Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  (Technically, those billboards weren’t advertising booze. Dwarfed by the giant logos or bouncing breasts would be a few words set in tiny type that explained what the ad was actually promoting: “Cricket gear,” said the ad for Seagram’s Royal Stag in letters perhaps two percent as tall as the whisky logo. “Music CDs” said the ad for Bacardi rum, implying that the bikini girls were having such a sexy good time only because of what they were listening to. I presume this technique allows Bacardi to skirt some law banning liquor advertising by pointing to the words and telling the regulators, “No, it’s all perfectly legal. We’re just advertising our latest tunes!”)

  All over the city, billboards assured the citizenry that one could be seen as classy and sophisticated only if they drank the right brand of booze. And this is why Shilpa was hoarding our bottles: to help people whose aspirations weren’t matched by their incomes. These people knew that there were a few markets in the city in which vendors sat surrounded by empty bottles of booze. We stumbled upon one of them near Shanti Niketan: haphazard piles of cheap vodka bottles, neat rows labeled for mid-range rum and, in the spot of honor, well-preserved bottles of whisky that had been shielded from the sun, their labels intact and clean, often accompanied by the fancy printed cardboard tubes in which they were originally sold. The people who bought these bottles would presumably refill them with cheap swill so they could flatter their guests into thinking they’re being served the good stuff. The guest’s eyes would pop when he sees the green Johnnie Walker label, and the host would hope he’s too bedazzled to notice that the first sip is already making his head hurt.

  I hope that Shilpa negotiated for the full value of that empty eighteen-year-old bottle of Glenfiddich single malt scotch I’d bought at the duty-free. Because somebody at the demand end of the empty bottle economy would surely pay a lot of money to serve 200-rupee rotgut from it the next time his father-in-law paid a surprise visit.

  Despite the joy we felt every time we opened the refrigerator and beheld Ganga’s latest creation, there were still times when homesickness or actual sickness would make us crave food that tasted like home or behaved in ways our stomachs could predict. Which is when we would be grudgingly happy that the viruses that have transformed every American suburb into the gastronomic twin of every other American suburb are even infecting Delhi: Ruby Tuesday and TGI Friday’s and Bennigans and other chain restaurants are sprouting like boils, blemishing the subcontinent with the blandest outgrowths of American culture that, nevertheless, were occasionally just what we needed. And while we accept that there’s nothing worse than traveling halfway across the world and then visiting the same restaurants we ate at with our high school friends, that’s where life lead us to celebrate our third wedding anniversary. (We just really wanted a beer that wasn’t Kingfisher, and the Ruby Tuesday in GK-II had Corona on their menu.)

  Fortunately, when the urge hit for imported flavors, Delhi also had options that weren’t global chains. There was excellent pizza at Flavors, near the Moolchand flyover, and decent Mexican food at Sancho’s in South Extension Part II that was cooked by an actual Mexican chef (until he left the country, reportedly because the food in India didn’t agree with him). If we wanted to go more upmarket, the Smokehouse Grill near GK-II was as close to a steakhouse as Delhi could get without serving actual beef, although filet mignon of buffalo was on the menu. When we needed something guaranteed not to agitate our endlessly churning stomachs, Subway’s subs were reliably identical to those served two continents away. And every so often we’d get one of the coveted invitations to dine in the various embassy restaurants, where we would eat authentic cheese in the company of underdressed expats.

  If we were combating a particularly virulent outbreak of homesickness, we might head to a five-star hotel. Not that we patronized such places at home; in fact, we deliberately avoided any scene that would turn people away for wearing sandals or, for that matter, could accurately be described as a “scene.” But in Delhi, we needed periodic respites from the city, and while the guilt of driving past beggars and slums and sidewalk-sleeping laborers on the way to 400-rupee Kingfishers was hard to reconcile, it usually evaporated in the lavender haze of the lobby flower arrangements.

  Most five-star hotels have multiple five-star restaurants, and a few of those are transcendent. Bukhara in the ITC Maurya is rightly famous. Bill Clinton said it made him “wish he had two stomachs” (although I have had meals at Taco Bell that have made me wish the same thing). But Bukhara is famous for the wrong dish: its storied meat plates blurred together in my mouth and inflicted upon me my first-ever meat headache; but its dal makhani was so creamy that it almost tasted like chocolate. The Oberoi’s 360 restaurant offers a delicious variety of Japanese-inspired everything, but the Oberoi’s Italian restaurant was no better than Flavors, despite being three times as expensive.

