The joy of Totapuri

Mangoes come in two varieties: one you peel, cut, dice and then daintily stab the pieces in a glass bowl with a fruit fork and put it in your mouth. The other mango you  squeeze and crush and then slurp the juice. Mango eaters are also of two varieties: The folks who prefer the cut and eat kind and the people who choose to love the mess of eating a gooey, sticky, fibrous mango with all the attendant drip, dribble and drool.
Unfortunately, the art of eating mango is dying as more and more people switch to the comfort of bottled juices, mango milk shakes, fruit salads and jams. Eating a mango with a fork or a toothpick is like eating a lunch in South India without de rigueur pickle. It isn’t the done thing.
A mango is one of the connects with childhood for most Indians that is renewed every year. A time when summer vacation meant mangoes in a diet. A mango with breakfast, then with lunch and then when adults have tea and one on the sly when nobody is looking.
With exotic names like Hapus aka Alphonso, Imampasand, Jehangir (ironically, Mughal Emperor Akbar who planted one lakh mango trees doesn’t have a variety named after him), Banginpally, Benishan, Totapuri aka Collector, Malgova and a dozen other varieties, the wash, peel, cut and eat mangoes have their own appeal with the comfort and dainty eating. 

It is the myriad juicy varieties with non-royal names like cheruku rasalu, chinna rasalu, pedda rasalu, raspuri, chausa, dussehri that one gets the feel of the mango season.
A mango connoisseur would wash then squeeze the mango in a particular way from below to up, one has to be extra careful with the thin skinned dussehri, and it has to be done in such a way that the sap is drained away, Then you have to carefully remove the crown of the mango so that the juice doesn’t spill over and the bitter sap is removed in its entirety. Then juice should be made to flow into the mouth in a particular way to experience the bliss of mango heaven. Then one thing unites the dainty eaters with the mess lovers: The seed. Slurp, slurp, slurp.
Whoever thinks a mango is eaten because it is sweet is wrong. A mango is eaten to revisit childhood and for glimpse of heaven that was once so near.


The pix is of daughter eating Benishan and her father eating a Malgova.

Angry skies over Hyderabad and the colours were just right.

A view of the much photographed Charminar from Machli Kaman.

Home is the sailor: The four fishermen haul up the country boat onto the sand after a busy day at the sea while a crane goes about its task undisturbed in the estuary in Gopalpur.

Lost in thought: Daughter dear sitting on a boat lost in thought.

More of the same, with just the colours adding to the magic.

The joy of punching hole in a puri

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.