Mysoor Bhajjim

By José Lourenço

Mix bhaji and a pau costs eighteen rupees at Margao’s Bombay Café, on Station Road. A single samosa with chutney costs ten rupees. But as evening settles into an amiable pace, the finest thing to eat at Bombay Café is a plate of Mysoor Bhajjim. They are balls of flour with ground coconut and whatever (who ever worries about what is in the things we love!) and you can eat four of these bhajjim with chutney for only ten rupees. They are warm and give your jaws a light workout, and they are filling. 

I go religiously to BC every evening to eat this plate of bhajjim. They make me feel all is well with the world. At that moment as I sit there eating those deep fried balls of flour, the working class people huddled around me at their narrow tables, the waiters and the bald cashier, we are all in a deep communion of utter contentment.

Today as I ordered the plate, I quickly noted my colleagues at the table. Across me, two and a half feet away was an elderly gent who seemed to have just eaten a samosa, going by his plate (it could have even been Mysoor Bhajjim) and was sipping his tea with a profound look on his face. A toothless sunken cheeked shopkeeper sat to my right.  

All was fine. My plate arrived and as is customary, I set aside the two teaspoons that are always served with everything at Bombay Café and picked up my first bhajja (we’d call it bhozo, in singular, further down south Salcete) with my fingers. As I was chomping away to glory, the old man across me left. 

A small inner sanctum behind the cashier's table serves as a 'family' area at Bombay Café. Family means women. Or couples. As this garbagriha was full, a couple sat at my table, on the bench across me. The man was plump and bespectacled and seemed to find me familiar. I found the woman familiar. Probably the mother of one of my kids' classmates. A good looking woman, shapely. She wore a dark pink top. 

"What will you have?" she quickly took charge.

He craned his neck to peer at the menu board.

"What's that shankar palli?"

"Shee shee don't eat that shankarpalli. It's a sweet. They give it during their Ganapati and all."

I had just finished eating my first bhajja. Or bhajji. Or bhozo. I now felt a bit self conscious. I picked up the teaspoons and attacked the second bhajja with these implements. It seemed unseemly to eat with my fingers when this beautiful, almost triumphant bust was poised just one and a half feet from my face. Got to give it respect. 

"What is he eating?" I sensed the man asking the waiter. I was eating, staring at my plate. I'm very shy like that.

"Mysoor Bhajjim," the waiter replied. 

"I will have that," the bloke said. Good taste. One more devotee.

"Maka mure, bhaji hadd," said the woman. "Shee shee, don't drink that water, anh," in an aside to her man. Back to the waiter - "Chonnea bhaji ani puri."

There is a zone around a man that defines intimacy. Strangers are usually kept at length, beyond a few metres. That's why corporate bosses have these big tables, to keep you the ordinary mortal at a distance. Your friends can come up to about three or four feet of your body. Your wife can enter the final one foot wide shield and actually touch you. Or as a wag once joked - "The shortest distance between a man and a woman is minus six inches." Hah! Or as Al Capuchino in Scent of a Woman says, “Hu-aah!”

But my point is that many situations break this formal zone of intimacy. In a crowded bus, and in packed cafés like BC. Sometimes they happen comically. I was once walking behind a woman on the crowded pathway that bisects Margao Garden, when her swinging hand hit me squarely in the family jewels. I doubled up in pain, but she walked on, blissfully unaware. 

So a violation of personal airspace can be traumatic. The man and the woman chattered on about power of attorney and pugddi and Pissurlekar, but that magnificent bust hovering above my plate, just a foot from my face, took its toll. I bravely chomped and gulped down my remaining bhajjim, careful not to send one flying across as I battled with the teaspoons. And then I rose and paid the bill (just ten rupees, can you imagine?) and left. 

The enjoyment of Mysoor Bhajjim is a pure thing, ideally experienced in a chaste environment, devoid of perturbation. I felt let down this evening, unfulfilled. Damn boobs.

I have my tea at a different place a few footfalls from BC―at Janata Café. That's where my friends usually gather for a tea and a smoke on a seedy and furtive bench behind the café. I was carrying History of Art by Judith Clark, just bought at a book sale for 400 bucks. After perusing the book, one of my friends, a contractor, said―"When I build my house, I want to put up framed photos of the persons who invented the telephone, the light bulb, Einstein and all, you know, all the inventors, and I will pray to them."

As I walked back to Comba, the light was falling. I saw many more people and heard many more things. There are no zones actually, we are all huddled together, piglings feeding from the same great invisible sow.

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