Bhaddoloker Cheley

Bhaddoloker Chheley

(the way it was in the 70s and 80s)

“Bhaddoloker Chheley”. There are passport phrases in almost all languages. An implicative comment, it is a shorthand that categorizes an entire lifestyle, not much different from a file type tag. Such phrases offer a passport to the holder, to certain entitlements, or lack thereof.

Bhaddoloker Chheley in Bengali means son of a gentleman (more properly Bhadrolok), a refrain heard repeatedly in Bengal. A son of a gentleman, by implication, is a gentleman. He is to be held as opposite to the lesser used, but oft implied, “Chotolok’er Cheley” (son of a small man), he is the one who will cross a puddle astride a rickshaw, the one who could make a social call in the evening, his folded cuffs exposing the HMT wristwatch with its oversize steel band hanging loose from his wrists, tackling twin rossogollas on his plate. He is to be trusted with a certain modicum of behavior, admitted into your house, an entrenched participant in a rigorous economic class structure. He may or may not have money—this was not important. He needed to have an education but was not required to be an intellectual—for there is another word for that –“Buddhijeebi” (crafted in pompous self definition, literally, as one who lives exploiting his brains).

Things would be particularly tragic if a Bhaddoloker Cheley went astray. Someone might say, “he was a gangster, a Bhaddoloker Cheley, turned into a gangster after falling in with foul company, and then got shot and killed—how tragic”. It would have been understandable, if the young man had projectiled out of the slums to this violent fate. But the thought of a refined bhadralok family, their neat life sliced apart by this wayward irregularity, was a cause for concern, a warning to other bhadraloks to keep their feet at bay from the incoming surf.

The bhadralok family did not admit to physical work (at least in the 70s and 80s). There was child labor for that, in the form of household help (today, though I understand that thankfully many of these children instead go to school). The gentleman might be an engineer, but a loose switch in his living room called for the electrician. And if the electrician was a dhoti clad bhadralok, then his presence warranted a few minutes in the living room, with tea and a couple of rossogollas.

Machismo has never been the bhadralok’s forte. Mock threats abound—“had you not been there to restrain me, I would have broken him into two”--but rarely culminate into action. “Seven millions sons, oh devoted Mother, you have made into Bengalis, not men. “--Rabindranath Tagore is quoted as saying in a book by Sikata Banerjee. Tagore, the poet of Bengal, did much to define this band of brotherhood. The bhadralok’s daughter, waiting in the wings for marriage, would have been a practitioner of his songs every Sunday morning. Seated on her bed, she would flay alive the gentle beauty of the poet’s work--heaving bosom in mournful, pendulous consonance above the swaying leather bellows of the harmonium.

Machismo aside, the Bhaddoloker Cheley, at some point in his life, has tried bodybuilding. This typically involved lathering himself up in mustard oil and spending a couple of weeks waving godas (heavy cast iron clubs), dressed in small shorts in the neighborhood “gym”—a simple construction typically next to a small park (I will bet that this practice, in the described form, is probably no more). Some of these kids would continue working out, developing bulging biceps and pecs and at this point they would cease to be bhadraloks. Bodybuilders had a peculiar set of norms. They would eat lots of ghee (clarified butter) and chickpeas. Raw eggs worked their way in after the movie Rocky was released in the late seventies. The iron that the weights were made of was sacrosanct. You could not contact it with your feet—this was a mark of disrespect—“lohay pa ditey nei”! If your feet touched them, you folded your hands and touched your forehead seeking forgiveness. Consequently, most Bengali bodybuilders ended up with spindly legs.

Emerging from their roots in the landed gentry and professional classes of the 19th. Century, who both aided and opposed the British, the ultimate bhadralok of the 1950’s was personified by characters such as the writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Strong willed, opinionated, fluent in the literature of both Bengal and England, he dedicated his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian”, in a quizzical act:“
“To the memory of the British Empire in India,
Which conferred subjecthood upon us,
But withheld citizenship.
To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:
"Civis Britannicus sum"
Because all that was good and living within us
Was made, shaped and quickened
By the same British rule.”

