Allaudin and the adventure during joota chupai!

So you were introduced to our wonderful cook-cum-family, Alauddin in the last post. That was not the end of his story. See, underlying Alauddin's brilliant culinary skills, is a desire for alcohol, more severe than his incapacity to digest the liquid. Therefore, throughout this शादी, one (and all) could spot Alauddin swinging around, drunk as a sponge and getting so emotional about the wedding that I knew I had at least one blog post ready right there! It was the night of the wedding. When we reached the venue of the wedding, Alauddin started drinking. We ate snacks. Alauddin downed a few. The varmaala were exchanged. Alauddin gulped a few more pegs. We danced and Alauddin kept up his visits to the bar. We ate dinner and Alauddin was still drinking. We returned to dancing and Alauddin returned to drinking. This should give you a very vague idea of what Alauddin's state was, when the फेरे began. The astrologically-fixed time for the फेरे was 1:30 a.m. and by then, everybody looked pretty much besotted, whether under influence of alcohol or नींद. We were sitting around the पंडाल when I spotted Alauddin standing right behind my brother and his almost-wife, swaying dangerously but looking intently at the ongoing पूजा. I went over and asked him to sit on a chair so that he wouldn't topple over. Alauddin insisted on dragging the chair close to where the marrying couple were seated and watching on with love and pride. But while we all thought that Alauddin was in that happy place, the portals of which only alcohol seems to open, something else was afoot. Somewhere just before the start of the फेरे, the bride had summoned Alauddin and asked him to find my brother's shoes and give 'em to her friends, who in the absence of sisters and cousins, were stepping in for जूता छुपाई. We did not know this. The bride's side did not know this. Now I have always lamented over what a useless lot we are and allow me to present yet another glaring example. Here is the bride and her friends, who despite being weak in Punjabi ways had nonetheless gathered their troops and planned their strategy. And there we were- a population explosion in our own right- and not one of us even remember about the damn जूता छुपाई! But not Alauddin! The भाभी had commanded it and Alauddin was determined to prove his loyalty. The fact that he picked up Vivek's shoes and hid them somewhere, in his quest to hide my brother's already hidden shoes, we can safely pin to the fact that he was drunk. The matter was brought to light in the middle of the 4th फेरा (of course I am not sure but I doubt anybody will remember to correct me) So when Alauddin realized what he had done, he returned the shoes to Vivek and remained appalled at his folly. Vivek is दामाद. The दामाद is the VIP in the Indian family and Alauddin could not believe he had taken the दामाद's shoes. Plus, we were teasing him about switching sides and I am sure that did not help. Thereafter, he resumed his swaying on the chair. He would check how many फेरे were done after every five minutes, then laugh in a drunken-embarrassed sorta way and say "भाभी बोली थी तो हम दामाद के जूते छुपा दिए!" OK so back to my tirade. I cannot finger-point enough at my side's ridiculous sloppiness. We paid attention to the fact that my brother's shoes were gone only at the end of the फेरे when the bride's relatives came up to me and asked me to give them the shoes. They said it was a custom and that the shoes must be handed to them and any pleas of innocence that I made were understandably not accepted. Finally and thankfully, the lawyer friends came forward and owned up to having taken the shoes. So it all ended well. But Alauddin had one final performance before we exited. At विदाई, I step out of the wedding hall to see Alauddin weeping and my mother consoling him. I overheard my mother asking him what was wrong and he said emotionally, "बहु घर आ गयी, ख़ुशी हो रहा है". What a beautifully, emotionally-expressive soul, this Alauddin.

Alauddin versus the Marwaris

So the wedding of my brother Ram and his much-better half Mriga was a very interesting affair. Our theme for the wedding was food and we did little else except eat. Ranchi is known for its fine देसी चिकन and assorted meats, besides other scrumptious food-stuff.

