Bombay Spice

July has to be the soggiest month of the year here in Mumbai – a month when life as we know it, with all its inherent rushing about and stopping to breathe only on Sunday, suddenly comes to a standstill as endless curtains of rain curtail all normal activity. It is a month of endless waiting in blocked trains and traffic snarls, a month when everything seems damp – damp clothes, damp hair, even the air seems damp (and redolent with the smell of mould thriving in corners deprived of sunlight). A month of days with no maids, no vegetables, no electricity or sometimes all these together!

I still remember my first foray into the kitchen – not just because it was my first time but more so because of its association with my mother. Afternoon tea was a daily ritual in my maternal home. The entire extended family would congregate in my grandmother’s room for chai (tea) daily. The actual making of the chai was usually the duty of the youngest daughter-in-law, but one afternoon, popular consensus decreed that I would make the chai. It was time – as reasoning went – for me to learn these little household chores.

It’s hard to believe that, with all its variety, Indian cuisine does not really have cheese in its repertoire. Of course, there are some Western cheeses being produced in different parts of India these days. I also have it on good authority that there are some really stinky cheeses being produced in the relatively undiscovered cuisine of the Northeastern states of India. But, apart from these, the only cheese we can call our own is paneer, or cottage cheese. So I was stumped with what to write for a cheese theme.

Breakfasts of sweet and juicy grapefruit freshly picked from one’s own garden, hot, doughy rotis topped with freshly churned butter and crumbled jaggery and endless cups of steaming ginger tea…. Meals of steaming-hot real basmati rice doused in homemade ghee, hot tor dal (a soup-like dish made with whole Pidgeon peas, indiginous to Uttarakhandi cuisine) tempered with pharan (a chive like herb indiginous to Uttaranchal) and garlicky stir-fried greens from the kitchen garden...and the sweet, sweet finale: hot halwa!