Taken in the context of the early 1950s, written by a man born in the late nineteenth century, the phrasing is understandable. Reading the book, one marvels at the extent of information available to the author in his developmental years. Most Bhadraloks in the decades following independence while not quite Nirad Babu clones, nonetheless retained an inherited set of values, albeit convoluted somewhat from what is reflected in Chaudhuri’s writings. The bhadralok was by and large an upright pillar of society, though not totally immune from an occasional trip to Kalighat (not for the right reasons) or some occasional graft during the time of the pujas. But their core set of values wove together in many instances a home environment where their children, wanting in many needs yet never lacking for books, had the opportunity to study and be mentored, and have equal access to knowledge comparable to almost anyone else in the world.

The bhadralok’s romantic sense of absolute expectation and its unfulfillment distinguished him. I have seen a gentleman walk into a test match and walk away just 10 minutes into the game, because he came to see the opening batsman Gavaskar play, and left after that wicket fell. According to him there was nobody else worth seeing and by departing, he made his point. And this is a constant theme, this separation on his own terms, figuratively or otherwise. “Class’ey keu uttar janto na, ami daralam, uttor ta diye beriye choley gelam class thekey”, said my chemistry teacher to me years ago, reminiscing his own days as a student—“nobody could answer the question, I simply stood up, gave the answer, and walked out of the class”— his departure was his exclamation point, signaling that he had nothing more to give, or take. V. S. Naipaul, in “A Million Mutinies Now”, describes the Presidency College physics professor Dipanjan Rai Chaudhuri, who did not do physics anymore because the problems that interested him, he did not possess the skills to solve, and the problems that he could tackle, did not interest him. Not letting his own limitations sully his high standards, he elevated himself out of this dilemma by quitting active research.

No description of a Bengali bhadralok is complete without a description of his organic urge to cross the mythical river. “Bolo Radhey, Brojosundari, par koro, par koro”—“Hey Radha (paramour of the god Krishna, and a general mythological figure), beauty of the forests, get me across (the river).” The theme is an important one, intended to bring about an equiibrium in the tired soul. Carried across the river he jettisons his weariness and his angst into the murky waters of the Ganga or Padma bringing closure onto himself at the opposing bank, into the comforting arms of “the mother”.

Much has obviously changed since those years. The internet has no doubt had a profound effect on the bhadralok. A few years back a modern “Bhoddoloker Cheley” sat next to me on an AI flight back to Calcutta. He was a freshman at MIT, returning home for the vacations. I mentioned to him how I, as a grad student in the US, had been excited on my first trip back to India some twenty years back and we talked about staying so far away from home. He looked at me as one might at an older practitioner of a trade. “I have heard that in those days you guys wrote like, letters and stuff?”.he asked.

www.indianfoodreviews.blogspot.com

Portland in March

My friend Ty was driving me to the Portland International Airport and we swung into the dropoff area for departing passengers. 24 years ago, we had made a similar dropoff run as I left for Los Angeles, and I had returned after all these years to the city where I made my first entry into US soil. There were vivid thoughts to juxtapose to, for the first foreign land leaves behind a pungency of memory, like the first inhalation of a cigarette. I had flown in for a large physics conference, and spent a few days in the downtown area. This evening I had taken the light rail from downtown Portland and headed towards Beaverton and Hillsboro, the suburbs where I used to reside. The train route starkly separates the downtown cityscape and the greener suburbs with a large tunnel near the Oregon zoo. Threading out of the tunnel, you leave behind the concrete city buildings and abruptly emerge into a parallel suburban world of rolling meadows with dandelions, connifers, and big high-techy office buildings with large parking lots.


Ty picks me up at the 185th. Station, a narrow strip of platform with a parking lot full of cherry blossoms that sparkle white against a clear blue sky like a Nirma ad, and we go for a ride. The suburbs have changed much in 24 years. Two lane blacktops are now four lane freeways, little shopping centers have been torn down, replaced by megalith chains. Arriving from the India of that time, Tanasbourne mall was my very first shopping mall. To me this was a monster of a shopping center, with shiny floors, high ceilings, and a polished antiseptic politeness--a whisper quiet machine of commerce where people bought and sold things as if in auto pilot with barely a transactional conversation; a Levi’s shop that ran row after row after row of blue denim, grocery stores that ran entire aisles full of wines. Like an old ship that had seen better times, it was scuttled some years ago, and the entire area revamped into a larger enterprise to cater to the growing population..