  Many of these hotels also offer Sunday brunch extravaganzas. At the Oberoi 360, a mere 2,500 rupees got us all the food we could eat and all the wine or champagne we could drink; but it turns out that we couldn’t eat enough to hold us over for a week, which is how full we’d hoped to have been to justify the cost of the indulgence. A more cost-conscious alternative is the Metropolitan hotel, where brunch is only—only—1,800 rupees. Their selection was smaller and skewed Japanese, which was fine for a sushi lover like me: there aren’t many oceans near Delhi, so this was one of the few places I trusted the fish. (Seafood in Delhi was probably the one thing I was more wary of than the water.)

  To supplement Ganga’s food, Delhi offered plenty of other Indian options. (I’ll refuse to admit that we ever chose to eat out when we had Ganga’s food in the fridge—I miss it so much, I don’t want to contemplate having ever passed it up.) Jenny favored Park Balluchi in Hauz Khas village both for the food and the jungle park atmosphere; it was there where she decided that paneer tikka kebabs, roasted in a tandoori oven with blackened spices encrusting milky sweet paneer, and then wrapped in roomali roti with red onion and mint chutney, was one of the world’s perfect dishes. (We discovered that the paneer tikka at Saket’s Citywalk mall food court was nearly as good, although we’re embarrassed to have eaten there so often.) Excellent north Indian food could be found everywhere from the upscale Punjabi By Nature chain to the tiny Chulha Chonka in Lajpat Nagar IV, which specialized in sarson ka saag, a delicious forest-colored sludge of mustard greens that was only available in fall and winter.

  Back in New York, even as we dreamed of diving head first into a vat of chicken curry, we remained ignorant of the diversity of Indian cuisine. Never mind not knowing the difference between Mughlai and Punjabi—we didn’t even know there was a difference between north and south Indian styles. But we are quick students, and it didn’t take us long to appreciate the nuances of the cuisine. When we got tired of heavy Mughlai gravies—such dishes should only be enjoyed in moderation, in interest of both palate desensitization and waistline expansion—we’d head over to Sagar Ratna in Defence Colony. Their south Indian specialities included dosas with potato filling and uttappams that were embedded with coconut meat and roasted tomatoes and served with bottomless bowls of sambar. But our favorite south Indian restaurant was Saravana Bhavan in Connaught Place. It was too far north to casually visit, but we rarely missed it if we were in the neighborhood.

  One of Delhi’s biggest concentrations of upscale restaurants was in Khan Market. The Big Chill had good Western food, and Chokola in particular served one of the few passable Western breakfasts in the city, which is why the Democrats Abroad organization regularly met there during the US election to discuss which one of us was in love with Candidate Obama more.

  The inner alley of Khan Market, where many of the restaurants are located, had crumbling sidewalks and oozing manholes that were at aesthetic odds with the area’s supposed position among the most expensive commercial real estate in the world. Nevertheless, it also boasted a few terrific kebab shops that were mobbed late into the night; I arrived home many evenings with Salim’s
mutton burra still smeared on my face. Despite the muddy cobblestones and dangling power lines around Salim’s, I was never nervous about eating there, because there was always a line of customers that testified to their salubrity.

  And this judgement reflects a certain bit of folk wisdom that American tourists pass along to one another: if a restaurant or street vendor has a line of customers, its food is probably safe to eat. The logic behind this rule is that locals intrinsically know who serves good food and who spoons out cumin-sprinkled botulism. We adhered to this rule religiously, despite its inherent inconsistencies: on some days, the bored-looking Nepali vendors in Hauz Khas market who were selling momos—what Americans would call Chinese dumplings—would have a half-dozen people clustered around their stalls, while other days they stared glumly at the passing traffic. I only bought from them on the busy days, just in case everyone else knew something I didn’t.

  My co-worker Pankaj told us that he followed a variation of this rule: he would instantly trust any food vendor if he saw a Sikh man eating there.

