Party Time At Palvayanteeswaran'sby Ramesh Mahadevan It wasn't often that Sunil and Savita, the local friendly couple, visited Ajay Palvayanteeswaran's apartment and lingered on and on like this. She is a student in an as yet unnamed department and he works for some funny sounding start-up company. Ten minutes into their visit, Ajay already felt a kinship toward them and, after an hour, he felt that they were the best couple he had ever known in his entire short life. He even offered to make them Chai. “You sit down Ajay,” Savita ordered him. “I will make chai for all of us. Sunil will help me. How many spoons of sugar do you take?” Ajay was deeply moved. “In which case, my kitchen is your kitchen. Help yourselves.” Ajay's kitchen is so messy, you need Yahoo Map and a GPS system to navigate through the clutter. This is the kitchen where grapes became raisins, raisins turned into wine, wine became vinegar and vinegar got reincarnated as chicken curry gravy. This is the kitchen where, on cloudy days, you had trouble spotting the refrigerator. But in just five short minutes, Savita took command of the place and started operating as if she grew up there in her previous birth. Inane conversations flourished as Savita ground cardamom to make the chai truly in desi-style. Sunil and Savita had just moved into a spanking new house and Sunil was giving Ajay a dump on it. He regaled Ajay with the step-by-step details on Mortgage application, radon testing and dry wall maintenance. The proud new homeowners even beseeched Ajay to buy a house himself. With today's mortgage rates, Ajay's student stipend is enough to buy an 'entry-level' home, they pointed out. Chai was made and consumed. Energized, Savita got up purposefully and started rummaging through Ajay's kitchen cabinets. “My god, Ajay. You even have a rolling pin, a belan!” Savita exclaimed. “You must be a closet cook.” Ajay was positively embarrassed. He had no idea he was a proud owner of a rolling pin. Since he had so many roommates through history, he always stole, bartered or otherwise inherited lots of his ex-roommates' assets; but he never took an inventory of his kitchen doodads. Then Ajay suddenly remembered -- his twelfth roommate, Pinky, (who was murdered by the local Indian store owner for breaking the tips of too many bhindis) bequeathed it to him on his deathbed. “You can have it, Savita,” Ajay said. “That is my housewarming gift for your new house.” “No, no. I have a better idea. We are going to have Pooris for dinner tonight. Right here! I hope you don't mind us inviting ourselves like this. And Sunil and I will make everything…you are simply going to sit down and entertain us.” What a deal! Pooris?! In his own kitchen? Was this even possible? And he didn't have to chop even one onion? For a moment, he smelled a conspiracy. Could they be dangerous Amway weirdoes waiting to ambush him when he was least expecting it? Ajay quickly dismissed the thought as a product of his own warped mind. “Savita, I am not sure I have the infrastructure to make pooris. And at any rate, don't you have to start the process, like, yesterday?” “Ajay, you are so funny. You bachelors think that pooris and idlis are tough to make. Everything is so simple. Just watch,” Savita said with a swagger. “By the way, we were just coming from the Indian store. We have atta in the car. Sunil, why don't you get it?” Thank god for their atta! Ajay was sure he had some himself. But he was also sure that by now it must have turned into a chunk of diamond somewhere in one of his cabinets. Next minute, the couple swung into action. They ransacked the kitchen looking for a kadai. Ajay didn't own such highly specialized implements and so they grabbed his favorite pot he always used to boil water for tea and declared it to be a makeshift kadai. Sunil emptied Ajay's yearly quota of oil into it and cranked up the stove, while Savita rolled away yummy looking pooris. The nameless, formless vegetable, stuck to a corner of Ajay's freezer, was yanked out by sheer brute force and instantly transformed into a side dish by the amazing Savita. Ajay just could not believe his luck. Somebody pinch him! Delicious pooris made in his own kitchen. That too, unsolicited! Gods must be great. He couldn't wait to tell his long distance friends and adversaries about it. “Pooris are so easy Ajay. We can even do it again next weekend. Let us know. Bye bye.