Now we Kakkars do not think much of vegetarians but since they did gather the wedding as vegetarians inevitably do and since my father was all-enthusiasm for his son's wedding, he decided to make top-notch arrangements for "those" people too. But there was a catch. Our non-vegetarian food is made beautifully by the waiter-cum-cook at Ranchi club- Allaudin. Allaudin is an anti-God since God is creator and Allaudin begins with creation ends. But when it comes to meat preparation of any kind, Allaudin is akin to PG Wodehouse's Anatole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jeeves_characters#Anatole) if you can keep a tighter-than-a-corset watch on his chilly-use. Allaudin's list of ingredients begins with 'हरी मिर्ची' and ends there too. My मीनू भाभी would sit with Allaudin everyday and recite a highly drool-inducing menu (also pronounced मीनू by the older Kakkar खानदान, so for example चाचा would say, "मीनू आं मीनू दिखा दो" that somehow never ceases to amuse me) and she would then ask, "बताओ क्या क्या चाहिए बाजार से", to which Allaudin would promptly begin, "लिखिए हरा मिर्चा". Here, I would coming flying in the scene, dragging my father and shouting "हरा मिर्चा नहीं नहीं!!!" and prod my father in his perfectly-round stomach until he instructed Allaudin to listen to what I was hysterically communicating.

Make no mistake, my claims of being a free woman does not, for a moment, put me in doubt that I still need mine father to get anybody to even hear me. Ah, the sad irony! Sigh!

But moving on. Now it is a well known fact in Bihar/Jharkhand that the best vegetarian food is best prepared by the मारवाड़ीs. They make some 20 items that are served in tiny कटोरीs on a big थाली and oh, everything is heavenly. So my father pulled a few मारवाड़ी strings and a group of nice मारवाड़ी cooks agreed to come home to cook us some वाह-वाह खाना. All of us would stuff ourselves to the brim during every meal and then swear to skip the next meal but we were at it again as soon as the meal was served. Our stomachs were most unhappy and our taste buds on cloud 9.

But (yes you were waiting for this, weren't you!) there was a catch, of course. The मारवाड़ीs are pure vegetarians and they also tend to display a highly prejudiced viewpoint of religious fanaticism. We were unaware of the second and we forgot about the first. So on day one, we had Alauddin come in to make his chicken and prawns and everything that was once alive. Oh brilliant stuff! We ate, we ate some more, we cried a little bit पेट पकड़ के and then we resumed eating again. बीच बीच में we danced and side में the पापा-भैया लोग drank. It was well past midnight when we all slept.

The next morning, we woke up to some very unappealing हल्ला-हंगामा. Problem: The मारवाड़ी cooks were on their way and the cooking area resembled a graveyard. ओये होए, वड्डा स्यापा! With marvelously swift movements for a bunch of groggy पंजाबीs, the site was cleaned of its meatish sins and we all ate a nice breakfast of चिवड़ा, amazing melt-in-our-mouths चीला,fruits that nobody cared to look at and चाय of course.

Thereafter, we kept a close tab on the situation and realized to our annoyance that my father had set-up a land-mine in his schedule for Alauddin and the मारवाड़ीs. So Alauddin would cook downstairs in the kitchen while the good vegetarian blokes were stationed on the terrace, which also had a room storing all food supplies for the शादी. One day one, Alauddin wanted हरा मिर्चा (rolls eyes) and he was asked to fetch it from upstairs but he looked at the speaker with the best "दिमाग ख़राब है" look and refused to fetch what he needed with a very noble reason- "हम को कुछ हो गया तो मीट सब कौन बनाएगा". What a man!

But it all proceeded without causalities and ended with a lot of upset-stomachs that told us how much people couldn't resist the food. The stories of Alauddin do not end here and will be shared in a later post.

Rewinding Monu's Wedding: The one where Bada Babu drugged us!

I have been meaning to write about specific incidents from Monu's wedding and so here is the highlight of the entire celebrations: Bada Babu drugging us on the day of the विवाह!

Now Monu's wedding happened in Mussoorie, which as I'm sure everybody knows (this is your cue to pretend you know about it, even if you don't) is an-incredibly-easily-accessible-and-hence-over-crowded-hill-station a stone's throw away from Dehradun. A big blotch on our family's honour and pride is that despite having lived in Dehradun- so technically among hills- all our lives, we are the first ones to throw up at the absolute beginning of the mountain road that I, UNaffectionately call "गोल गोल".

