(When I first arrived here, in 1986, the only cheese available was a tasteless, rubbery item called Cooking Cheese. At one stage I actually ordered cheese-making supplies from The New England Cheesemaking Supply Co. and made a not-bad gouda, aged in the refrigerator. Now we have Mozzarella, and Swiss, and cream cheese (marketed as Malai Chaska), and American cheese - the kind where each thin slice is wrapped in its own plastic sheet. And imported tins of Brie. Incroyable. I still have to dream of goat cheese, though. Goats are commonly eaten here -- goat-meat is called mutton -- but when I tried to buy goats' milk and make some of my own, I found that each lactating goat provides about a thimbleful of milk, beyond what it supplies to its kids -- I would have needed a whole herd.)
After Naturally Auroville, we moved on to Movenpick, where we perched on bleached wooden chairs and ate panini, followed by ice cream imported from Switzerland.
Does it seem strange to import ice cream from Switzerland? Read this:
IT was in 1833 that the Tudor Ice Company of Boston sent its first ice ship to India. The clipper, Tuscany, arrived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on September 6, with 180 tonnes of ice wrapped in pine sawdust that remained intact in blocks even after a four-month-long journey. For the next 40 years, the export ice trade from the US prospered in India till the advent of mechanical refrigeration which sounded its death knell. Tudor was the pioneer of the ice trade not only in India but the world over. In the 1850s, the North-Eastern States of the US exported as much as 150,000 tonnes of ice a year...
After Movenpick we went to Barista, a coffee pub, and lolled there for awhile, drinking something called icepresso.
Barista is right next to Evoluzione, a new furniture store that sells Ligne Roset. You can buy a love-seat for Rs. 125,000 - an enormous amount. I don't know if anyone is really buying, though. When I went in to take a look one day, the only customer was a prosperous-looking Sindhi lady, who perched on the edge of a sofa that folded over like a sheet of paper. She looked irritated, and said to the salesgirls, "You mean it doesn't even come with a centre table? And what discount do you give?"
After all this we returned, fed and caffeinated, on the chaotic streets, while I planned to make pasta with bleu cheese and coconut milk-lemon grass-and-ginger sorbet.
So, we have all this in Chennai too - not just the crumbling, broken things that appeal to me. And we have buildings like this:
Tidel Park
More and more of them spring up like mushrooms from the fertile mulch of the city of the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment