Early morning I am at Agra Chatwallah in Hyderabad. No, not the Gulzar Houz one, but the Banjara Hills one. “Ek puri bhaji,” I ask. The waiter takes four minutes and puts in front of me three puffs of brown puris coated with shimmering oil and suggesting heat. The child in me wants to punch a hole in that and see the steam come out of it. It does. I have to put my finger in my mouth for the effort. It is hot. I take out a small piece of it dip it in the gruelly brown aloo curry and put it in my mouth. Bliss. I taste the flavours of a civilisation. There is boiled aloo, there is ground onions, chillies, a dash of masalas without pepper that is the hallmark of south Indian cuisine.
Eating puri bhaji cannot be imagined anywhere else. The one place that comes closest is the puri bhaji place as you step out of the VT in Bombay. Now I don't know whether the place exists or no. That's beside the point.
Puri is the unsung dish of Indian cuisine. The real one is just a blob of wheat dough rolled flat and round, it sails into a pan of hot oil and it magically it gets three layers, the thin outer layer, the thick middle layer and the third thin layer. There is nothing that can come close to the physical magic of the puri. The bhaji gets its variations, the folks from Andhra region add a dash of besan (chick-pea flour), then there are folks who eat it with khorma, of course there is nothing that comes close to it when you scoop up a blob of kheema and peas.
The Eat, Pray, Love story lady travelled half way across the world to discover food. You don't have to do it. We Indians can discover food magic in our own cities.
