I’m not supposed to eat pani puri because I get a throat infection everytime I eat it. So it’s a rare treat. Manish is careful about how often I eat pani puri and ice cream.
Manish and I met on the office bus. I heard this guy dissing Gurgaon. I had just spent 3 months in Gurgaon and enjoyed it. So I had to defend Gurgaon. That’s how we started talking. He walked me back to my PG and we just stood there talking for an hour about movies and books and Jason Bourne.
We kept bumping into each other on some bus or the other.
Now he is the guy who gets a parcel of pain puri from a ‘clean and hygienic’ place. He doesn’t eat any of it himself, maybe a few pieces from my plate to give me company.
I swear he brings me Pani Puri whenever I think of it. It’s like he reads my mind.
My experience making, eating and feeding no-infection pani puri:
- I have already professed my love for pain puri enough that it validates a tattoo. I had it for 3 years straight when I was in Nagpur from a guy who looked like a balding Rahul Roy. When I came to Pune and tried to find purpose outside of the engineering college that made me miserable, one time I set out on a mission to taste pain puri from each locality on the map of Pune. It took a few months, but I managed.
- In that lieu, I had a favorite pain puri place in each area I lived in. My Viman Nagar pain puri guy has seen me through all the major ups and downs of my college life. I have had pain puri after I presented my seminar paper, after I cried my eyes out at the farewell, after a drunk pub night.
- I used to be, maybe still am a prude about Pani Puri. I insist that unfiltered water Pani Puri with a splash of the maker’s sweat is the scientifically better-tasting Pani Puri. For a very long time, Bisleri Pani Puri has been a term used like an insult, the equivalent of people who pick up an American accent in a 1 month trip to the states. R made a case for not sprinkling Pista on Gulab Jamun by equating it to BPP and I was deterred. But I am trying to be a better person about this. I am trying to not have opinions about people’s food preferences, about the sound they make while eating, for it is all-natural. I actively talk myself out of my elitism about what I considered ‘elitism’.
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I spent a big portion of my life trying to make friends. I failed incessantly and humiliatingly most of the time. I tried to befriend a neighbor, the very first time I was uprooted from school. She was older and a bully. I was left seeking her and her friends into the sunset while they went back home or started playing another game in another playground. In the next school, when I tried to help out a girl who seemed lonely, she got teased for spending time with me. I was the cheese touch (ref. Diary of the Whimpy Kid). In engineering college, somehow all friendships had already been forged by the time I joined. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to lure their affection with food and fun, but I was always forgotten when movie invitations were sent out. Neha would be the first friend I made. I wouldn’t know much about being a friend, she wouldn’t know of my context, so there would hard feelings until distance and therapy would teach me better.
It’s been years to this, I have friends like family, I have made peace with the past so it doesn’t weigh me down; yet I cannot, doesn’t feel like ever will be able to take for granted people sending me a photo, post, a poem, a bunch of ‘self-help stickers’ because it “reminded me of you”. I gush at statements like “P would not like that, you know how she is about Bisleri Pani Puri”. I love this feeling of being understood and thought of.
Dear Neha,
For being the first friend in the overwhelming sea that PICT was, for the self-help stickers, paintings, mandala and for sharing this love for pani puri, thank you.