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Next Saturday, Sunil and Savita promptly arrived at Ajay's apartment once again. This time around, they had brought along several grocery bagsful of all kinds of stuff. One of the bags contained a weird gadget, which looked like a small guillotine that could be used to behead short desis. “What in the world is this?” Ajay asked, utterly baffled. “Oh, that's an automatic 'Roti maker' – a really useful thingummy. You can churn out pooris by the dozens without 'belan'ing them with a rolling pin. You will see,” Savita replied. The marvels of modern technology! And how it is fulfilling such a vital desi need, amazed Ajay. They had also brought along a humongous plastic container shrouded by twenty grocery bags. When it came to food, Ajay always displayed a keen sense of curiosity. So, he ripped the container open and found in it what looked like scrambled human left-brain. “Jeez, Savita. What the heck is this?” “Oh, that! It is Navratna Korma.” She said with infinite modesty, “My own recipe.” What a woman, Ajay marveled. A rare combination of Tarla Dalal and Madhur Jaffrey, rotting away in a crummy American college trying to do a useless Ph. D. “Actually Ajay, it is real simple,” she continued. “It is just like our Mixed Vegetable subzi. Only, after you make the subzi, you add in a dubba each of whipping cream, whipped cream, whupped cream, whippeth cream. And then you put in two sticks of butter. That's all. Real easy.” Savita's dishes were enormously popular in the desi circles and, in fact, a couple of months ago, the FBI classified her Aloo Mattar as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. “Why don't you write a cookbook, Savita?” Ajay managed to ask, unable to watch such talent go waste. “I declare you the Poori Queen.” They had even brought along dough to make vada. And before Ajay could situate himself, Sunil had already discovered the makeshift 'kadai' they had used the previous time and started heating the oil. The next two hours, there was frenetic activity in the kitchen with pooris rolling from the left and the right. In another tray, there was a mini mountain of vadas. Since the smell pervaded the entire apartment complex, Phatta and Sidey promptly landed up and helped themselves to the goodies. Then they had the usual conversation about Sunil's new house. “We still haven't installed the curtains,” Sunil said. Boy, that should scare your neighbors, Ajay thought. But he felt it would be too rude to verbalize it just when they were nice enough to cook for him in his own kitchen. Ajay was personally invited by them to come and see their house, once they were done doing the place. “We should do this poori party every weekend.” “Oh, sure!” Savita replied, as if it was easy as pie. “This is really no trouble at all. We will designate Saturdays as poori day and your apartment is the venue. Next week this time should be perfect…” Ajay was in hog's heaven. Was this how Moghul emperors lived? He gobbled dozens of those round fluffies and even hid some ten of them for later consumption, in an aluminum foil at the back of his fridge, away from the prying eyes of his next door savages. For a moment, he feared he might go through a poori overdose. But, heck, there was no such thing. It took Ajay nearly ten hours to wash up after Sunil and Savita left. They had used every single pot and pan he possessed. There was a thin layer of flour everywhere in the kitchen, almost like it just got hit by a sandstorm. Every square millimeter of his kitchen counter was greasy and he was unable to figure out whether it was the old stickiness or a fresh goo-iness due to Operation poori. The oil in the pot had transformed into a black glob, almost looking like drainage sludge and, even after his washing it numerous times, Ajay could not get rid of the sliminess. Now that they were going to have weekly poori parties, perhaps he should buy a real kadai. He should look it as an investment… ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was just midweek. But Ajay was already beginning to develop chronic poori withdrawal symptoms. For three days, he had been devouring the leftover pooris.. However, he felt that the leftovers were not as tasty as the freshly-made goodies, till he one day discovered that he had been actually eating his place-mats all along. Later, Ajay thoughtfully visited the 'India Bazaar' and bought the hugest atta packet in the store, and then, promptly went to the Costco Wholesale Warehouse and bought their one million liter jar of vegetable