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I might as well blame Rohinton Mistry for the pani-puri cravings which began assailing me last week. I left work a little early on Friday and it occurred to me I might be able to assuage them on my way home. I didn't feel like going "all the way" to Little India, so instead I walked over to the stretch of Ridge just south of Devon where I remember there being a hole-in-the-wall much favoured by cabdrivers. It's called Bismillah Restaurant and it's everything I hoped it would be--especially when it comes to beardy men--except that pani-puri is not on the menu. I didn't want to pass up an opportunity to try their cooking, so I ordered a shami kebab rolled in a chapati. Tasty, fresh, and on the verge of being too spicy but still within the zone where the extreme flavourfulness overwhelms the mouth-destroying properties.
I came away very pleased but still not entirely satisfied. When I woke up from my golden siesta and saw that it was lunchtime, it occurred to me how very quickly I could be at Uru-Swati. So after some dithering, I hustled down to Devon and...just missed the westbound bus. Fortunately, another came along ten minutes later and after an uncomfortable period of hearing a toddler scream while his mother chatted away on her cell phone, I was chowing down. Rounding out the meal were a couple of dahi vada and a creamy cup of masala chai.
Afterwards, I purposely avoided going into Patel Brothers or Mughal Bakery in order to break the association in my mind between Little India and grand expeditions. It's no further from our house than Andersonville, which we visit every week now, yet I find myself approaching it with the same degree of planning as out South Side friends. Do we have enough achar? What about chand cookies? Should I buy some frozen and rush home? Forget it--I went to Patel Café for a messy and delicious fig ice cream cone.
But of course one place I couldn't pass up was India Book House. Part of what inspired the trip, after all, was reading this Sepia Mutiny post and wondering if I could find Cour or some other South Asian women writers there. In general, my reading tends to be very scattershot, guided more by what I stumble across in used bookstores than by any programmatic approach to a country's literature. But IBH's offerings are pretty scattershot themselves, so I found no Cour but I did pick up Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man (published in the USA as both Cracking India and 1947 to recall the title of the Deepa Mehta film adaptation).
I also found a sale copy of Stanley Wolpert's Shameful flight and, as I've never read a decent history of Partition, began reading it immediately. He writes a very good narrative, concentrating on key episodes in the five years leading up to 1947 so that it doesn't become too unwieldy. So far, not many of the personalities involved come away smelling very rosy. Rajagopalachari cuts the best figure among the Indian leaders, a model of reasonableness against the obstinacy of the rest of Congress, not to mention Jinnah and the Muslim League. (There's a particularly breathtaking bit of naïveté in the form of Mahatma's wartime suggestion that if the British simply picked up and left, the Japanese would lose interest in invading India.)
But they're at least depicted as being on the right side of history, unlike the diehard imperialists of the Raj. I never quite realised the depths of Churchill's bigotry against India and the Indians. He seems not only dead-set on scuppering any kind of just settlement but completely barbarous even when it comes to simple administrative matters. More people died in wartime famines than in Partition-related violence four years later, despite ample food stores. (The Viceroy of India had to beg him for months for 50,000 tonnes of food relief when Britain had 6 million tonnes in floating stores offshore.) And we haven't even gotten to the real hatchet job, as the cover blurb tells me it's Wolpert's ambition to lay the blame for Partition and the decades of instability which have followed firmly at the feet of Lord Mountbatten.
So you can credit Mistry with sending me on a South Asia kick. I only wish his book had been a bit better. Some of the pathos is really affecting, but the melodramatic twists and turns do prompt some eye-rolling at times. For that reason, it might be worth sending it to my sister.
I came away very pleased but still not entirely satisfied. When I woke up from my golden siesta and saw that it was lunchtime, it occurred to me how very quickly I could be at Uru-Swati. So after some dithering, I hustled down to Devon and...just missed the westbound bus. Fortunately, another came along ten minutes later and after an uncomfortable period of hearing a toddler scream while his mother chatted away on her cell phone, I was chowing down. Rounding out the meal were a couple of dahi vada and a creamy cup of masala chai.
Afterwards, I purposely avoided going into Patel Brothers or Mughal Bakery in order to break the association in my mind between Little India and grand expeditions. It's no further from our house than Andersonville, which we visit every week now, yet I find myself approaching it with the same degree of planning as out South Side friends. Do we have enough achar? What about chand cookies? Should I buy some frozen and rush home? Forget it--I went to Patel Café for a messy and delicious fig ice cream cone.
But of course one place I couldn't pass up was India Book House. Part of what inspired the trip, after all, was reading this Sepia Mutiny post and wondering if I could find Cour or some other South Asian women writers there. In general, my reading tends to be very scattershot, guided more by what I stumble across in used bookstores than by any programmatic approach to a country's literature. But IBH's offerings are pretty scattershot themselves, so I found no Cour but I did pick up Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man (published in the USA as both Cracking India and 1947 to recall the title of the Deepa Mehta film adaptation).
I also found a sale copy of Stanley Wolpert's Shameful flight and, as I've never read a decent history of Partition, began reading it immediately. He writes a very good narrative, concentrating on key episodes in the five years leading up to 1947 so that it doesn't become too unwieldy. So far, not many of the personalities involved come away smelling very rosy. Rajagopalachari cuts the best figure among the Indian leaders, a model of reasonableness against the obstinacy of the rest of Congress, not to mention Jinnah and the Muslim League. (There's a particularly breathtaking bit of naïveté in the form of Mahatma's wartime suggestion that if the British simply picked up and left, the Japanese would lose interest in invading India.)
But they're at least depicted as being on the right side of history, unlike the diehard imperialists of the Raj. I never quite realised the depths of Churchill's bigotry against India and the Indians. He seems not only dead-set on scuppering any kind of just settlement but completely barbarous even when it comes to simple administrative matters. More people died in wartime famines than in Partition-related violence four years later, despite ample food stores. (The Viceroy of India had to beg him for months for 50,000 tonnes of food relief when Britain had 6 million tonnes in floating stores offshore.) And we haven't even gotten to the real hatchet job, as the cover blurb tells me it's Wolpert's ambition to lay the blame for Partition and the decades of instability which have followed firmly at the feet of Lord Mountbatten.
So you can credit Mistry with sending me on a South Asia kick. I only wish his book had been a bit better. Some of the pathos is really affecting, but the melodramatic twists and turns do prompt some eye-rolling at times. For that reason, it might be worth sending it to my sister.