Now throughout the pre-wedding functions, starting with the कीर्तन and through the सगन, cocktail and all others, we dressed up एकदम झिन-टाक झिन-टाक and the grand finale to the aforesaid dressing up एकदम झिन-टाक झिन-टाक was the actual wedding, of course. But to be dressed in our absolute best and then to have to go through the high puke-risk zone to arrive at the wedding venue was almost a cruelty.

So when Bada Babu (if you have been reading the blog you will know he is बड़ी बुआ's husband, our फूफा) offered us magical tablets that he promised will remove the faintest signs of nausea and queasiness from our systems, the first people to gulp this tablet down were Arjun and yours truly.

Arjun is my newphew and Bada Babu's grandson. He is a good kid who takes a little too long to dress up for my liking and other than this minor difference, we get along not very famously (and why would we) but we are quite close. For reasons that I cannot remember, it later turned out that nobody else had taken the pill.

So after wasting time as one usually does when one is in the middle of a busy and important occasion like one's sister's wedding, the family dispersed to get dressed. Fast-forward through a lot of banging on the bathroom doors, screaming for combs and hair brushes and Sanjay जीजाजी drinking चाय out of a कटोरी because all glasses had been used up, the family assembled to leave for Mussoorie and were dispersed in batches.

Being a diabetic, one of my sure-shot symptoms of a hypoglycemic situation is when I feel an overpowering drowsiness and I cannot stay awake without super-human effort. So when I began to feel said overpowering drowsiness, I rushed to check my blood sugar only to find the BS levels stable. Confused, I still ate a biscuit and kept tab on my blood sugar over the next hour as I struggled to keep my eyes open.

I decide to wash my face once and after the required routine of tucking towels under the chin to prevent water from dripping over clothes when the clothes are your very best, I walked into चाचा- चाची's room to go through the connecting door into the bathroom and here I find Arjun slumped on the bed and snoring. Strange but connections are made rather slowly in my dim brain and I gave it no second thought.

Eventually, the last few of us were left at home. Arjun, who had been woken up after much difficulty was slumping against the wall where he had been placed and ordered strictly to not sit. I was made to sit on one of those cruel, straight-back chairs without any support of a dining table to put my head down on and Ram bhaia watched over the both of us and bellowed a very piercing 'OYE' every now and then. Even until then, we did not understand why we were so sleepy and kept thinking we were more tired than we had realized. Not the brightest bunch, as I always say.

Then while talking about nausea and the impending trip up the mountain road, I drowsily suggested Bada Babu's magic-pill, only to be told by somebody that said magic-pill is akin to the sleeping drought in the Harry Potter world

So that's how I ended up looking spaced out in Monu's wedding album and that's how poor Arjun was nowhere to be seen in the same album, him being passed-out in one of the comfortable-as-sin beds of the five-star.

All that was cooking at Sushil's wedding

I am still recuperating from the intense activities of two weddings and am, for a while bursting at the seams with not just my bulging lard-content but also stories from weddings. As it so happens, with the bagful of stories I have and all of them wanting to tumble out at the same time, they remained bottled-up all this while. Today, while riding my faithful scooter through the lanes of Dehradun, I spotted Krishna and knew that to be my sign to begin writing, even as I desperately tried to hide my much-bloated self from her easy view.

So for every shaadi in Dehradun and a few in Ranchi too, Krishna is the not-so-nice toothless woman who comes to cook the meals when the guests arrive. Like most of us Indians, she is corrupt and conniving and provides a rich source of entertainment through constant bickering with the women of the house. My Dad very wisely observed about the women of the house during Sushil's wedding: "खुद बनायेंगी नहीं खाना,ना चैन से बैठेंगी".