Driving around, travelling in the train, it is visually apparent that the homogeneity of the suburbs of the past have altered dramatically. 25 years ago, there was one Chinese restaurant that I knew of in Beaverton. Today, at the crossing of the once desolate NW Bronson and 185th, not far from where I was picked up by a passing police car a quarter century ago because I was an out of place long haired foreigner, there is a Vietnamese grocery shop. The restaurant where we ate dinner, in the midst of rural countryside, amid the crafted beers that are the staple of Oregon establishments, we nibbled on pita bread and hummus, and chickens cooked with habanero chillies.

Portland is very different from the East Coast or California, and is in a state that was progressive enough for Jesse Jackson to win in 1988. A mix of part coffee, part Pacific Northwest grunge, part upscale USA, downtown Portland is a mix of high end shopping, 19th century west coast architecture, and trendy coffeehouses with untidy wide spaces and high ceilings. Coffeeshops sprout on every corner, as Portland tears out of Seattle’s giant shadow. Stumptown Coffee is the jewel of Portland coffeehouses, and the subject of a recent Time article anointing it as the flagbearer for the “third wave” movement for coffee (isnt it fascinating, our obsession with the odd number to emphasize an exotic differentiation--“third wave coffee”, “third world country”, “fifth horseman”:“first” is unique, but “second” smacks of failure, and “fourth” feels just too complete; the odd number, with its unpaired entity, is more inspiring).

Downtown Portland, with its free light rail system for commuting feels vaguely European. There are many pedestrians and bicyclists: this is one of the few American cities where bicycles appear to be a serious transportation mode for conveyance rather than recreation. The light rail cars have spaces built into them for transporting bikes, and I see many cyclists hop in and out of the light rail which is free within the limits of the downtown. I walk up Broadway and there is a man walking alongside me at a brisk pace, panhandling oncoming pedestrians. Most people are curt in their refusal , the man swears under his breath as he walks on. One “accostee” gives away his plastic bag of toiletries. Those who oblige do not receive much of an acknowledgement, the man is busy surging forward eyeing his next kill. I time this exhibition of speed panhandling. In a matter of a couple of minutes and a couple of city blocks he is richer by a few dollars and a bag of toothpaste.


Portland airport late at night, as I prepare to take the redeye, is still small and quiet as I remember it, and the people in Oregon remain helpful and friendly. Honed by years of New York living, I am tentative at first to their willingness to converse. “Dont fuhget to putch yo’ laptop on the biyen”, the guard cautions me at the security check. A coffee store proprietor takes the time to spend a few minutes describing the emergence of single source coffee in Portland. Pacific Northwestern accents have decidedly Midwestern influences, carried in by the wagon trains of 19th century settlers to places with lyrical names like Walla Walla, Umatilla, and the Dalles. They retain their dry sense of humor, I recalled the bus driver wryly commenting, in the mid-eighties on an Oregonian who blew himself up —“I have no problems if he wanted to kill himself, but there wus no need to take the neighborhood with him”.

I prepare myself for the redeye flight back to New York. I have enough reading material, picked up from Powell Books, a city block sized, gigantic bookstore in Portland where one could get lost in for hours. A middle seat has magically been changed to an aisle, in the exit row, by the generosity of a kind airline representative. Onwards to JFK.

Devi

www.devinyc.com
8 East 18th Street
New York, NY 10003-1938
(212) 691-1300

Last night our good friends, A & U, took us out to Devi, an ethnically conscious, Manhattan savvy, Indian restaurant near the NYU area of the city. Devi--in most Indian languages--means goddess, and you will invoke her name a few times in course of the evening. The first will be after looking at the prices on the menu. A non-descript entrance leads into an opulent interior in the Rajasthani style. Fantastic colored glass lighting pendants inset with mock semi-precious stones from Faizabad hang from the high ceiling, overseeing earnest faced, uber-palated diners, in a room full of stonework and marble.

