The flute-seller’s swan song. The lost itinerant hawkers of the bylanes of India.

K returned home after a 10 day-long work trip this morning. My initial reactions, when she walked in with her suitcase, were those of joy and elation. Followed by hunger pangs. It was 9.30 am and it would be a while before #kayteecooks came to work. I took matters in my hands. Made myself Gruyere cheese chilli fried eggs and sourdough toast and sat down for breakfast. K gave me company with an espresso.

Today’s #finelychoppedbreakfast

She then showered and went to sleep. Little Nimki was delirious with joy to have his mummy back. He gave her the cold shoulder for a short bit and then capitulated and snuggled on her duvet, lay on K and went off to sleep. Baby Loaf sulked longer. “A 10 day leave is not on,” Mummy Loaf. He thawed after a couple of hours, got up on the bed, joined his brother and snuggled into Mummy Loaf and slept.

Little Nimki  was so happy

“Wake me up when you eat,” said K before she went to sleep.

“That will be at 3 or after,” I told her. I did yoga nidra myself and chilled a bit after that before I finally took shower. My back was hurting and I wanted to rest it a bit and the yoga nidra and hot shower helped..

Baby Loaf thaws

I went to the kitchen at 3.30pm, took our a fillet of rawas, which was marinated in Ankola Masala Fish Curry Masala and salt,  from the I fridge. I placed it on a cooking foil, drizzled coconut oil on it and bunged it in the oven for 15 min at 180 C. 

I then checked the chicken curry that #KayteeCooks had made for our dinner and the sambar that she had made for lunch. I was satisfied with the way both looked and nodded to no-one in particular.

Yesterday I wrote on my social media about how I felt I felt there is a business opportunity for life coaches to teach people on how to give constructive and usable feedback. Learning to give feedback is a life skill that I picked up during my market research days. A consultant took a workshop with us managers on how to give feedback to team member when I was in IMRB. The job of market research itself is to give consumer insights based feedback which clients could use to sell better. Learning how to take and use feedback? Hmm…that’s a tough task for a Bengali, an Aquarian and a first born son!

I have tried to use what one had learnt on giving feedback on both our cooks to varying degrees of success. Today was a good day.

Murgir Jhol by #kayteecooks today

The chicken curry that #kayteecooks makes leaves K and me perplexed. It is red, soupy and flavourless. Nothing like the Bengali murgir jhol, Parsi margi nu ras or even Maharashtrian chicken rassa, which are light and yet bursting with flavour. I was determined to fix things today. I gave her the spice mix and specific instructions on what to do: add dry whole spices to mustard oil, then the paste of 2 onions, proceed further only when they are brown, then add ginger and garlic pastes, when this is browned add chicken which you will marinated first with the spices I gave you and a spoon of dahi. NO TOMATO (since she does not understand ‘less tomato’). Stir and ONLY when the chicken is brown, do you add water. And only half a coffee mug. 

The one line brief to her was, ‘brown hone do. Phir taste aayega.’ She take it to heart and made me get up (I was chilling after breakfast) to see if the chicken and onions had browned enough before she added water.

You might say that this is micro-management and not feedback. Whatever it takes to get the job done. The curry was magnificent. If you care about the end goal, you will know how to motivate and lead your team. If not, it’s quiet quitting time for all. And my meals are too important for that!

Sambar by #kayteecooks

Unlike in the case of the chicken curry, #Kayteecooks is a cat when it comes to making sambar. K wanted  sambar for lunch today after her long flight back. I was facing a small problem with our sambar. We add vegetables to it and veggies such as brinjal, okra, pumpkin melt just into the dal. I thought of a solution. I told #kayteecooks to saute the veggies separately and to add them to sambar once she opens the pressure cooker in which she had cooked the dal. ‘Saute’ is #kayteecooks’ favourite kitchen term and she jumped at the suggestion and we got the desired result. The veggies were intact and yet cooked properly.

K, who had not had any Indian spice during the 10 days that she spent in Paris and Bucharest, loved it. Unlike in the chicken curry, where #kayteecooks was out of her depth, here I gave a small suggestion and she landed the rest. Feedback can be of many types, but the most important thing is to ensure that the one you are giving feedback to can act on it and I was happy to have had two successes today!

My #EatBetter lunch. Sambar, grilled rawas, red rice

I heard the sound of someone playing a flute outside while I heated the food. The notes were high and off key. The tune was from DDLJ…tujhe dekha to yeh jana sanam. The sound became increasingly loud and rather shrill. 

I went to the windows to shut them and restore some sanity. That’s when the second tune from the same movie was played, mere khwabo main jo aye, still off key and shrill!

It was a quiet afternoon and then…

It reminded me of a morning in Calcutta from the hoary past. It was around noon, the year 1995. I had stepped out of college after the first class of the day. I had tickets for the movie at some theatre near Presidency College whose name I do not remember. I’d never been to that theatre before. Or after. I was alone as the others who were supposed to join me, had not. I entered the theatre when this song was playing, with Kajol pirouetting in a rain soaked white dress, on the screen. 

