Arshid Malik
I sincerely don’t know what is with us Kashmiris, we just don’t know how to survive without rice and meat. Where ever we are we always keep sniffing for that heart throbbing aroma of meat being cooked and always hunt for places where we can have rice with mutton or beef dishes. Well, there is nothing potentially wrong with the habit since it is a cultural thing and speaks of our history, recent as well as ancient, but sometimes the whole thing touches too much!
I have met with several incidents where my taste buds led me to utter disasters in terms of what I eventually ate off the plate. Once I was in Chandigarh and was barely surviving with tandoori nans and pulses of all kinds served to your satisfaction with loads of clarified butter. My stay was extended by a week while I had already survived there for a fortnight. I walked to the nearby vegetarian restaurant along with some of my colleagues and as we were about to order someone amongst us said that he knew a place in Sector 26 (if I recall properly) where they served tandoori nans, rice, halal chicken and mutton delicacies.
That was it. We grabbed a vehicle (one which we owned) and started off to find Sector 26. It was like hunting for the part-mythical Area 51 (you must know if you happen to be an alien geek that it is secret cantonment in Nevada USA where they carry out all kinds of experiments on captured aliens and manufacture and thereof test space ships created on the lines of experience gained from capturing or retrieving alien space ships, and yes, sorry for the digression but this needed to be explained) which no one has found till date and yet holds millions of fans worldwide. While we were at it, we switched on the GPS as it is very difficult to navigate manually through the complex city that Chandigarh is. The GPS landed us in a forest of sorts with no way leading out and dreadful eerie sounds crawling across the ground.
I was sure, sort of, that while we had come to dine we were about to turn into dinner of some predator. Anyways, we had to switch on the manual system of navigation to get somewhere if we ever hoped to. The difference of error was something like several hundred kilometres as we found to our utter amazement that we were not in Chandigarh anymore. So we retraced our steps and had to walk into our hotel on an empty stomach, cursing the colleague who had mentioned the very word “mutton and chicken dishes” or the other way round.
The very next morning we woke up to aches in the stomach and settled for a decent purely vegetarian breakfast and started our day. When evening fell, we started getting cranky about food and the very absence of the taste of chicken and mutton was heartfelt. We gathered some nerve and decided to set off early that day and find the halal non-vegetarian hotel or whatever it was. After a strenuous journey of two and a half hours we found Sector 26 and now it was time to find the restaurant. After so much effort we were not going back without biting our teeth into some mutton or chicken. Fate favoured us this time and we found the restaurant which was in all actuality a shop stricken by flies. We stepped in to meet a disgusting smell of blood mingled with tandoori rotis being cooked. We took some courage and ordered ourselves some real good food and when our tables were served we learnt that only the names were good, the rest was too bad to be ingested. With our nostrils pinched we ate off what we could and headed to our berths. We had learnt our lesson but this lesson was forgotten soon enough as a few months later I met with the same fate in another part of the country and another and another and several others within the coming couple of years.
I usually don’t take lunch, and that has been the case for the past 20 years. But sometimes it gets to me and I yearn for a plate full of hot steaming rice and some good quality non vegetarian dishes. Today was the day and I was about to be misled. A colleague of mine suggested a great quality Kashmiri restaurant nearby which I had never noticed and there was no keeping me away from it. We rushed and even though my good friend had eaten there several times he could not find it for another half an hour and I smelt something fishy. We found the place and walked into the not so ambient restaurant. We ordered some quality stuff and were waiting on an almost empty stomach for around 45 minutes. We received paltry rice served out on plates to be followed by the dishes we had ordered. Dishes??? Undercooked mutton was swimming in what looked like a cesspool and the chicken was almost live. We received some chutney and roties which we had never ordered. I called up the waiter and asked him to unveil the mystery of the un-ordered chapattis. He said they were short on rice and they had decided on our behalf that we would like to have chapattis instead. I had had it. I called up the manager and gave him a good bashing. After all was said and done we walked out with a sour taste in our mouths and I had again learnt the lesson I always tend to forget. Cant help it. Can you?