There are a few dishes that have made their way into the menus of many Indian restaurants over the past few years, originating from industrial eateries in dense Indian pockets such as Oaktree Lane, mutating onto the menus of fashionable metropolitan ones like Devi, and then tributaring on to the far flung suburbs. Kurkure (crunchy) Bhindi is one of them--finely sliced okra deep fried and garnished with lemon juice, salt, and spices. Manchurian Gobi (cauliflower) is another, fried in a batter with a tomatoey sauce, its roots traceable to Calcutta Chinese food. Bhel Puri is a puffed rice based street food in India that feels strangely impotent in the dimly lit ambience of posh restaurants, neatly presented and cast out of a pyramidal mold, but without the swirl of surrounding entropy that gives it life. Our dinners at Indian restaurants are weighted towards appetizers, an impromptu dim-sum like melee, topped off with a shared entrée. Right off the bat, the food at Devi feels different—better prepared, better ingredients, more thought behind the process. Chicken Kebabs with ground coriander, and an apricot sauce on the side, dissolve in the mouth--you cannot begin to unravel where one flavor ends and another begins, it is as if a continuum has been reconstructed out of the the finely chopped condiments. If there is one unique aspect to this place, it is the background/foreground pairing of tastes.

Devi is the very best Indian restaurant in the tri-state area. This is not the food of a heavy handed pace bowler who will throw you a sizzling bouncer, nor is this your ho-hum suburban medium pacer with his reliable swing balls. The chef, Suvir Saran, is a an elegant bowler with spin and flight, who moves his ball trickily on the textured pitch of Indian food. I have not had lamb kebabs that have been this tender, I have not had jackfruit biryani this refined (I have not had any jackfruit biryani earlier, for that matter—but this is where the background/foreground comes in). Sample the food--this is the next time that you will take the Devi’s name.

The ambiance of Devi has the phoney ethnicity of a hoighty-toighty Indian restaurant, down to the little lamps along each step on the staircase. It is maybe a legacy of India’s colonial hangover, that an intercourse with the west always needs to be with one’s ethnic foot set plumb forward; or maybe just a proven ploy to attract customers. Whatever be the case, if you can afford this on your wallet, by all means go for it, for this will be the benchmark against which all Indian food here ought to be measured.

Chutney Masala Bistro

http://www.chutneymasalabistro.com
4 Main Street
Irvington, NY 10533

With a few new restaurants sprouting in and around Westchester the past few years—Chillichicken in Stamford, the reincarnated Westchester Groceries in Thornwood, and now Chutney Masala—a two year old restaurant in Irvington, diners have a wonderful choice of evolving Indian food around the area. We visited Chutney Masala for the first time last night. Finding it was a bit of a struggle--Main St. heads towards the river and ends at the train station. You are then supposed to go around the overpass and head into the parking lot of the train station next to the river, in the middle of which is a brick building,housing Chutney Masala. It is a two storey restaurant that does not feel cramped. The interior walls are exposed brick, hung with black and white reprints of hunting photographs from colonial India, circa I would guess the early 20th. Century. Ask for a table on the second floor. On the winter night that we were there the shutters were drawn, but we are told that in summer the view across the Hudson can be gorgeous.

The menu at Chutney Masala has the usual suspects—chicken tikka masala and its ilk without which I am told, Indian restaurants will not survive given these dishes’ name recognition among American diners. But I would suggest ignoring such dishes, for this restaurant offers a lot more.

Chutney masala is owned by a couple with experience at two of India’s top hotels in New Delhi—The Maurya Sheration and the The Taj Palace, and their food is more novel and interesting, than standard Indian menus. We settled for Amritsari Fish and Bombay chat for appetizers. The fish finger based dish, it was tilapia that night, owes its name to the city of Amritsar, where battered fish is deep fried and sold as street food. The Bombay chat was well done, puffed rice with spices, and variety of additive, similar to the Jhal Muri at Chillichicken in intent. With two meat eating factories in tow--our teenaged sons--we settled for lamb Seekh Kebabs and Hyderabadi Biryani, a Dum dish, with goat meat. This is another “new” for Westchester—5 to 10 years ago, I would not see goat meat on the menu of Indian restaurants here. Dum cooking originates from the Mughal times of the 16th. Century, and involves food cooked with a small amount of water in a clay pot sealed off with a lid by a “gasket” of flour and water. The cooking ambient, an overpressure of steam, leaves the food moist and the meats tender. Our vegetarian friends and dining companions went for, among other things, daal and kurkure bhindi—finely cut, fried, crunchy okra. The daal was as would be made at home, simple and elegant, like a sweet purring engine with no rough edges, that does not need to rev up to make you feel good. Have it with simple white rice and perhaps a mouthful or two of the bhindi.

We sampled a couple of desserts. Gajar ka Halwa a “porridge” of grated carrots, milk, clarified butter, cardamom; and phirni, another “porridge” made with broken rice and milk. Indian desserts, as I have noted before, are an acquired taste, but if you have made this leap, then these desserts were wonderfully built, smooth and not sugary.