I smiled at the memory. I looked down from our window. I saw a flute seller who was carrying a bag full of flutes?. playing one to announce his presence. One of the drivers from our building stepped out from the gate and spoke to the flute seller and patted him on his back. The flute seller stopped and moved a few yards awaya. Then started again. Our very own Cacofonix (from Asterix) was unperturbed. 

Awaz kum karon

Seeing him took me back a further 15 years. From 1995 this time to 1980. We had just moved into India and Calcutta. A world alien to me after UK and Iran. My dad had rented the ground floor of a two storied house in Dhakuria in south Calcutta (as it was called then). I would often sit at the verandah, aged 6, watching a fascinating new world with the same intensity as our elder cat Baby Loaf, who loves looking down on the street for hours from our apartment.

One day a flute seller walked by our lane. I made my parents buy me a flute. Then proceeded to torture them for a day or so before I moved on from the flute to whatever caught my fancy. There were many more sounds and sights that entertained chubby little me while I sat on a mora (stool) on our verandah. We did not have iPads in 1980!

The sound of a dugdugee (a sort of miniature dholak which Lord Shiva is supposed to jam on) would come from the guys who could make monkeys and bears dance for you, or whose kids would do dangerous balancing acts on poles. Hoping to get the attention of kids like us who would get their parents to loosen their pursestrings. There was  the sound of the flute of the snake charmer. 

‘Kwaliteee Kuwaliteeeeeeeee,’ went the icecream vendor at 4.30 pm. I would run inwards, specially if my dad was there. He never said no to me. I would get my chocobar.

Come dusk and a couple of swarthy men, dressed in banyans and veshtis folded above their knees, would walk down the lane pushing a dosa cart. As if the sound of the wheels rolling on street was not enough, they would clang the iron griddle pan with stainless steel ladles to announce their arrival. My mum would order a dosa which she and I then shared. I am yet to have a dosa that tastes as good and I have had many over the following 42 years.

Come the pujas and groups of young men would arrive at the gate of our verandah and say, ‘boudi pujor chaada’…(money for the pujas)… once when it was raining heavily for days…the same boys came to our house with big bed sheets spread out and held by them. They were collecting rice, dal and money, to feed the those who lived in the Ponchantola ‘bosti’ (slum/ shantytown) and who had been rendered homeless in the rains.

At times one would hear the twang of the cotton-mattress guy who would pull the strings of the gigantic ektara-like instrument with which he turned cotton into mattress, pillows, quilts and other huggable things. This was usually after Kali Puja and before winter. I would love to see the mattress-wala work when he was called to make a new quilt or pad up an existing mattress. Those mattresses had no orthopaedic, foam memory, acu-spine technology etc, but I do not recall any grown up complain of backaches in the 1980s. 

Come election time and there would be processions going on, people walking, or on cycles, canvassing for votes ….’amader dabi mante hobe,’ ‘inklab jindabad’ etc. Once my father got into an altercation with them and his elder cousin, who lived down the road, separated him from the mob. 

I was a single child then. Just as Baby Loaf was till little Nimki was born. 

I would often sit alone in the balcony at Dhakuria. Bare-chested and in shorts. Perspiring furiously as I was not accustomed to the weather. Trying to keep myself entertained.At times my mum would give me company. At times the grand-daughter of our landlord. She was a year elder to me. At times just  mosquitoes.

My dad would be home on Sundays. He would be poring over fat medical books, case files and x-rays in his study. On his table, which I later used, and which my brother (who was yet to be born) made his after I left the city. I would at in the verandah. At times peeping in through the door to look at my dad. He would look up and smile at me. Just as I do at Baby Loaf and little Nimki when they join me while I type in my study.

Baby Loaf watches me while I work. Just as baby Raja watched his (Loaf’s) grandpa.

The folks who excited my mom, and all the mashimas and pishimas in the para ( women in the neighbourhood), the most were the purano kapor bashon- walas. Folks who would take old clothes and give new utensils in their place. Rele life barter you can set. well before social media collabs came into existence. 

My mother would come back into the house, 2 to 3 hours of hard bargaining and a couple of sack-full of clothes and bedsheets later. She would be carrying a small stainless steel saucer and a spoon, or a utensil to make rice in, or a couple of stainless steel glasses. Grinning like Kapil Dev Nikhanj would 3 year later while holding the Prudential World Cup on the stands of Lords. 

Our own world had changed by then with my dad passing away. The Dhakuria house was relegated to my memory till I visited it two decades later with K on a trip back to Kolkata and saw that it still exists. 

The verandah was empty. As was my dad’s study. It was now someone’s bedroom.

The microwave pinged. The food was ready. We sat down to eat. What will happen to the songs of our streets, I wondered, as our houses grow higher and higher, the gates taller and taller.

I don’t have an answer. Do you?