Matiyaburj

 

 

Food is not like us, humans. The first bite or scoop or sip does reveal the palate’s entire DNA. After that, the food’s invasion into your senses repeats itself– bite-by-bite or scoop-by-scoop or sip-by-sip and your happy tongue, programmed after the first taste, rejoices in advance on what good thing will fall into its lap. And it does. The tongue keeps savouring the unbelievable sameness and then, suddenly, it cannot eat anymore. So sad.

But we humans are the unmaking of all this. The person in question remains a person in question; his first impression never-lasting; his last impression his first impression.

 

Incidentally, when I, the famished, first nibbled an exotic assortment from an Oriental wok (pan), with my left hands holding an alloy steel knife, my ears tuning into overhead neo-Western music (Dido and all) and my right hand clanking the clattering white bone china cutlery with a fork, this subtle revelation had not yet dawned, even though it was high noon. All this came later; much after the soul had been satiated with a hodgepodge of fragile South Asian delights. Even personalities could change, by the way.

 

The restaurant in question was four-months-into-business Purple Rice, boxed with international flair in Sector-35, and its 23-year-old London-returned owner, Vipul Dua, assorting all sorts of exoticas for learned gastronomy and revenues.

 

I debuted here with Purple Treasure Soup, said to be the creation of the chef (Bhasker, scooped from Taj Delhi, now wearing a purple bandana) with eight types of exotic vegetables. Swooshed in, the crunchy-munchy pale liquid did do some good.

 

I followed up with lamb, with Paper Thin Lamb, with soft shredded meat stir fried with three types of bell-peppers and served, smoking; the itsy-bitsy creamy white bits trapped amid shreds of greenish foliage. Full in taste, the chewed lamb melted on contact and the taste-buds exhumed a lingering acknowledgment.

 

But barging into the lamb were mouthfuls of another crunchy-munchy—the very red and very brown Chicken Lettuce Wrap (boneless chicken breasts wrapped in lettuce leaves and tossed with some Thai sauce). The pieces would gently explode in the mouth’s gentle squeeze and fill the hot, dry tongue with instant fantasies.

 

The Zumbo prawns, as it turned out on eating were, prawn-like. They had a make-do name– Hot Chilli Prawns—and a nationality too—Indonesian. Really meaty, when guided, glided out of the stick and plucked golden brown.

 

On the black-brown round table swam in the promised Standing Pomfret, whole-fried with Malasian know-how and Xo sauce. Like fish eating fish, the sea/river fish, smeared with thick and tangy gravy, was dismembered, sideways, and eaten with my fumbling brown-wood chopsticks and eaten with the driest and the lightest chicken noodles of my recent memories.

 

Dessert has dates and I had honeyed Date Pancakes, the Chinese flour wrap popping out a chocolaty paste that the nice ice cream flowed into and made the mouth hot, cold, sweet and someway indescribable, the dripping honey apart.

All over.

The mouth is now buzzing with sting bees of smell. I swallow the saliva and silently, the jasmine tea arrives in a white porcelain kava, with remnants of some floating leaves. Sugarless, tasteless and also aroma-less, the warm brown water feels grudgingly good on my burning taste buds, like jasmine tea gliding over white porcelain.

 

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