Chutney Masala has excelled is because of its restraint. Dishes are not overly spicy, and they are not oily. The menu is varied, there is adequate content for the adventurous, and the food is closer to the quality that you would get at restaurants in the larger Indian cities. Throw in a beautiful ambience, and you have the makings of a winning restaurant.
Additional comments:
A subsequent visit late one night, returning from New Jersey, was not as impressive as the first. An Indian sounding salad looked hastily put together, the biryani was ho-hum. It was late at night and one hopes this was an anomaly, at a time when the kitchen was possibly winding down and the last of the customers were departing. Service remained excellent, and one of the most friendly that I have seen.

Chillichicken

www.chilichickenct.com
19 High ridge road
Stamford, CT 06905
(203) 977-0400

ChilliChicken is a new restaurant that has opened up in Stamford, CT, at the site of the old Tawa restaurant, only a 20 minute drive through the backroads from Chappaqua. Chilli Chicken serves Indo-Chinese food, and as its name implies, originates from the food served in chinese restaurants in India. Set up by waves of Chinese immigrants of Hakka origin who started migrating to Kolkata from Southeastern China as early as the late eighteenth century, the menus in these restaurants were modified by the tastes of Indian customers (and likey British colonial customers before them). Kolkata still has a substantial population of Chinese immigrants, many of whom were persecuted during the Indo-Chinese war of 1962—I am still haunted by the owner of a Chinese restaurant on Central Park Ave in White Plains who upon learning that I was Indian, emotionally confronted me in the early nineties, about why they were thrown out of Kolkata in the early sixties during the India-China war. Visibly successful in the USA, he gave me the look of faraway bitterness as he recalled those days, noting that they had had no reason to move, till the war started.


The leitmotif for the Chinese restaurant in India, is a garnish bowl full of green chilli pieces soaked in vinegar and a little spoon for scooping out the vinegar to add a bit of zing. And if this isn’t enough, then there would be a green, evenly smooth paste called “chilli sauce that was actually made using papaya and pumpkins. These two condiments are de rigueur for a Chinese restaurant in India, and I was reassured to find the chilli-vinegar at our table in Chilli Chicken.



The food at ChilliChicken is more on the “Indo” side of Indo-Chinese, as is typical of this genre in the US. What I found to be its most welcoming, evolutionary aspect, was the absence of oiliness--the bane of the typical Indian restaurant--and the departure from the “no spice unturned”, mode of cooking that many Americans have unfortunately come to expect from Indian food. We stuck to Indo-Chinese classics-- chicken sweet corn soup that was light and airy; sweet and sour chicken—refreshingly easy on the tongue, unlike equivalents that I have eaten in New Jersey that were fit more for a fire-eater’s convention; slightly soggy Hakka chowmein--really an Indo-Chinese concoction that originated from the Hakka origins of South-Eastern Chinese immigrants. Thrown into this mix were appetizers that gave away the Bengali origins of the chef, “Jhal Muri” a spiced up, flirtatious mixture of puffed rice, with the grains of the rice held together with moist sauces and condiments—in your mouth the dry on the inside moist on the outside grains of puffed rice crumble up with the the spices playing a blitzing game with your tastebuds, not too strong, but like little evanescent explosions of a thousand colors. Washed these down with some “Thums Up”, an Indian cola drink that rose to prominence in the late seventies when Coca Cola was banished from India as part of a wave of nationalizing regulations. Rushing in to fill the void, we had new products such as Thums Up and the less successful Campa Cola, belittled in those days as fallbacks that did not come close to Coke, yet serving the nostalgias of the diaspora today, sitting in small Connecticut shopping centers like us.

As I have mentioned earlier in my posts, Indian food has become popular enough that one expects something beyond the usual for increasingly sophisticated foodies. Sometimes these morph into expensive and pretentious combinations of cuisine that can be forced, or they can be the introduction of a time-tested hybrid, cooked sensibly, and for sensible palates (for really hot food, receive the food into the back-side of the mouth and avoid extensive contact with the tip of your tongue where the density of “heat” sensing tastebuds is highest). Along with Westchester Groceries, Chili Chicken is one of those restaurants that are making the Weschester area increasingly cosmopolitan in its Indian food—give it a try and you will not regret it.