Author: Choudhury, Chandrahas
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‘A single meal, Pala,’ said Madhav Pujari, still lost in his memories, as the chauffeur held the door open for him.
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‘A single meal, Pala,’ said Madhav Pujari, still lost in his memories, as the chauffeur held the door open for him. ‘Sometimes a single meal can sustain a human being for an entire lifetime.’
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In the first couple of years after a restaurant opens, business is always up and down, hot and cold, before things settle into a rhythm.
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Everybody who works in a restaurant that has mid-range prices recognises a certain kind of patron, and that is the kadka. This is the customer who will order only the cheapest thing on the menu, because he is frightened by the numbers to the right of everything else.
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‘But after the ’62 war with China it became very difficult for them to live here. People became very hostile to them, even though some of them were more Indian than Indians themselves.
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Days and weeks went past, rich in bok choy and black bean sauce, held together by noodles and cornflour, with debt whispering in one ear and time in the other.
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Lying just beneath so many things that turn up in our lives is the touch, the influence, of someone we do not know.
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Those who deliberately inflict pain on others invariably reap pain in return. But this is only the beginning of the matter. Sometimes, blind in their troublemaking, such people then continue to be blind in their suffering, and so, when things turn around for them, they set about making trouble again, like toasters with only two settings.
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This is why I think it is foolish to forgive them, because even plates and spoons know more than them and are good to you if you are good to them. At the same time, to nurture a lasting bitterness or rage against them is merely to bring oneself down to their level. One has no option but to cultivate a spirit of detachment in these matters.
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Although outsiders to the industry never realize this, cooking for the staff is a very important task in the repertoire of a restaurant chef. After he has spent all day labouring far from home and family, you can’t deny a working man the needs of his stomach — his food the way he knows and loves it. And the waiters and kitchen workers despised Barun because, between him and Chef Uttam, they made sure the staff lunch and dinner were always Bengali food, made to their own taste, cooked in mustard oil and spiced with radhuni and panch phoron.
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Apparently Bengal is full of four things: Communists, village ponds, mustard oil, and tantriks.
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Truly, more than what happens, what is most interesting in this world is why a man believes something happens, the connections he makes between one thing and another.
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Basically those who belong to this industry only know three states of being: going to work, being at work, and coming back from work.
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Yet thankfully the daily grind is not a lonely one, like that of a writer, widow or husband. This is a team sport.
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I’m keeping the smile on my face — this is a service industry, always keep smiling — but suddenly I’m mad.
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Sometimes when I pop my head into the kitchen and try to make a joke to lighten the mood, no one in here laughs and I wonder why. Now I understand.
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The wisdom of the cook, like the meaning of the Tao itself, cannot be expressed or shared in the realm of language, only in that of action.
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Those who have never cooked, only eaten, believe that they only don’t know what it means to cook, when in truth they have not even understood what it means to eat.
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Why are we given such a long life? So that we may first generate the character and the confusion from which we have a chance to discover — if only for an instant — what life really means.
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The customer of a restaurant wants many things, sometimes without even knowing what he or she wants. Let me propose a few. To look at a menu and feel the illusion of wealth and limitless possibility that comes with the offer of choice. To feel the warmth not just of a plate of noodles or soup, but of being cared for, fussed over. To feel important, not just because he or she is a human wallet but because she is a person with a face, a voice, a history.
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And a restaurateur’s job, I firmly believe — and here I differ from the theory of my father — is to make not just food but time warm, alive, nourishing. (In the difference between the two lies the meaning of hospitality.)
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After all, food and work both have a price, but hospitality is both unpaid and demanding. It is easier to put the body through an eight-hour grind than to make genuine eye contact with every person one meets.
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As excited as a child to be back in Bombay, he was thrilled by every little experience: eating a vada-pav on the street, having his twenty-rupee notes accepted with tears of joy by beggars, and studying the city at night from the second-last seat on the left-hand side of a BEST bus (‘the one where you got yourself two windows and extra air-conditioning’).
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‘Even after so many days I still haven’t been able to work it out, Jigarbhai. You tell me: how come our Chinese food is so much better than that of the Chinese?’
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for there is nothing like the restaurant business to test a man’s character, and nothing like man’s character
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for there is nothing like the restaurant business to test a man’s character, and nothing like man’s character to test the restaurant business.
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He had learnt to speak Bambaiya Hindi correctly — if such a thing is possible, Bambaiya Hindi being all wrong to begin with.
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Hereafter in his life, Pintu might succeed or fail, but he would always have in his brain the sweet memory of this first victory. Sometimes, in our trade, it’s even more pleasurable to cook a man properly than a dish.
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Sometimes, in our trade, it’s even more pleasurable to cook a man properly than a dish.
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One day when he used the word ‘democracy’ in a conversation, all of us burst out laughing, but later I found myself asking why, and whether our mockery said something about us and not about him.
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I knew something dangerous was going on in the fellow’s brain. But there’s still a mystery. How did he become a devotee of Shiva living in Prabhadevi? We only have the Siddhi Vinayak temple and a Devi temple in our area.’
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‘Apologise? Whoever heard of a boss apologising to a worker? That’s the surest way to turn their heads and spoil them for good!’
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A gleaming metal brazier, a beautiful plate of porcelain, a delicate tea pot with a spout like an elephant’s trunk, a filigreed tray for serving thin-sliced meats — these are the real riches of the kitchen, as the wife is the real wealth of any household. Further, cleanliness, as we well know, is godliness.
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Sometimes rules are there to be broken, Master Fang. Contrary to what we are taught, things are given not to those who hold back, but those who ask. The meek shall not inherit the earth — or if they do, it will be only mud.
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But the question always asked of any Chinese restaurant in India is: is it really Chinese? A useless question, actually, because there is no right answer. It all depends on the knowledge and the expectations of the customer. If we make Chinese our Indian way, with plenty of oil and chilli and lots of gravy in the curries, then some people will screw up their noses and say, ‘Oh God, these people are so ignorant. They’re calling this Chinese!’ Suppose we make Chinese food like they really do in China, maybe seven out of a hundred customers will be pleased, and the rest will never come back again. You can’t win either way.
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One day the restaurant would be mine just because my last name was Pala, but to balance out this lottery in my life he was going to make sure that I worked morning, noon, and night, was always criticised and never praised, and only got pocket money and no more.