For whom the belly tolls

This was one of the many moments that have, subsequently, been rued. It was another one of those times when the larynx and the brain were not connected and yet, the mouth found a mind of its own and opened to speak. The rather plump teacher in school informed the rather skinny me, “Looking at you, one would think there is a famine in the country.” Without thinking, I had retorted, “And looking at you, sir, one would think that you are the cause of it.” Needless to add, we did not see paunch to belly after that.

Our older son, who was good at drawing, once made a picture of me in my uniform of jeans, sneakers and a tee. Not to be outdone, the younger one presented his own version of me. This was a rather large representation of the alphabet ‘p’. The explanation that came with it was simple head to toe, the stick was me and the bulge was my stomach. Combined, they made ‘daddy’.

So how did that paunch, the subject of family portraits and assorted comments, arrive? Did it sneak in at night while one slept after a ‘hearty and handsome’ repast, as a phrase of middle-English goes? Did it decide to become an unforgiving appendage in a haze of alcohol and no exercise? While one still works out, the modus operandi of the paunch, one knows that one day it wasn’t there, and the next, it had arrived, sneakily whispering, “You are now middle-aged”. With bags full of calories, the unwelcome guest had come to stay. But now that it was here, there was little choice except to deal with it and even make friends with this new addition to the body.

I have never cared for the word ‘foodie’. In my head, it seems to imply that food is something we can do without. One may as well use words like ‘air-ie’, or ‘water-ie’. It becomes even worse when one thinks of the thousands that sleep on less than full stomachs. The Buddhist saint Milarepa survived for several years on nettle soup and many of his images depict him with a large earthen pot of what sustained him. That’s when even my thoughts turned to how some ingredients still come from the wild.

At different times of the year in the hills, many leaves, fungi and flowers collected from the wild are readily available in vegetable markets. For example, the fiddlehead fern with a thick stem, called lungru or lingri, grows in the mid-hills; this is cooked in yoghurt and can also be pickled. It can also be lightly sautéed. Bichhu buti, the stinging nettle; kachnaar, Bauhinia Tomentosa’s flowers; and bathu, a chenopod, are collected from the hillsides and cooked. But of all things that come from nature and form a part of regular cuisine, perhaps nothing can surpass guchhi, the morels that grow in cedar and oak woods and sell for substantial amounts in the markets. And this is apart from the endless array of herbs that find their way to markets in Delhi, Amritsar and elsewhere.

Just before the outbreak of Covid-19, we were invited to a meal that had been curated by a Michelin star chef out of ingredients collected from the forests. Seeds, sorrel, nettle stems and much else was used with aplomb and served with finesse. That our stomachs reeled with these unfamiliar ingredients makes for another tale. And that one time of food culled from the wild, at least for me, decided that one would happily stick with the familiar. Paunch or no paunch.