Champi, Bhajans, and Aloo-Paranthas

......the curious mixture of warmth and pettiness, and velvet and lace that typifies Dilli of the predominantly Panju culture.....

My childhood was martyred to a mother who never really bothered about her daughter growing into the beau ideal of Indian womanhood [translatable into: lustrous, well-oiled tresses], and the barber at the then exclusive shehnaz parlor who found lice in my hair, ensured that my hair never grew beyond the gauche tufts sticking out from behind my ears. The successive trunchball figures throughout school who burdened me with home-work, and the rest of the time before curfew that was spent sparing around on pavements in the colony [we called it " hanging"] or the Party I just had to go to, left me with very little time or energy to spare for the nest on my head. No wonder then, I could never quite appreciate the Johnny walker song that has immortalized "champi".

It was during my five-month stint as a boarder with the goswami family in G.K-II that I was introduced to the pleasures and pains of tel-maalish. Every Saturday morning the daughters of the large family of the three brothers would assemble before their grandmother and patiently wait their turn in the sunny verandah, the only neutral ground in the three-storied house. Once it satisfied mataji that we [3 of the 5 girls with whom I shared a bunk bed-study table existence] would not be a bad influence on her kudis; she let us be part of the Goswami family Saturday ritual of champi.

Every Saturday, a low stool was brought out from the store, on which the matriarch would sit, acutely conscious of [and enjoying] the power (however temporary) she exercised over the queue of heads lined up for the oil massage. The ceremony would begin when the bhaiya [our landlord, her eldest son] switched on a Gulshan Kumar cassette of Maiya bhajans or of Hare Rama, Hare Krishna chants. Mataji would sing along, never missing a word, and her fingers too kept beat with the music as they weaved into our scalps, their magic of warm oil and winter sun. Her wrinkled fingers would move in gradually diminishing circles, the lulling rhythm interrupted every now and then when she began a drumbeat accompaniment to the frenzied endings of the chants. Deeply immersed in her meditations as she was, she was not above a sharp tug or an unmercifully tight grip on a hapless head to square a week's account of grouses. Her meditations would also be interrupted to instruct her daughter-in-law [bhabi for us] on how to pepper the aloo with just the right amount of zeera, or to exchange gossip about the firozi colored kurta Mrs. bhasin was wearing at Mrs. kohli’s cousin's shaaddi. The family get-together of sorts [rife with the tensions of an Ekta Kapoor soap] took place amid laundry drying in the sun and potted crouton, cacti, and the money plant at the far corner of the verandah. The champi continued well into the afternoon, at the end of which we emerged, a well oiled, pig-tailed, ravenous assembly line production. We then gorged on a spread of gajar-ka-halwa, aloo-paranthas, and raita that Bhabi, Manju bhabi, and Pinky bhabi had been slaving on while we had been lazing in the winter sun and the men had been discussing business, politics, and the mileage their cars gave them. I looked forward to these Saturdays” not because of the promise of food and tel maalish, or the few hours of winter sunshine on the verandah before the claustrophobia of my 8" by 6" room; not even because of the entertaining melodrama that unfolded as the family got together. I looked forward to these Saturdays because it meant that the geyser would be switched on for an extra hour!

There was however, more to the champi, bhajans, and aloo-paranthas, the "homely atmosphere" and "call us bhabi-bhaiya" jargon that let my parents enjoy 151 nights of undisturbed slumber in the winter of 1997. “Home-away-from-home” proved to be a misnomer: the landlord turned out to be a peeping tom, the butter-won't melt-in-my-mouth demeanor of bhabi did the Hyde routine at any hint of even a week's delay in rent, their charming school-going son metamorphosised into a foul- mouthed irate ass whenever he didn't get his way and their daughter howled to us at night about the injustice of not being allowed to wax, and phoren undergarments disappeared from the clothesline.

I obviously changed addresses in the next year of college, and have shifted many homes since, but I remember my days as boarder with the Gowswamis for the dilli darshan, which was more insightful than the ones promised by the I.T.D.C. ’’I got a taste of the curious mixture of warmth and pettiness, and velvet and lace that typifies Dilli of the predominantly Panju culture that I as an erudite Bengali initially scorned. But that attitude has changed because how can one be judgmental about a place where gajar-ka-halwa and garam chai appear once in a while to brighten lonely and cold winter evenings in cramped barsatis with “only two hours” geyser injunctions? Where food, fits a wide variety of budgets: Butter Chicken in Kake-da-dhaba, Chow-Min from vans, Shammi Kebabs at the caf” in Triveni, Bulls-Eye at the Yellow Brick Road, lunchtime queues outside Sagar or Chili Chicken at the Gymkhana? Where baniya, yuppie attitudes and dhing-chak music from Santros and Ford Ikons competes with raves and rock-fests? Where an absorption in the prices at Greater Kailash and Karol-Bagh, doesn’t preclude common sense or sound advise,’’’’. Like the kind bhabi gave me regarding men and life: the dumb, helpless bimbo act is more beneficial than the I-am-independent-and capable-woman act, and it has produced extraordinary results with the university administrative staff, at the bank and post-office when I’ve arrived during the chai-break, and the times I’ve wrangled the last parking space or avoided the fine for ticket-less travel on buses. It is a city pulsating with life, a city forever in a mad rush [the hurry to get somewhere’from Tilak Nagar to Nehru Place, from Purani Dilli to Mehrauli,..or more pressing concerns of meeting the deadline at work and managing the intersection before the light turns red]. There is attitude, there is the paan-stained wall, and there is also the groin-scratcher. There is the D&G dressed babe, there is the “We for Yamuna” campaign, and there is also the emigration queue outside the Canadian embassy on Shanti Path. It is a city that defies simplistic definitions.

Those Saturday mornings stretching into long, lazy afternoons of champi, bhajans, and aloo-parantha that were the prologue to this eclectic confusion, have remained one of the most enduring experiences in my 22-odd years of vagabond existence.