Longing for Golgappe

Growing up in India, as we moved every few years between the various cities and towns on India, you would think that I experienced diversity in spades.  You would be right. I can follow various languages aside from my native Tamil – Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Hindi, Mumbai Hindi (a whole different breed from the UP Hindi that I heard in my teen years).  I can speak at least pidgin versions of many of them.  I am very familiar with the great regional dishes – the deeply satisfying rajma-kadhi-chawal of Punjab, the delicate textures in the kachori-sabzi of Uttar Pradesh, the complex flavors of bisi-bele-huli-anna of Karnataka, the mellow ash gourd and black-eyed peas laden olan of Kerala… it’s all part of my palate thanks to my childhood travels and my mother’s eagerness to learn how to make many of the culinary masterpieces of daily life from our neighbors.

However, when it came to street food, for many years I was a complete novice.  I knew nothing at all about the Indian street staples such as  sliced tiara-like segments of sour-sweet barely ripe mangos drizzled with lime and chilli powder at Marina Beach, sugar-cane juice squeezed right in front of you at Lal Bagh, a slice of watermelon that left red dribbles down the sides of your mouth and parts of your arms as you walked through Ajmal Khan Road, warm newspaper cones of boiled salted peanuts with just the right dash of masala powder any winter evening from a street vendor outside your home in Karol Bagh, cucumber-tomato-cheese sandwiches laced with ketchup and green mint sauce on a corner street in Sion, and many many others.  Actually, this is incorrect.  I knew all about them – just did not have a clue how any of them tasted on the street. 

This was because my father, Appa, had a fraught relationship with street food.  To him, street food was an unforgivable no-no - a siren so irresistible and devilish that one possibly needed evil-eye amulets and garlic-laden crosses held aloft to ward off the temptations.  As a child, I was dragged across the street quickly past the seductive cart and the wares sold within.  Street food was so laden with disease and pestilence that we would all be stricken down within mere seconds of our tongues touching it – or at least so it felt to me based on the fervor and urgency with which he denounced it.  “That old frying oil!” began one regularly pronounced diatribe.  I now suspect that as a kid he had some personal experience with this, and all his protective instincts seized up into an Iron Dome of impenetrable logic with which there was no arguing.

So.  I watched in envious agony as my friends stopped after school to buy juicy multi-colored barf ka gola (popsicles) from the cart vendors outside every school gate.  Life is unbearable on the hot summer afternoons when you walk empty-handed alongside a friend who is slurping and licking her way joyously around a biliously orange and blue icy concoction.  Upon reaching home, I would be fed a nutritious tiffin of dosai-sambaar and thayir saadam by my mother, and the knowledge of this only left me silently seething in anguish during the walk home.  But I was cursed to be an innately obedient child who really did not question my parents’ edicts sufficiently enough to actively overturn them.  

The years went by, and my mom actually made many of the street delicacies at home – sliced mangoes drizzled with chilli and lime – check, home-made mango ice-cream – check, sandwiches with Amul cheese and home-made ketchup – check.  However, you will agree with me that this is not at all the same thing.  Then, when I was in 9th grade, during the middle of the school year, Appa got transferred out of Allahabad to Bangalore.  Since leaving in the middle of the school year would cause a lot of disruption to my education, it was decided that my mom and I would remain in Allahabad for the remaining months of the school year and join Appa in Bangalore after the year completed. 

A week after Appa left, the golgappa-walla came around at 6pm as he had had every day for the past 3 years.  And as he had, for every day for the past three years, he kept walking past our home without wasting any breath calling out “Gol Gappe! Gol Gappe!”  My mother heard the cart bell tinkling as he walked past, and she stepped up to the gate and called out, “Golgappe waale!  Idhar aao!”  “Golgappe man, come here!”   While I watched in confusion, she beckoned to him.  He probably was as surprised as I was to hear this from the lady of the home that never ever bought anything from him.  

Serving golgappe (also known as pani puri, phuchka, gupchup – each being minor variations on the basic theme) is a fine art as well as a synthesis of everything that Appa feared.  A small hollow golden fried shell is stuffed with boiled potatoes, maybe boiled garbanzo beans, then picked up and held by the golgappe walla with one hand, while he pours a spicy minty dark broth into the shell with the other, and hands it to you.  Some servers have been known to just dip the entire shell (and portion of the holding hand) into the broth and hand you the dripping, now broth-filled shell.  You pop the entire thing into your mouth for a crunchy, juicy, soft potato-fried shell, mint-cilantro, ying-yang detonation in your mouth.  But you better be quick about it, because the minute he hands you your gappe, he serves the next person waiting, and will soon circle back to you with another ready offering.  The common joke in Northern India is that the pani, broth, of the golgappa, derives its exquisite complex flavor on the street probably because it is intermingled with the sweat of the server.  But I digress.

My mom paid him and asked him to serve us both.  We stood at our gate gobbling them as fast as he could get them into our hands.  When we were done, we stumbled away from the gate, perhaps ten minutes later, completely sated, with our tongues still encased in briny, minty ecstasy.  As we went inside to clean up, I looked at my mom, waiting for some explanation.  She shrugged and declared with careful nonchalance that I now know was designed to avoid implying any disrespect to Appa, “I always wanted to try it.  Pretty good, illa?”  I quietly and completely agreed with her sentiments.  Every few evenings of each week, for the subsequent four wintry months, my mother and I made up lost ground – we ate golgappe, bhelpuri, samosa chole, roasted peanuts, anything that a passing cart chef could conjure up at our gate.  I have no recollection of any adverse effects, but then, I may be just willfully forgetting them now.   All I remember is my mom and I scarfing down the wares before they would once again move away from easy reach. 

This led, over the years, to an unspoken pact between my mother and me.  Whenever just the two of us went out, in whatever town we were in then, we would get ourselves some little delight from the street – chilli bajjis from a street vendor in Adyar, pakodas in Ghaffar Market, brain tonic (a cleverly named fried spicy peanut concoction served in newspaper cones) in Gandhi bazaar, Softy ice-cream in Usman Road.  These ventures were never analyzed later at home.  However, to this day, the possibility of having golgappe presents an allure to me that is unmatched by any other culinary offering.