I drive through the jungle every day at noon. It is a small strip of road connecting two thoroughfares. On one side loom corporate buildings with extraterrestrial names. On the other is Terra Infirma, a midden of garbage pullulant with nascent life. The submerged bones of abandoned vehicles are festive with washing as newer dwellings of tarp and tin mushroom past the squelch of tamped plastic.
One afternoon I surprised a little girl in a blue skirt dancing alone in the rain. The jungle had her at its mercy — chikungunya, dengue, diarrhoea, encephalitis — who knows what next, man-eaters, child eaters all. The pale horseman was everywhere, and what did she have as defence?
When I was her age, man-eaters were a real presence in my life. I’d met a few at the zoo, but more in the tales of that intrepid hunter, Jim Corbett. The misty Himalayas, with their uncertain huddle of villages existed for the sole purpose of Corbett’s man-friendly gun. To my eight-year-old eyes, the unstated story was far more vivid: a bunch of craven villagers bullied by a tiger gone rogue, approach noble gora with gun. After that, easy-peasy: build machan, tether goat, beat drums loud enough to wake the napping beast, and step aside to let Corbett take aim.
The books, all of them, ended with a triumphant picture of Corbett, jackbooted foot planted on a stripy carcass, while a servile contingent cheered at a remove. Since none of those books had pictures, I must have imagined it all.
There is one fact I’m sure I did not imagine. All Corbett’s books had children stuffing themselves with halwa-puri.
Now what exactly was that? “There’s halwa and then there’s puri,” my mother stated, totally ignoring the hyphen. That hyphen was everything. Without it, halwa, any halwa, no matter how delectable, was just a sticky sweet, and puri a trifling dirigible. That hyphen commandeered their coincidence: halwa-puri became the stuff you battened on when man-eaters were on the prowl.
My mother’s efforts at Corbett cuisine made even our cat look smug. What good could it do against a tiger? I don’t remember anything of Corbett’s tigers, but I’ve thought of his halwa-puri every day since I began navigating the jungle.
Then yesterday, an emergency took me down that road at 6 am. At the corner is New Hindustan Chinese, usually shuttered, barred and locked. It was open this morning, and judging from the buzz, business was booming.
Chinese food at dawn? I couldn’t see past the wall of male backs to see what they were gobbling with such gusto, and the misty air lacked the queasy accord instantly recognisable as Indian Chinese: charred garlic and cabbage panicked into a cold sweat with vinegar and soy. Instead, a very different aroma inflated the alveoli with cheer.
Warm wheat. Syrup. Ghee.
Chinese?
I parked on the nearest dunghill and picked my way back disbelievingly. My nose hadn’t misled me. New Hindustan Chinese was making a paratha — one enormous paratha on a tawa three feet wide. On the adjoining counter a kadhai glowered with a red meld of sooji halwa. Two young boys greeted me cheerily, ‘Aadha kilo? Pau?’ I’d never thought of paratha by the kilo before. A glance behind the older kid explained the logic. A plastic tub held a glistening coil of dough, sleek, puffy, sated like a python and at least a kilo strong, the paratha unborn.
‘Laccha Paratha?’ I asked.
Salman, the chef, corrected me gravely. ‘Normal Paratha.’
‘Sooji halwa,’ Usman, the sous, added.
I had never seen a pre-paratha as abnormal as this one.
Salman agreed.
Other names prevailed among the non-cognoscenti: Special Paratha, Halwa Paratha, Halwa-puri.
Halwa-puri!
The hyphen rang out clear as a bell.
Salman shrugged. ‘People who don’t know better will call it anything.’
It seemed custom-built for Corbett.
After all these years, and far away from misty Kumaon — halwa-puri!
Salman begins a stretch and twirl routine that will have any pizzaiolo at the last gasp of envy. On the waiting tawa a puddle of ghee renders its grains unwillingly. Wider, thinner, higher floats the paratha, a celestial body now, drifting just short of the cobwebbed ceiling. Gravity wins and a big pale moon floats down, light as a leaf, into a welcoming sear of ghee.
We breathe deep. We notice trees. Birds give us gossip of the night. Dogs rouse themselves with short eager barks. A woman hurries up the road.
Salman, meanwhile, has turned the paratha. Little bubbles of gold have appeared across its bland white surface. Slow cooking keeps it soft longer, Salman says, and douses it with more ghee. Fifteen minutes, and half a kilo of vanaspati, completes the transformation from greasy dough to flaky, fragrant delight. Slap on a wedge of syrupy halwa, and summon every man-eater in the terai — Corbett, I’ve got your gun!
The author’s most recent work is The Secret Life of Zika Virus (Speaking Tiger, 2017).