30 years of my life I used to wonder why onions are frowned upon by orthodox brahmins who don't touch any dish that has them in it. In 1974, I started cooking meals for my younger sister who joined me at IIT KGP for a year for her PG Diploma. She was all of ten years younger to me and she didn't know how to make coffee even...she was either at her mom's place or in a ladies' hostel before her KGP sojourn.
We both had to be ready to start to our Department by 7 in the morning. And I had to get up at 4.30 before dawn to get past my ablutions and start cooking a curry, sambar, and rice for our lunch...I alone managed with just a fried brinjal as a side dish with rice, but I couldn't starve her like that.
Often we were held up by our maid who used to arrive leisurely, and there would be tension. So, one day I thought I would do the peeling and cutting of vegetables the night before and store them in the kitchen...there was no fridge in our modest bungalow. And that would save all of half an hour in the morning.
The second day of this venture, I peeled the skin of a couple of onions and cut the chaps into four pieces and placed them in a bowl and covered it with a plate and went to bed at 11 in the night.
And got up at 4.30 next morning and after a while entered the kitchen to make for myself a cup of coffee. That's it! I just couldn't stand the stink that enveloped and surrounded and overwhelmed the stale air there and I had to rush and throw all those onion pieces into the dustbin far outside our courtyard near our back-neighbor's bungalow...it was not yet daybreak...
That was the last time I cut onions for a good six years.
Long time ago at IIT KGP there was this student, A, a topper in his M Sc batch wishing to go to the US for his Ph D. He was a nice chap but apparently more rustic than me in his school days. He told me he hailed from a remote village in Rajasthan. All of us were very impressed with his lifeline from a tiny desert village to IIT KGP on way to his American Dreamland. And we gave him as many recos as he reasonably wanted. But he particularly wished to take a dozen recos from Prof N, in whose subject he topped, sensing that Prof N was most impressed with him.
Prof N agreed and asked A to meet him soon after lunch-break in his office on a Wednesday when no classes were held as a matter of practice.
And as A was standing behind Prof N breathing down his neck to have a peek at the entries 'checked' in the first Reco, Prof N suddenly turned around and shouted at A:
"You smell awful...what did you have for lunch?"
"The usual Hall Mess stuff, sir"
"You are bluffing...can't I guess?"
"Sorry sir, it has been my habit and custom and superstition to chew a raw onion after our horrible Mess lunch"
"Get out! You will bring shame upon your motherland and IIT KGP and me as well...Scram!"
...THE END...
No comments:
Post a Comment