“Will you please take an extra cutlet for me?” Neela whispers, as we stand in line to help ourselves at the buffet. She can’t sneak one on to her plate because the head waiter has his gimlet eyes fixed on the paneer cutlets in question. It is his duty to ensure that people like Neela do not get the best of both worlds — that is the vegetarian and the non-vegetarian specials for the day. Whereas I am solicitously urged to help myself to the greasy treat. Woe betide any non-vegetarian who casts his or her eye on the vegetarian special.
A party menu in the Air Force Mess is pretty much standard. If it is Chinese that day, we veggies get, you guessed it, gobi manchurian. If it is Indian food, you can’t escape paneer and, if it is Continental cuisine, it is a cheesy cutlet. Everyone is extra nice to the vegetarians, as they feel we are somehow the underprivileged. Sometimes even we feel that way, especially when we are desperately trying to catch the eye of the waiter on the horizon who is carrying the boiled peanuts with chopped onions and green chillies. Nothing wrong with that, I love them peanuts too but the crunch of the fish fry or the chicken nugget is difficult to ignore. The other options are usually vegetable batons with mayonnaise or the pineapple and cheese skewered on a toothpick (I thought it was such a stylish snack).
But, if an Air Marshal is coming to town, breaking bread with him is always a good thing, food wise. The best linen comes out, the pudding is always a pleasant surprise (way different from runny custard) and there is cashew, pistachios and almonds instead of peanuts. We call them the Air Marshal snacks.
“You vegetarians are a pain,” my friends accuse me. While they prepare a chicken butter masala or a baked fish that will keep the others engaged and happy, they have to rack their brains to feed us ghaas-phoos types. So we get paneer, mystifyingly, considered the only worthy substitute for chicken despite us assuring them that we were delighted to eat dal, chawal, baingan, bhindi, or karela. They never believed us.
But there are some perils to being a non-veg. At a ‘dining-in-night’ for an Air Marshal, the menu included prawns much to the delight of the Bengalis among us. This is a formal dinner where the big man sits at the head of the table and each course is ceremoniously served. Everyone is expected to keep an eye on the boss man’s moves. The minute he finishes a course and closes his plate, the rest have to do so too. Usually, he waits till the others have finished the food on their plate.
But on this occasion (may be he was allergic to sea food), the Air Marshal closed his plate five minutes into the course, just after the prawn dish was served. There was an audible gasp of dismay from the other diners as the plates of the yet-to-be-relished chingri maach were whisked away before they could properly get into it. The vegetarians, on the other hand, only had to forgo their kofta; a small sacrifice, we concede, compared to the crustacean.