A Place Called Poetry
Food and Conversation: An Essay
An erstwhile student and I were on a lunch date.
Perusing the menu, I spotted an intriguing entry. The name was innocuous enough: the menu has it down as ‘Chicken Pocket.’ It sounded interesting, so I ordered it. We were inside this place called ‘Poetry’, in Juhu, Aditi and I, and she was educating me about several things that she found sadly lacking in my education.
Aditi had been a student in one of my science classes and she was a bored and blasé teenager, who stared straight at me during my first lecture with her class. I knew that look: ‘Challenge me,” it said, “Show me that it is worth attending your lecture.” So I did. Over the next few days, I watched those eyes lose their indifference, become sharper, more interested, more intrigued. And then I saw her leaning forward, with a sparkle in her eyes: I saw her shushing her friends who were trying to talk to her when I was teaching. The day she opened up about all the mischief she was capable of, and she had done in school, I knew I had won.
I had got through.
Aditi is intelligent and congenitally bored. She wanted every moment in her life to be challenging and intriguing. And she is multilingual. She is equally fluent in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and French. And she is capable of giving a sharp and incisive set down to anyone not worthy of her time, in any of those languages. Or with one pointedly raised eyebrow. Classy and street smart at the same time, she decided that I would be the only person she wished to keep in touch with, from College. Over the years she sent me urgent texts asking that we meet up. No topics of discussion were off limits. Food, four-letter words, ex flames, books and movies, the ‘middle-aged uncle’ who was ‘staking’ her out, how she outwitted him; and her battle with drugs and depression. I was a recipient of all these confidences. And we laughed. Oh, a lot!
In the restaurant, a shallow bowl arrived, in some time, for Aditi. At the bottom was the goodness of flavoured, whipped yoghurt nestling innocently, topped with fruits and nuts and seeds, minuscule bits as well as larger pieces.
Then my order, ‘Chicken Pocket’ arrived.
Not realising that this was the poetry in ‘Poetry’ I cut a bit, and popped it into my mouth.
And then I had to stop talking for some time because something wonderful was happening in the vicinity of my heart and soul. The slice of roast chicken was stuffed with a creamy mix of spinach, mushrooms and spicy, flavorful cream. This concoction rested on a bed of mashed potatoes, and the in-house salad was arranged tastefully on the side. The whole of it lay on a layer of a very zesty sauce with a lemony nip.
Every time you cut into this slice of paradise, you get a cross section, consisting of the succulence of chicken, the saucy zest of the zest, the comfort of the potatoes, the magic of the creamy mushrooms and spinach, and the crispness of the in-house salad.
For some time, I thought that I had seen Chandrayan 2, the Indian lunar mission exploring device.
It is a good place to go to, Poetry, in Juhu. It is light-filled, with lots of room in it, both for your feet and elbows, as well as for groups of different sizes. The waiters are efficient, but unobtrusive, and don’t stand in corners, staring at you, or breathing down your necks. The food takes some time to reach your table, which is very re assuring. You know that it is not two-day old food that has been popped into the microwave, for a quick fix.
Here, is food that creates joy.
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
Tagging Marcus aka Gregory Maidman, who states that bad food renders him grief-stricken, and/or boiling mad, like it does, me. Cheers!