When Monu got married, Chachi let Krishna do the cooking, and her other objectionable tasks- stuffing a whole lot of food into her mouth, packing daily meals to feed who we suspect to be the entire neighbourhood and preparing some very fancy things that we never seemed to get a taste of, among others- without any interference. But the seeds of gossips about Krishna's ways were sown right then. When the time for Sushil's wedding arrived, the good women of my family began to sit around to exchange gossip while folding wedding cards or packing mithai and other sweets or just to purely gossip. There, the skeletons from our खुरा where Krishna's workstation was set-up during Monu's wedding, were unearthed and by the time the day had arrived for Krishna to begin cooking for guests at Sushil's wedding, we were all looking at the skinny, toothless woman through heavily-coloured lenses.

Episode 1: Krishna versus Meenu bhahi.

My father instructed Meenu bhabhi- बड़ी बुआ's बहु- to instruct Krishna to make meat for lunch the next day. In his lame attempt at pampering Meenu bhabhi, who he reasoned would be tired after her journey from the state of Jharkhand to the state of Uttarakhand, my Dad ignited what would be a long-drawn battle of not-so-much-wits-as-angry-spats. Meenu bhabhi went up to Krishna and announced her supervisory role in the preparation of meat. Krishna naturally took offence and clicked her tongue disapprovingly, except that it sounds not very click-like when you have no teeth and a sagging jaw-line like Krishna does not and does. So when Meenu bhabhi asked for the प्याज-अदरक-लसन-टमाटर मसाला to be भुनो-ed well, it was भुनो-ed not so well. And when Meenu bhabhi said less salt, there was barely any salt. The end result was a watery curry with some rubbery chunks of an animal killed for nothing. Krishna-01, Meenu-00

But wait! Meenu bhabhi wanted the last laugh so when Krishna asked her how the meat was, Meenu bhahi went out of her way and through several other ways in praising the preparation. Krishna kept saying "नहीं मैं तो अलग तरीके से बनाती हूँ और बहुत अच्छा, पता नहीं इसमें नमक कैसा था" and Meenu bhabhi spent all the time she was supposed to utilize in resting after her long journey, convincing Krishna that it was marvelous. What is victory if the enemy won't accept defeat! Krishna-01, Meenu-01

Episode 2: Krishna versus mommy.

So after the meat episode, Krishna labelled us all the bad sorts and gleefully proceeded to make life hell for the women. During this शादी time, I would stop at बड़ी मम्मी's for breakfast on my way to work and my mother would scurry to the make-shift kitchen to get Krishna cooking. She did not appreciate it, I can tell you expecting to sit and have some चाय and gossip before committing to the grind.

On Saturday then, I walk into बड़ी मम्मी's in my jammies and with my weekend chirpiness at the same time as usual for my breakfast when I bump into Krishna as she was hurrying to or from somewhere. "कैसी है मेरी बेटी?" she asked a now very-surprised me. I mumbled a few words about my good health and she said "अज ते दफ्तर नी जाणा? मैं नी जाणे देना तेन्नु अज दफ्तर" before briskly walking away. Thus with the glow of a stranger's love still warming my heart, I entered the house to seek my food-procurement person, i.e. mommy. Mommies responded to the cry of her (not-so) young and was trotting of in search of Krishna when K walked in herself. Now for reasons not yet clear, mommy said to K coolly, "श्वेता के लिए नाश्ता बना दीजिये, उसको काम पर जाना है". Krishna looked at mommy equally coolly and said "मेरी बेटी ने अज दफ्तर नी जाणा" and walked off with her cup of tea to sit in the sun and chat...

Krishna- 01, Mommy- 00

... and walked off with her cup of tea to sit in the sun and chat...

Well, almost. Mommy, displaying reflexes to compete with Spiderman's, stood in front of Krishna and said menacingly, "मेरी बेटी उठते ही नाश्ता खाती है. अभी बनाओ". Never mind how mommy's statement reflects on me, I was so happy I was getting breakfast that I forgot everything else.

Krishna- 01, Mommy- 01, Me- 4 परांठे

Of course, as always happens among Punjabis, after Sushil's शादी when Krishna packed all that she could from the day's meals and bid farewell to the lot of us, she hugged all the women one by one and told them how much she would miss them. The feeling was reciprocated by some of our women and appreciation for Krishna's skills and efficiency was granted by all of them.