  The follow-the-crowd rule served us well. One day when I was walking along Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi, I spotted a line at a food stall stretching fifteen feet back into an alley. I instantly joined it, even though I didn’t know what I would be buying, and even though it was the kind of line where I was chest-to-back with the person in front of me and all too aware of when the guy behind me spotted a pretty girl walking by. The indignity of the queue paid off in a plate of aloo tikki: fried potato patties stuffed with chickpeas and drowned in yogurt sauce and chutneys. I gobbled it down on the sidewalk while the sweat of the men who bookended me evaporated from my shirt.

  Aloo tikki became one of our favorite street foods. Ever paranoid about bacteria as we were, it was soothing to watch the hot oil fry all those nasty pathogens out of the patties (even as we pretended not to notice the distinctly unrefrigerated chutneys in their metal canisters). We also loved chhole bhature, which was a thick gravy of chickpeas topped with ginger slivers and eaten with a fried bread; usually considered a breakfast dish, one plate was sufficient to make us skip lunch. Street vendor selling sprouted lentils would mix them with tomatoes, onions, chillies and cilantro and serve them to us on plates made from dried leaves that, being biodegradable, made us feel less guilty about throwing them in the trash piles that always grew on the ground near vendors’ feet. We were told that bhel puri, with puffed rice, nuts and various other dried bits drowned in chutney, always tasted better in Mumbai; but we enjoyed it equally in both cities. The chaiwallah near my office sold samosas that he’d wrap in bags made from old newspapers that turned translucent with grease. Stuffed with potatoes and studded with green peas, the samosas’ crust was flaky and sweet and the insides were spicy and succulent, reminiscent only in shape of the frozen versions served at the Indian restaurants back home. The chaiwallahs also sold deep-fried sandwiches with enough grease to eliminate a hangover and induce a heart attack.

  We usually avoided street meat. Chicken kebab stands and fried fishwallahs were relatively rare, and while we’d see them in the Old City near the Jama Masjid, our sanitary paranoia was far more pronounced in the face of unrefrigerated chicken than unrefrigerated chickpeas.

  The only vegetarian Delhi street food we categorically refused were golgappas. Also called panipuri (“water bread”), golgappas are rigid hollow spheres of fried dough stuffed with potatoes, onions and chickpeas. The vendor hands his customer an empty plate, pokes a hole in a sphere with his thumb, shoves stuffing in with his finger, plunges the sphere into a giant vat of brown-green liquid, and then places it on the waiting plate. The customer grabs it and pops it into his mouth whole, before the water melts through the dough. When bitten, the golgappa explodes. There’s far more liquid than we’d have ever imagined the little sphere could contain; it overwhelms the taste buds and fills the mouth and, if our throats aren’t ready, makes us choke. We’d chew and fake a smile and try not to let the juice drip down our face, and we’d keep the plate right below our chins just in case it did.

  Golgappas seem to occupy a niche in Delhi culture that’s similar to Taco Bell in America: both taste best late at night when surrounded by friends. Crowds of men and women congregate around the nearest golgappa vendor in the wee hours, each holding out a plate, their eager faces lit by the white glow of the gas lamp, laughing and chatting and popping their spheres and asking for more.

  It wasn’t that we didn’t like the flavor, although they did tend to be heavy on chaat masala, a spice sprinkled on everything from paneer to lemonade that, to us, tastes vaguely of egg. No, we avoided golgappas for a different reason: the sight of the vendor plunging the spheres into the soup with his bare hand. Over and over again.

  Look: we knew that one can’t enjoy India if one was constantly paranoid of a few little germs. But the sight of so much unfiltered water coming into contact with so much sweaty skin was too much for our sheltered suburban sensibilities to bear.

  That’s why we would only relent to eating golgappas at Dilli Haat, the government-run crafts bazaar where it was assured that the vendors cooked with filtered water. A few miles north of Hauz Khas market, Dilli Haat is the exact opposite of what we’d expect from anything that was government-run: it was clean, well-maintained, with a surprising variety of high quality merchandise and, best of all, a few dozen food vendors representing each region in India. In winter, the Kashmir stall serves up a syrupy honey almond chai so delicious that the memory of its warmth stayed with me for a week of frigid nights.

