Musings on Food and My Own Life

I want to share with you my favourite, lighter and warm memories of food - which may surprise most of you - at college. I did my under-graduation and post grad at Govt. Stanley Medical College, Royapuram, Chennai. This means, I spent 10 years in the hostel and it was one rollicking decade which is etched in soul forever because college is where I met and wooed my wife. This pas de deux may sound corny and cheesy, but hey everyone loves a good romantic tale, right?

We met on the 9th of August 1994. I was in my final year MBBS and she in her first year. She was the room mate of my room mate's sister. You get the route, don't you? So one evening when I was piss drunk my chum asks me to accompany him to meet his sis in the LH. We Stanleans are very fortunate in that the MH and LH shared a single 6 foot wall. (Suitably inebriated gentlemen scaled these walls at night and brought back a lot of goodies in the form of wet wash out clothes). I resisted going with him to the LH but lady luck dragged me there and then the rest is, well, history and chemistry.

Male visitors were allowed inside the LH premises but limited to the visitors hall and the open park space which had concrete benches and for some strange reason were called 'stone benches' and the visiting time was 4-8pm on all days except on Sundays which was 9am to 8pm. We had a stone bench to ourselves. No one dared to encroach our space. Looking back we should've scratched our names onto the concrete as is the wont with most lovers.

There was a small shack of a canteen inside the LH which served tea, coffee, snacks and for the innocent babies, Horlicks. The guys who ran the place Maari and Karuppasamy (he was the Park Town Vijay Fan Club Secretary then) had a special affinity for me and I went in whenever I felt like snacking, conveniently writing it in my girl's 'account'. The MH food was fantastic. It was a student's mess and we had the best butter/chilli chicken in town. The LH mess was a contractor's mess and the food was just about palatable. Every Wednesday and Saturday nights we had ghee rice, veg gravy, chicken, potato chips, egg, juice and ice cream. I took tiffin boxes full of chicken every Wednesday and Saturday - it helped that my room mate was the mess secretary - to give my wife who shared it with her friends. On Sundays, we had chicken and biryani from her mess sitting on the stone bench yakking yadda yadda. Sometimes I would go: "You say something" and she'd go: "You say something" and then we'd have been sitting there speaking nothing for a whole damn 10 minutes. You'll have to note here that I have not missed a single day of LH duty of 4-8 and Sunday 9-8 unless she went to her home town for a whole 5 yrs. She wrote to me, mostly sending me cards when she was away.

We weren't like the regular lovers of the day doing the cinema-park-beach routine. The stone bench was our fiefdom, our play, our emotions, tiffs, make ups and love. It was all that I wanted in life. The first ever time we went out was with a mutual male friend and the sacred trip was to 'Shansi' a Chinese resto at Purasawalkam. We ragged her into a treat because she had, yes, scored very high marks in her exams! Of course we ended up ordering a lot of food and wasting a lot of it too because of the 'embarrassment' to share. (After those exams, she, a brilliant student who has a couple of State ranks to her credit has just managed to pass the exams thanks to me and my shindigs. She cried before her final exams blaming me for not allowing her to study)

Another time, very early in our 'friendship' days we went to the 'Beach Station' to reserve our tickets. (We went by the Kovai Express. I got down at Salem to proceed to Yercaud and she went to Erode, her place.) There I bought a couple of Aavin flavoured milk packs. I poked in the straw and began drinking. She pokes in the straw and sucks and sucks, nothing comes out. Red faced, she handed the pack to me. Hesitantly I took a sip from the already-sipped-straw. Folks, I tell you, nothing came out of it because the whole thing had solidified, but, for a non-co-ed no girl siblings/cousins guy like me, it was pure fucking electricity through my bones!

Sipping on a single straw especially when you have a 'thingy' for the girl is always a surreal experience. Phantasmagoria. After that and a couple of years later, I popped the question and she said a vehement: Yes. On special occasions we went to the Ambassador Pallava in Egmore to treat ourselves, when we were low on cash - end of the month - we bought food from the nearby hotels. Mostly some 'side dishes'. Especially the crab curry at Excellent Hotel on Broadway and the turkey biryani at Pandiyan Hotel in Royapuram. One evening we decided to break the monotony of the stone bench and feeling particularly rich on that day, we dropped in at the coffee shop at Hotel Breeze on Poonamalee High Road. We shared a Black Forest Cake. Manna from Heaven. It was a lesson on how togetherness and hunger is the best sauce for food.

Most of the girls in the LH had their own 'hot plates' on which they toasted their own breads and made noodles and such things. There was a regular patient who came to the OP and I learnt she was a fish monger close to our hostel. That was music to my ears. We bought fish from her regularly and my lady made full use of her hot plate and fried fish for me! For someone who salivated in fountains even as the platform dwelling folks did their 'tadka', this was the gastronomic pinnacle. Once my brother, who was studying in Coimbatore, came to visit us and between the two of us we wolfed down 25 pieces of fish that she had painstakingly fried. Only after we polished it off did we realize there was none left for her! Beer and fish. That match made in Heaven!

The men's hostel food was good. But alas, do we ever realize what we are getting? Here, I'll have to quote GK Chesterton here: "The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost...The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God's image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision of all visible things-- wink the other eye."

