Not for non vegetarians

-
I associate food with smell. If the house or a hotel smells good, chances are the food there will taste good. When I came to Mumbai and was staying in a Christian hostel, I remember the feeling of nausea at 10am everyday as they started cooking beef. For a pure vegetarian Gujarati girl, it was a culture shock. I had never had people eating non vegetarian on my table for the first fifteen years of my life. So to see pieces of meat in a watery gravy was not a pleasant sight for me. Hostel food was full of coconut in every vegetable and garlic in every dal.At home, we never ate garlic or onions on a daily basis. In Mumbai, my meals had so many new ingredients and then I got used to seeing and smelling that. Even people sucking the bone for the marrow was a sight I had never seen before. There was no religious sentiment involved. I was just so shocked and oh so unexposed.

Stage two was when I joined a five star hotel in Mumbai. For me, the whole hotel was always stinking of food. For years, I couldn't relish my meals at five star hotels. The lobby with the cafe to the 24 hr coffee shop to the Indian restaurant , all were a big no no for me. I remember rushing back to the hostel for my meals. The food just smelt and felt stale to me. Then the leftovers came to the staff cafeteria.
The good part was I was very friendly with the chefs in the hotel. All tea times I would sit with them. They were one happy lot of people, away from the hotel politics. They just made me laugh and never talked food.

Stage three was when I got married to a non vegetarian, the in laws to prove a point would cook non vegetarian food every time we were invited for a meal. I never could cook non vegetarian food. I had to touch n fry fish and clear the bones there. Once I came home from work and my house was smelling of prawns. I ran to the kitchen and saw these pink fleshy things and shells all over the place. I almost died. Cooked food is different but to see it like that was unpalatable.
People still go on asking me about veg vs non veg food. I am questioned why my children don't eat and why I don't cook at home or why my maids can't cook at home. I have to answer if this is religious or personal choice of mine. People sympathize with my husband as if he doesn't get to eat at home. My husband has no issues whatsoever but people do. Will I let my children eat non veg? Why haven't they tried it till now? So on and so forth. I don't have answers and no judgements here. Its just something I do. Do I have to keep justifying?
Now the best part is whenever we go out, I choose and order the non vegetarian food for him. Years of working in the hotel industry has made me a pro at recognizing the good dishes even if I don't eat them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nange Paon in Navratri

-
When I was working and staying in the hostel, I kind of stopped believing in most festivals and rituals. I thought all this was some weird things which people did, it had no scientific base and why should I follow anyone. In the college hostel, vacations were time to go home and not connected with any festival except Diwali. Sophia College hostel was a cocoon in the heart of South Mumbai. The campus with an old palace building was a quiet oasis with trees and birds, in the mayhem of Mumbai. No festival touched it unless the college celebrated it. The Polytechnic had rock shows and one Dandiya night every year, which it soon stopped having by 1988. Only celebration was the Vegetable Biryani in lunch on Sundays. The Polytechnic hostel did not even believe in pampering the children with food. Memories of bread being there round the clock for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. For them, while the non vegetarians ate eggs for breakfast, the vegetarian had bread. And then when non vegetaria
Read more

Antakshari

-
Today we were playing antakshari at the Holi get together. We did not know any new songs so naturally only the golden melodies were being sung. The whole generation playing antakshari was singing the similar era songs on the alphabets they got. I realised a couple of things. In English language there is no game like Antakshari. How many sentences end with I or The? How can you sing when most songs start with I, The, Once, When and How?I cannot resist explaining the game, we all grow up with, in India. Antakshari means Ant : end , Akshar: alphabet ie last letter of the word. Akshar also means God. It also means God has the last word. Its a game with two teams and we call the teams as  'party'.  We say "Baithey baithey kya karein, karna hai kuchh kaam, shuru karo antakshari , le ka Hari ka naam." Translated from Hindi, We are sitting idle, lets do some work, lets start antakshari, starting with God's name. In Indian games, there is a lot of religion or belief in Go
Read more

Shraddh period in Hinduism

-
According to the Hindu calendar, this is the shraddh period going on.  For fifteen days in a year, the ancestors are remembered and prayed to. No auspicious events / ceremonies take place in this time. People use the tithi/date of death to invite a Pandit and feed the departed soul. It means you remember the person passed away, give food to the Pandit and the crows. People keep a cooked meal on the terrace. They try to make the favourite food of the departed person. My memories are of my Grandma mixing and crushing all the savouries with her hands and when it was in form of  a paste, my Uncle would go to the terrace and throw the food for the crows. Crows in Hinduism are considered messengers of the departed souls. A lot of people feed Gathiyas to the crows for the full year. If your ancestors are happy, then your life goes well ,is the general belief amongst Hindus. The shraddh period falls exactly between Ganpati and Navratri. One does not buy a house or have a wedding in this time.
Read more