Mundane acts of travel- packing up, waking the kids up at midnight to make in time to the airport for our 4am flight to Delhi, printing out boarding passes, going through security- took on a sheer exuberance. We might have been the first people in the world to ever travel by air, such was the level of our excitement.
I've never been to Delhi by flight before. The two other times in my life I've been that far up North (people like me, who feel most comfortable south of the Vindhyas and who always have to scrunch up their face to recall their primary school Hindi, always capitalize the N in North India. The geographical, linguistic and cultural differences seem so vast that North might just as well be a different country) were when I was a child- first when I was 10 or 11, and the second when I was 22 (one might think, well, not so much of a child, but for all practical purposes, in terms of total and blissful ignorance of anything of import, I was).
Outside Delhi airport are a couple of eating and tea drinking joints. Tea seems to be the favorite drink in the North... which makes me wonder why my mom, who if she could have double-capitalized the N in North would have done so while firmly proclaiming that she was fine in the South, thank you very much, was such an avid tea drinker and reluctant coffee drinker. When I was 10, my dad got transferred from Madras (which is about as South as one can get). Initially he was supposed to go to Delhi and my mom literally cried, "Oh my God, how can we possibly survive so far up North? The cold! The Mustard Oil!!" But in fact, he got transferred to Pune and my mom told me, "Oh good, it's only central India. It's quite close to Bombay and that's practically home" And that is how my parents and I became life-long addicts of poha, bakarwadi, aam burfi and zunka bhakri.
So anyway, we went to an eating joint called "Delhi Str-Eats" and guess what we saw? Idli and dosa!! So much for Delhi street eats!
We all recoiled. Give us authentic Delhi food, we cried. And so we ate parothas with big dollops of fresh butter, deep fried pooris with aloo and a gigantic oil-dripping bhatura with chole.
My uncle had booked us a room at the IIT Delhi guest house, in the center of the campus surrounded by trees. We were greeted by a golden oriole pair, a few jungle babblers, a coppersmith barbet and a red vented bulbul as soon as we got off the cab. Very soon it became clear that while the natural beauty of the guest house was all very well, it was impossible to actually stand outside in that weather for any length of time to enjoy all this ornithological pleasantness. It was 42 degrees Celcius.... at 9 in the morning!
Our days in Delhi were spent hanging out with my uncle, aunt and cousin; visiting some friends and driving around Delhi. In my mind, Delhi was this horror city, covered in smoke and filled with rapists.Turns out, apart from the preponderance of Hindi, Delhi isn't so different from Bangalore. Also turns out, my Hindi isn't so rusty after a few days of linguistic immersion. So, maybe I don't need to capitalize the N after all... it's just the north. It takes the same time to reach it as it does to reach Kolar by car.
2 comments:
The tea drinking habit developed in Goa when Appa got his ulcers and couldn't drink coffee because it gave him acidity. So the whole family, except for my mom, switched to tea. I have a strange feeling none of the kids drank coffee before that, but tea was somehow considered a drink we could all have. At the age of 3 or 4, when Adarsh colony friends sneered at my milk bottle, I promptly declared I would drink tea, too.
Amma continued with coffee and meticulously bought and roasted her seeds each week in a little clay pot and one of us would grind her a daily dose of coffee powder.
Heyyy for some reason, I didn't see this comment at all! Thanks for commenting! Wow- you guys ground the coffee at home? With what? Not a mixie, I don't think... did you have a hand grinder?
Post a Comment