It has been twenty years that i have been in the US, and i haven’t yet been able to figure out why there is no place in this country that makes a half-decent biryani. By biryani, i mean mutton biryani of course. Chicken biryani is a pale imitation of the real thing, like the Ray-Ban knockoff ‘Roy-ban glasses’ you would get in New Market, and vegetable biryani is marriage without sex.
Of course biryani is on the menu of every restaurant in the US that plays instrumental ‘taal se taal mila’, but inevitably i find these $15.99+tax biryanis to be over-spiced rice concoctions with the meat discordant to the overall taste profile, like a disinterested second generation NRI-kid at a Carnatic recital, there but not quite. I have been told it is because i am looking only for a specific kind of biryani, the Kolkata kind, when there are more types of biryani than independent candidates in Indian elections and that may well be true, but still does not answer my question: Why have i never found one place in the continental United States of America with a good Kolkata biryani, and god knows i have looked.
Because Kolkata biryani is not just an item on the menu. Like the music of Jaan Tere Naam and Sachin Tendulkar’s off-drives, it is a link to my childhood, when Bollywood was not political and you had the time to watch every over of a Test match, and one could savour, second by second, the orchestra in the mouth, of the juice from the mutton mixing with the mild heat from the rice, and the texture of the egg complementing the smoothness of the potato, without that voice in your head whispering of the terrible effect on your LDL-HDL numbers and your blood glucose. So maybe, it’s not really Kolkata biryani i am looking for, but a very specific gustatory experience, of a biryani and a Mithun movie on the cable, then an hour of deep sleep followed by two more hours of cricket on the streets, the exact taste of how things used to be, of home, not just a place in space but also in time, and maybe my search for the perfect biryani is doomed from the get go, because nothing ever will measure up, not even if cooked by the personal chef of the Nawab of Oudh, because what is gone is gone.
Or maybe they should cook the meat with the rice better, not bury their cluelessness by an overdose of spice, and definitely not reheat yesterday’s leftovers in the microwave and serve.
