Ruchi’s story
Imagine this: A shy girl who spends her whole childhood moving from one school and neighborhood to another because of her father’s job. By the time she is be in-grouped anywhere, it is time to leave. It is a long chain of Hello goodbye hello goodbye. She desires, more than anything, to be a part of a group of friends, where she wouldn’t be an outsider.
Back to the present, now imagine this: Girl is living in a house that she likes. It has white walls, marble tiles and a view. She lives on a student budget and minimal furniture. On this furniture and floor are, sprawled around here and there, her friends. They are her people, her family. She is living her dream.
I am the girl. These are my friends!
Aishi and I were meant to be. We had been a part of each other’s peripheral life, in one way or another, all our lives. Now we lived together and went about our daily chores, exchanging insights that could only be realized by us.
Raghav, you could trust to lighten a bad mood with a joke here, a comment there. He took care of the practicalities and the movie picking. He had an excited-dance that I cannot forget or describe. He would sit beside me as I suffer through an anxiety attack. He would arrange my legs in different positions to check if it helped, among other things he tried to reduce my anxiety. I remember him always serenading us.
Keerthi is made of love! Every cell in her body is made of pure love. With her, you belong! She is so beautiful, will make you feel beautiful too. With her, you are special, smart, funny, empathetic, equal parts sad and jovial. Our frequencies matched and there is nothing better than that. She is also the best cook. She made dinner for us in my congested kitchen, with only the ingredients available in the fridge. The most often made dish was the self-explanatory: Kuch-bhi Kuch-bhi rice. It was an amalgamation of our shared love for rice and the ingredients of a student’s fridge. Did I mention that she is the best cook? The rice was so buttery, so fine! It was the same, but a little different every time. It is one of the many souvenirs from the best phase of my life.
(Compulsory ingredients for Kuch-bhi Kuch-bhi rice: mushroom, palak, garlic and butter)
My experience cooking, eating and feeding Kuch-bhi Kuch-bhi rice:
- Making KBKB rice pushed me into, what feels like, the next phase of Via Dil. I cooked without following a recipe, open to ideas, failures and instincts. I was available to the experience; I noticed how beautiful the ingredients looked, just how colorful! I took a moment to stare, to click a photo.
- I had been approaching food, and its photography, as an outsider. I felt like an intruder to this world. So I followed recipes; restricting my instincts to decisions about quantities of salt and sugar, sometimes not even that. Looking back, the photos seem stoic, don’t they? No matter how much soul I put into the stories, something felt missing. It was the joy!
- The rice turned out mediocre at best. I have a theory: you don’t get into accidents when you are learning to drive or when you drive anxiously as a beginner; but right after, when you think you can drive, till you become a good driver.
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Making friends has been an uphill task. I made functional friendships in most places but only came to understand them a few years back. I started treating them with care and tended to them like houseplants. I only recently started reaping the fruits of having solid friendships in my life. It came to help my relationships, my mental health, even my career. Who woulda thunk?
Recipe
Ingredients:
Whichever vegetables are available in your fridge
What I used:
- Garlic and herb butter
- Chilies- 3
- Garlic- 6-7 cloves
- Ginger – an inch
- Capsicum – 2
- Cherry tomatoes – a handful
- Spinach – a fistful
- Coriander – to taste
- Rice – 1 cup
- Salt – to taste
- Black pepper – to taste
- Olive oil – 3-4 tbsp
Process
- Start cooking the rice
- In a pan, stir fry mushroom in butter
- When the mushroom secrets water, pour it into the cooking rice, to give the rice a mushroomy taste.
- When the mushrooms become dry, add cherry tomatoes (chopped in half) and cook till they get darker. Then add capsicum till brown patches show.
- In a separate pan, stir fry chilies, garlic and whole cherry tomatoes (I love a cherry tomato exploding in my mouth while eating) till brown
- In a pan take some butter (maybe even jeera till it crackles), add rice, mushrooms, tomato, capsicum. Stir and cover. Cook for 5 minutes.
- sprinkle the burnt garlic, chili, whole cherry tomatoes and coriander over it.
