Table Manners & Mannerisms - 10

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When Laxman, the liveried bearer in our Faculty Hostel in 1967 at IIT KGP, shoved his plate of 4 heavily roasted bread slices, I was reminded of the 'burnt offerings' in the Genesis of the gilt-edged butter-papered Holy Bible that Father got as a gift from his Madras Christian College:

And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

There was no bread in Muthukur during my schooling there in the 1950s. At least I didn't see any. Wheat doesn't grow on the Coromandel Coast and bread-making technology was unknown. Bread is a staple of the Abrahamic religions of West Asia and was perhaps imported late into India...and didn't seep into Muthukur. The Lord's Prayer that Jesus taught in his Sermon on the Mount asks for bread:

 Our Father, who art in heaven,
    hallowed be thy Name,
    thy kingdom come,
    thy will be done,
        on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.

It is daily bread, not daily idlis. And unleavened bread was the food partaken by the fasting Jews during their Passover. 

Today is Easter Monday and I am reminded of the Holy Bible. 

The other day my son drove me to the nearby SBI branch at Madinaguda where the Lady Manager had promised him a small locker. And when we reached there we found the bank closed phut and grilled down. And my son remembered that it was the Good Friday holiday that day.

Strange that the Good Friday season came and went without me noticing it in this rocky Hyderabad. It was never so during my decades in the campus of IIT KGP. I was always looking forward to the Good Friday season because that was when the huge trees lining the streets of the campus were in full bloom...the colorful Krishnachura, Radhachura, Sonalu and others. And bees would be buzzing and boys and girls would be mugging in the Central Library for their end-sem exams. Quite a season that was. I am told that due to the delay caused by the advent of the Primitive and Advanced JEEs the academic year ends in May instead of April...so sorry.

The first I saw bread was when I was 5. My didi had a tonsillectomy operation in the King George Hospital at Vizagh where my uncle was a house surgeon and was living in a rented house in Maharanipet. By the way this tonsil thing was common those days and every other chap had to undergo it as a routine, next only to appendectomy (which too my didi had five years later).

During her convalescence which lasted all of a week she was hospitalized and I had to carry her home-cooked food to her during lunch. And my mom who was attending to her there would place in my bag a huge loaf of bread that every patient got as a free gift from the hospital. I carried it home and inspected it. 

It was full of holes like the sponge that my Air Force uncle gifted us when we were at school in Muthukur. Till then we used to wipe our slates with our moistened hands and that made our hands dirty and the slate white. With the piece of sponge that was doled out to us on a daily basis our technology became advanced. All we had to do was dip it in water and rub the slate with it. Very clean. We loved it...till someone told us that it is an animal product from the water-bodies. And then we refused to touch it...

Much later I saw what was then the new arrival in the Bimala Sweets Shop at IIT KGP. That was called the Sponge Rosogolla...a huge big thing. But it was like gilding the lily. For, rosogollas, sponge or no sponge, were anyway full of holes and squeezing them left only a little bit of solid. I was told that this was the way rosogollas used to be eaten during competitions when folks used to boast that they ate all of 50 rosogollas. But that is plain cheating...let them eat 20 rosogollas without squeezing them of their juice...they would retire hurt with a bloated belly.

Anyway, there was this problem of what to do with those huge loaves of bread that I daily carried home. Neither my grannie who was the kitchen queen then nor my youngest auntie, Papai Pinni, knew. And we were brought up on the Taittiriya Upanishad principle that food should not be wasted, for, food was god.

The bread smelled awful or rather, awesome and alien. And teased bits of it were not lovely like bits of dosa or vada which had to be chewed and relished. The bread pieces didn't bring our teeth into action.  And the edgy crumbs were too tough for our teeth. 

Auntie tried cutting them into big slices and frying them on the frying pan with lots of ghee. And they turned stiff and brittle. And grannie suggested that the kids eat the teased out bread pieces dipping them in milk...she herself would never volunteer for any such exotic stuff. And I was made the guinea pig. And I detested the milky bread. It was more milk than bread sponging as it did all the milk that grannie gave us in a bowl. When I made faces, grannie gave me fresh milk this time with sugar in it. That was worse...I never had a sweet tooth and wanted my food salty and sour and gritty. She then asked me to eat those horrible pieces of bread with sambar instead of milk. That was a case of the bad driving the good away...the sambar tasted foul.

Ultimately I guess those huge loaves of bread went to Appalamma, our maid. And perhaps she gave it to her buffalo and the beast stopped giving milk...   

Ten years later when I was back in Vizagh as a student of the university there, my medico friends in the Andhra Medical College used to boast of their Pavan Bakery just across the road from the King George Hospital. This Pavan Bakery was a sort of College Street Coffee House for medicos at KGH. The students and professors used to visit it for their snacks and talk of thrombosis. And the tiny joint got bumptious. And the sole bearer there put on a lot of dog if you were not a regular medico and tried to gatecrash. One had to go there as a parasite of his medico-friend. 

Pavan Bakery was known for its Bun' n 'Butter. I went there once with my medico friend, SPS, and I liked the bun and butter there...more the butter than the bun. 

And I asked Laxman if he could serve me bun and butter instead of his lousy bread. And he asked:

"What is bun sir?"

I left it at that...

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