For a Bengali to reject non-vegetarian food is like rejecting the riches handed down to you by your ancestors and wanting to be a self-made man. Which is why it irritates me a lot when people, once they come to know that I am a Bengali, assume that I love fish. I want to tell them, “I am a self-made vegetarian.”
Bishwanath Ghosh Having said that, I am not a 100 per cent vegetarian. I love eggs, but only when hard-boiled or in the form of omelette: if you break an egg over my noodles I won’t even touch it. I can eat — eating does not mean relishing — only one variety of fish, rohu , that too when it is fried well. The only non-vegetarian dish I relished, that too strictly after a drink or three — so that the alcohol numbed my mind to the fact that I was eating meat — was spicy mutton curry. But late last year, sitting at a ghat in Varanasi, I watched two goat kids playing with their mother. I found them no less endearing than puppies or kittens: in fact, while puppies and kittens can get naughty, these kids were charmingly obedient. “And I eat them?” I asked myself. That was that: I gave up eating mutton.
Such selective non-vegetarian behaviour can only be tolerated by an indulgent mother. The rest of the world is bound to ask you: if you can eat rohu , why not hilsa ; if you can eat mutton, why not beef; if you can eat a boiled egg, why not the raw yolk?
Since I don’t have the answers to these very valid questions, and since my mother is no longer alive, I prefer to call myself a vegetarian whenever I am eating out. And being a vegetarian, believe me, can make you feel very lonely.
In Calcutta, I feel left out when I see fellow diners ordering fish; and during a trip to Australia last year, I survived mainly on bread and olive oil, occasionally laced with chilli paste, while fellow journalists gorged on all kinds of meat.
While non-vegetarians feel sorry for me, I only envy them and wish I too could relish meat. But what to do, it is a matter of temperament. I salivate more at the sight of hawkers selling fresh vegetables on the pavement than when I visit a meat market. I can never eat chicken once I have seen it being slaughtered in front of my eyes: you can call me chicken, that’s all right.
Having said that, I once ate pork. I don’t recall whether it was her birthday or mine, but one afternoon in 1996 my then girlfriend and I stepped into a restaurant called Dominos in New Delhi’s South Extension. The place served only pizza, even though I am not at all sure whether it had anything to do — most likely it did not — with the Domino’s that we know today.
My girlfriend chose her pizza in no time at all whereas I was clueless about what to order. This was the first time this Kanpur-bred man was going to eat pizza — “it’s called peet-suh ,” the girlfriend corrected me — and I kept scanning the menu for a long time, even as the waiter in the black tie began to get impatient.
Finally, I placed my finger on a preparation that had the word ‘salami’ prefixed to it and told the waiter, “Bring me this.” Salami : a word I was familiar with. In cricket, opening batsmen are called “ salami ballebaaz ”, and since it is usually the best players who open the batting, I thought the pizza I was ordering was the best.
Half-way through the meal, I felt a tiny piece of cartilage in my mouth. I summoned the waiter and asked him, “Is this pizza vegetarian or non-vegetarian?” Instead of giving me a direct reply, he held his hands apart to indicate the size of something and innocently said, “ Woh sooar hota hai na (you know a pig, right)?”
