Poetry

It’s Like a Curry Sandwich

by Skanda Prasad

Bengaluru, 1994

Amma never made this at home,
and Grandma — bless her heart—
would’ve fainted at the touch
of the proscribed onions,
but ever so rarely we’d traipse
to the chaat shop,

uncurl our fists from gnarled fingers,
point a chopstick digit, toothpick-length,
at the chalkboard menu and ask
for pubbuhjee. Appa’s moustache
always smiled

before his lips did,
translated child-talk
to the cashier I mistook
for a rapper when he screamed
over the kitchen clangs

One masala dosa one idli two coffee two badam milk one upma
and two paav bhaaji, forty-six rupees please.

Paav Bhaji
Bread and cooked veggies.

First, the boiling: Potatoes,
conquistador trophies from Peru,
rotund constancies, first fit
only for cattle,
then, the poor;

peas, cauliflower, and carrots,
bouquets from the Fertile Crescent—
Middle East, Cyprus, Persia.

Then, the sautéing. Baptise in angry oil
cumin from the Levant, onions, garlic,
ginger from Nusantara; chillies and
capsicum, fiery shells of the Columbian
Exchange, and tomatoes
red like Aztec blood; hissing
aroma assailing the house, settling
on next month’s clothes.

Step three. The bubbling of the stew:
Vegetables — julienned, smashed, diced,
boiled, quartered, regressed to inchoateness,
New World and Old coalesced in roils
of butter; unblanded by salt and spices:
cinnamon, turmeric, cardamom, and black
pepper — the Indian heart of the dish—
Moluccan cloves, Iraqi fenugreek,
and dried chillies, suffusing
into each other
like a murmuration of starlings

and crowned with a grove of cilantro,
lime, and tearfully shredded onions
atop ghee-toasted rolls of well-risen bread.

III

‘Pav Bhaji’
Paõ: Bread — from the Portuguese patois

of Vasco da Gama, First Count
of Vidigueira, Second Viceroy of India,
Admiral of the Seas of Arabia, Persia,
India and all the Orient, discoverer
of routes known to Arabs, Indians,
and Chinese
only for millennia;

who, in search of ‘Christians
and spices’, misheard Krishna as Christ,
thought temples were bastard churches,
and the natives, lost Catholics;

who, when laughed out of court for his gifts
to the Samoothiri of Malabar — sugar, oil,
honey, six hats, and four scarlet cloaks—
decided to help himself
to sixteen fishermen — savages,
bravely seized — as he decamped
from God’s own country.

He must’ve liked the taste enough
for a bigger helping on the second sojourn:
Arab trade ships, fishing villages, factories,
lips and ears of a Hindu priest — the same one
who’d introduced him to the Malabar King—
helpfully replaced with the ears of a dog,

and four-hundred pilgrims,
Mecca-bound, looted, beaten,
locked in their ship, and burnt to a crisp:

fish folk, coolies, mothers squeezing their babies
through red-hot portholes, merchants, cooks
stewing vegetables — Bhaji — for dinner
after the evening prayers, genuflections
towards a land they’d never see.

Atlanta, 2017

‘Paav Bhaajee’

Ordered one, this time with clear vowels,
clenched jaw, and the extra sprinkle
of Americanese, so I’d be understood
when asking for cheese on top

No rap waiter this time, just a kid,
Aum tattoo and coifed moustache,
greeting us with namaste y’all, mangling
the names — I made him repeat
Sev Bataataa Dahi Puri five times
for a laugh, stretched out

till the check arrived
with my chai latte.

I taught myself to cook
Paav Bhaji the next day.

Appeared in Issue Fall '20