Mess food was good, but we had to have egg with everything. Egg dosa is fine, but egg chappathis, egg rice and even egg idlis! The cooks were known as 'masters' and they were taken to task quite harshly if the food wasn't up to the mark. Working in the Stanley MH mess was the worst nightmare for anyone. Ragging the first years in the mess was a common thing. We had what was known as the 'Stanley Rasam' where a senior would mix sambhar, rasam, curd or whatever PLUS a ton of salt in a tumbler and handed out the cocktail to drink. Of course everyone barfed on the first sip. There was this terror guy who ragged me in the mess. He was having his curd rice. Licked his fingers well with due vulgarity and then fed me a mouthful from his plate. Though I was shitting bricks, I refused to take it. He gave me a tight one on the cheeks and said: "Food is fucking God dude, you'll have it whoever gives it to you and however they give it you!" I loathed the bugger then. Later we became good friends.

Thursdays were the days we had idlis for dinner. You'd hardly see a motley bunch then. People like my room mate and I, who had a demanding tongue and a ravenous appetite begged borrowed or stole money to buy some gravy for those bullet like idlis instead of the bland sambhar and chutney. When we went totally dry and bereft of any dough (which was most of the time) and hungry for the DDs from home our fav technique of tricking the guys because we were notorious for not returning the money so not many took the risk of loaning us any, was: "Machan, got two fifties for a hundred? We need some change!" The poor unsuspecting soul would go: "No, man, I have only hundreds." "Ok, then give one of those hundreds!" Whack! Whack! Whack!

One such Thursday we loaded a plate full of idlis. 25 in number and sat in the middle of the huge hostel play ground which overlooked the ladies hostel sipping beer, enjoying the cool breeze, yakking some crap about the dames, dipping hard idlis into the hotel bought gravy and wolfed down 12 apiece. My roomie's favourite mongrel, strangely named 'Kammanaatti' was sitting beside him waiting in anticipation. The last idli he put it down for him. Kammanaatti took a sniff of it and went away. My pal was so irritated, "Here we are swallowing 12 of the mess idlis and you insult us?" and gave him a kick. Not a big aficionado of dogs, but the first time I saw it in an animal's eyes: "Et tu Brutus". It was in the year 97 or 98 when it poured cats and dogs (also rain) continuously for 4 days. The whole of Chennai came to a stand still. Food supply was hit and we were served only gruel and upma. Only then did most of us realize what it meant to have decent grub.

I was a big hit with the staff nurses, ward boys and ayahs in my hospital ward. The first question I always asked them was: "Have you had your food!" or "What's for lunch!" and I insisted on seeing their 'tiffin' boxes and also took a bite of whatever they had. They had a lot of respect for me. A 'doctor' taking their food. But food is the greatest leveller, that is, if you are game for it. When I went on my evening rounds after my LH duty, (without even my steth) I asked the same of patients too. Either they'd be having their dinner at that time (brought by their relatives) or about to have. Some with a lot of restraint have asked me to join them and I've never refused at all. You know the joy of those poor folks admitted in squalid Govt. hospitals was boundless. There was a cirrhotic patient who was admitted for quite a long time and one evening he told me: "Sir, if you don't mind, I'll tell you this...you are like a Hindi actor, clean shaved, chewing a gum, breezing into the ward saying hi and hello to the patients and having food with us while all your colleagues are mostly sour puss faced individuals who come in and treat us like objects mostly asking us questions for their benefit and not ours. It is your smile that heals us!" Folks, that is the biggest compliment that I've received so far. All my degrees be damned!

I have to end this on a solemn note. My dear father was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and his voice box had to be removed completely which meant that he couldn't speak. During the post-operative period he was convalescing in the 'special ward' which shared the same floor albeit a different wing with the lady house surgeons' quarters. My wife was then doing her house surgeoncy and though my Mom knew I had a girl pal she didn't know initially that she was going to be her DIL. My dad had a Ryle's tube inserted (via the nose into the stomach) to feed him and it was my wife who made 'kanji', soups and other health fluids that could be poured through the tube and also attending the wards. For this, I'm indebted to her for more than a few lifetimes. One day, though my father couldn't eat, he'd walked down to one of the umpteen 'snack kiosks' in the hospital campus and bought us vadais and because he couldn't speak motioned with his hand: "I bought it for you all. You don't have to restrict yourself just because I can't eat." I cried myself a river that night. And then he got discharged, went off into a depression, got into alcohol, liver failure...death bed...and circumstances were such that we tied the knot at the Eashwaran Temple, Erode on the 12th of Nov 99 and then another nuptial knot on the 28th Nov 99 at Thiruchendur Temple, a reception at Erode on the 1st of December and then my greatest hero, my guiding beacon of light passed away on the 6th of December 99.

PS: Thank you for reading this. I haven't done a proof reading, so bear with me on this...brought forth a flood of emotions in me. I'm thankful to CFG and all you kind folks for having me relive the past which I rarely do. Because sometimes it haunts me like a ghost. It was nice to ventilate about food and my life. I'm curious to know about your fav food moments with your loved ones. Sharing is what gives life it's deepest meaning. Thanks once again!

Posted with Blogsy