oil. By now, word was out in the entire campus about the Saturday poori party and people were clamoring to join in. Ajay short-listed the potential invitees using various loyalty criteria. The next Saturday, six more guys turned up – Sidey, Sutta, Phatta, Srini, PJ and Bala – some of whom had held world records for poori eating. Srini, for example, had eaten 32 pooris in one sitting in IIT Madras, until his mouth stuck shut. Bala's record was only 31, but he also ate raw dough worth five pooris alongside -- however, he was denied the record for technical reasons... At the appointed hour, the poori couple marched in – this time with a barrel of Tarla Dalal's Subzi number 82 and stuffing for samosas. “We can use the same oil for samosas also,” Sunil explained as he positioned himself to fry the darned things. Even samosas! The crowd of boys was awestruck and, as they were eating, Ajay was already negotiating deals with them for various return favors. In the middle, out of courtesy, they felt obligated to talk about Sunil and Savita's new house and how the Ten-Year Treasury rates were falling these days. Again, Savita made enough extra pooris for everyone's subsequent consumption. She even packed two dozens for themselves. Somebody even suggested that the poori party be extended into a weekly Dumb Charade party with regular scorecards. The possibilities were endless. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was the fourth Saturday. Ajay was already counting minutes, when a shocking phone call came. “Sorry, Ajay. We will have to cancel today's party because Sunil is a bit under the weather,” Savita said imploringly. A bit under the weather? They were smoking cigarettes together just that morning. But these days, with SARS and all kinds of other infections, who knew when who got what virus? But Ajay was seriously disappointed, nonetheless. There was nothing left for him to do that entire evening. It was almost as if his whole life was collapsing. He began ringing up his friends and talked to their answering machines. Surprisingly, Aishwarya was home. Ajay gave her a complete run down of what had transpired the past few weekends. “Ajay Palvayanteeswaran. You are a dumb fool,” she said. It wasn't as if Ajay heard those words for the first time. Still, it stung him. “What? Why? What do you mean?“ he asked. “You think Savita was making you pooris for altruistic reasons? She and Sunil are the cunningest people around. They won't even lift their little finger unless they have an ulterior motive. Ajay, you are a victim of their cruel trick…” “Oh, please explain.” “Ajay, they are the biggest poori addicts in the world. And you see, they just bought this brand new house. They couldn't bring themselves to heat up oil in their new house and deep-fry things – imagine, a new house smelling of paint and wood, getting vitiated by the foul smell of stale oil. You bachelors probably don't know. But any time you deep-fry anything in your kitchen, your entire house stinks of oil. Your clothes smell of oil, your cat smells of oil, your hubby smells of oil…and that too, for days on end.” Ajay suddenly remembered the foul smell he endured a few days ago. He thought it was from him, since he hadn't bathed in a few days. It was god awful. Almost like he took a dip in the nearest septic tank. “Yes, Ajay,” Aishwarya kept going. “The oily smell haunts your house like a bunch of ghosts. Dollar values of desi houses come down sharply because of this stupid stink. Besides, the entire place becomes sticky.” It was almost as if Aishwarya was a Bodhi tree and Ajay was getting enlightened. She continued, “Tormented by their love for pooris and other deep-fried items on the one hand and their love for their new home on the other, the only solution was to make use of someone gullible like you. But then, they couldn't go on like that forever. Finally, their stomachs won and now they have decided to make pooris in their own home even if it ruins their place. As a matter of fact, as we speak, pooris are getting mass-produced there – they are having their housewarming this very evening…of course, they are inviting only those people who are not messy – you see, new carpets can get soiled easily -- this is probably why you are not invited. Achcha, chalo, I will have to get ready to go there…” Ajay's world was crumbling, like a crisp poori under the weight of a ravenously hungry hand. To hell with pooris. Go Parathas! Anybody wants vegetable oil, lots of it? |