  At the Delhi street food stall, we would be heartened to see the golgappa vendor wearing gloves, and heartened further to see him dipping only deep enough to submerge them, as opposed to the street vendors who preferred plunging their hands in up to their wrists. Dilli Haat’s vendors, in return, never seemed to tire of the sight of goras trying golgoppas for the first time. They’d giggle as we’d chew and swallow and cough and sputter, and laugh out loud when we’d try to eat it in bites and send juice squirting all over our shirts.

  Our Indian friends derided our sanitary paranoia as detracting from the true Indian experience. Filtered water, they’d say, ruins the flavor of the golgappas.

  The one street food that never triggered our paranoia reflex was chai. We couldn’t go more than half a block without passing a chaiwallah seated under a tree or against a wall, selling India’s signature brew at four rupees per cup. Chai is milk, tea dust, sugar, and spices boiled to sanitary perfection over a gas flame and then poured through a sieve into a tiny plastic cup. Delhiites’ love of chai seemed to transcend culture, class, caste, and weather—a steaming glass somehow cooled us down in summer just as effectively as it warmed us up in winter.

  A chai break is a universal and inalienable right. And the laborers who streamed out of the factories drank it side-byside with the information workers from my office, all of us savoring the fact that for the next five minutes, our bosses were culturally obligated to leave us alone. Similarly, Jenny and I discovered that the aggressive beggars who tailed us through the streets of Jaipur vanished the moment we stepped up to a chai shop. Which means that the chaiwallah is more than a tea maker: he dispenses of an aura of protection that shields his customers from the world beyond his bubble, at least until their cups are empty.

  Halfway down the street from my office sat a chaiwallah named Lakshan. When my company first moved to this neighborhood, they paid Lakshan to walk through the office pouring his freshly boiled chai for us four or five times a day. But one awful day, Finance bought a machine that dispensed sweet coffee, tomato soup, and a drink vaguely recognizable as chai. Lakshan’s contract was abruptly canceled in favor of lukewarm glop. It was a decision that satisfied nobody except Finance. So instead of Lakshan coming to us, we went to him.

  Lakshan sat on the sidewalk under intermittent shade, surrounded by bags of cigarette singles, shiny aluminium packets of mouth freshener, and plates of fried sandwiches and biscuits. He had clearly negotiated some so
rt of arrangement with the management of the building behind him, because there was a little cement alcove for his stove and he freely went in and out of the building’s courtyard to fill his stockpot with water. Lakshan was not a one-man operation: his twelve-year-old son Raju worked with him. One day, as my colleague Dipankar sipped our chai and watched the father and son work, we calculated that Lakshan probably earned around 400 rupees a day after expenses. About $240 a month. With that money, he had to support his wife and at least one child, feed them, clothe them and put a roof over their heads; no wonder he couldn’t afford an employee that would allow his son to go to school.

  Watching Lakshan make tea cannot be described as watching an artist at work. It was more like watching the practiced hands of a surgeon. Lakshan would perform gestures he’d repeated thousands of times since he presumably apprenticed at his own father’s chai stand. His hands moved automatically, measuring tea and sugar in his palms without thought, crunching cardamom and sometimes ginger against the concrete ground with a rock, and pouring the boiling mixture through a sieve into the little plastic cups without spilling a drop. Lakshan would be at his stand before I got to work and would still be pouring when I left. It was possible he lived nearby; more likely, he and his son slept right there on the sidewalk during the week. On Sunday, when the offices in the area were closed, I hope they got to go somewhere else and enjoy their only day of rest.

  I loved chai, but it wasn’t enough to get me going in the morning. Had I lived in Delhi even ten years earlier, this would have been a big problem; but I was fortunate to arrive just as the city’s coffee culture began to truly take off. Delhi hasn’t evolved to America’s standard of a Starbucks on every corner, but the rapid franchising of Café Coffee Day and Barista (and, to a lesser extent, Costa) means that that day may be close at hand. We’d find at least one representative of these chains in about half the markets we visited in south Delhi. They’d adapted the Starbucks model to local tastes by offering more prepared food than in the US, and by instituting table service for taking orders and delivering lattes. At the time, though, few of them offered wireless Internet, so they weren’t yet filled with hipster faces bathed in the holy glow of Apple laptops.