Sometimes descriptions of food and eating in literature can go on repeating themselves in one’s head like a stuck record. In my case, those unforgettable lines are from RK Narayan’s The Guide . ‘He had a craving for bonda , which he used to eat in the railway station stall when a man came there to vend his edibles on a wooden tray to the travellers. It was composed of flour, potato, a slice of onion, a coriander leaf, and a green chilli — and oh! how it tasted — although he probably fried it in anything; he was the sort of vendor who would not hesitate to fry a thing in kerosene, if it worked out cheaper. With all that, he made delicious stuff…’
Counted as one of the greatest writers — often mentioned alongside Balzac, Dickens, Chekhov and Faulkner — Narayan did employ food to great effect in his stories. The Vendor of Sweets even has edibles in its title; The Man-Eater of Malgudi suggests that humans are low on the food chain; typical Indian junk food is referenced in Waiting for the Mahatma — where the protagonist suffering from a gnawing craving for freshly cooked idli or dosa is instead offered stale short eats: ‘ Kara sev, vadai and potato bonda …’
However, it is in his The Guide , the saga of a fake guru being forced to undertake a fast by his gullible devotees, that food has a concrete and pivotal role. As Raju, the reluctant godman, gets hungrier and hungrier, the memory of the bonda that used to be on sale at the railway station where he ran a small stall takes on a hallucinatory force. It heightens the dramatic tension unbearably.
It is an ironic tale: Raju, just out from jail, initially enjoys the meals brought by the villagers to the temple ruin where he’s staying, but when drought hits the country it becomes obvious that there are no more free lunches coming his way. This forces him, eventually, to turn into a genuine saint — to conjure up rain through fasting. He goes along with it, even though he himself knows that he has no supernatural powers. Raju is transformed from being an egocentric person to a self-sacrificing altruist, but his story had a curious side effect on me: it turned me into a bonda addict.
For years I was unable to pass one of those deep-frying roadside chefs with their vats of boiling oil — probably spurious and recycled — without buying myself a piping hot ball of dough stuffed with potatoes and spices, and that came with lashings of green mint chutney which may well have been churned out of gutter water. I knew it wasn’t healthy to binge on, but I just couldn’t help myself. Whenever I saw a bonda I thought of Raju’s starvation and had to do something about it.
Interestingly, Narayan wrote The Guide not at home in Mysuru but while in Berkeley — where his productive days were marred by just one singular disagreeable factor: the lack of vegetarian food. Back in the 1950s, vegetarianism hadn’t caught on in California and the restaurants in the Bay Area served nothing but beefsteaks. Eventually, in order to survive, the novelist bought a hotplate and from then on sustained on curd rice until he finished the manuscript. His predicament is clearly mirrored in the hungry guru of the novel. The choice of bonda as a literary device is apt, considering that this traditional Udupi dish is historically documented as a quintessential part of Karnataka cuisine since at least the 12th Century.
I was eventually cured of my addiction when I was climbing the rock at Sravanabelagola, known for its giant monolith of a Jain saint called Bahubali, who starved himself to death about 1,000 years ago — after realising the vanity of hungering for power. The climb had made me ravenous, and again Narayan’s lines played in my mind — of the drooling guru’s dreams of gluttony, to ‘eat bonda for fifteen days without a break’, and the pain of his enforced starvation heightened by the crowds of onlookers.
But once I finally got down to the bus stand where there was, as at almost all bus stops of south India, a bonda -frying man, my appetite for deep-fried junk suddenly vanished. If those ascetics could starve themselves to death, I figured that I could, at the very least, abstain from bonda -hogging this one time and lose a few inches and pounds from my podgy bonda -shaped waistline.
Since then, I’ve not eaten a single potato bonda .
The writer is the author of bestselling novels Mr. Majestic! and Hari, a Hero for Hire . His next book, Tropical Detective , will be published by Pan Macmillan this autumn.
