C O L U M N S

High Life

Plastic Mumbai
Oh, for the Bombay of the Sixties.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against globalisation or the packaging revolution. And I support greater foreign investment in the retail sector - not because I'm wild about Wal Mart but because of the usual arguments in favour of liberalisation - and the free import of foods from all over the world.

But when I see the sort of things that kids enjoy today, I sometimes begin to wonder if we've lost out on the flavour of middle class Indian life. I'm as willing as the next man to sing the praises of Mars Bars, of American cookies and (though perhaps a little less so) Pringles potato chips. But even as these international products take over our shelves, I say to myself: what happened to the things I grew up with?

Take potato chips/ crisps. When I was growing up in Bombay in the Sixties, we called them wafers. You bought them by weight from a shop - usually family-owned and managed - where they had been freshly fried. The chips themselves were hardly the stackable chips of Pringle quality (the secret to the clone-like quality of each Pringle chip is that it is not cut from a fresh potato but is moulded from what the trade calls "reconstituted potato"), but were oddly varied: one would be a golden slice of fried potato, another would be a translucent sliver with the edges curling up, and no two wafers were ever the same size.

Looking back, I think I valued their individuality much more than the taste. You knew that your wafers had been fried a few hours before (at most), and that a real human being - not some factory robot - had done the frying, deciding when each batch was ready to be lifted out of the hot oil.

Not that there was anything wrong with the taste, of course. The great wafer-makers had peanut oil in their bloodstreams (the actor Boman Irani ran his family wafer shop till a few years ago, for instance), and each chip was perfectly crunchy and even after you chewed and swallowed it, the rich taste of golden potato filled your mouth.

I wonder too about the lust for such cookies as Oreos - in my view, among the most disgusting biscuits known to man. When I was young, Britannia pretty much had the market sewn up (as I suppose it still does), but there were no fancy Little Heart pastry biscuits. The biscuits you were most likely to encounter were either Marie (thin and slightly maida-tasting) or Thin Arrowroot (much better for dunking into your tea or milk). As kids, our favourites remained Nice (was it pronounced "naice" or "nees", we would wonder), because they were coated in sugar.

At my house, however, neither Britannia nor Parle (king of the glucose biscuit segment) made much headway. We bought our biscuits from small local bakeries which were either Parsi or Muslim-owned. Top of the heap was the Shrewsbury biscuit (which you can still get today), but my mother's favourite was something called "khaarra biscuit" (because it had a sweet-salty taste) that metamorphosed into a delicious gunk of goo when you dunked it into milky tea.

These days, alas, nobody eats fresh biscuits. We pay far too much for packets of industrial cookies that were made many months ago and transported over hundreds of miles, buried in containers, deep within the bowels of cargo ships.

So it is with bread. Can there be anything more disgusting than the packaged sliced white bread we get in the shops these days? If I am forced to eat the stuff - usually to be polite to my hosts - then I am always astonished that people agree to pay good money for this rubbish. Usually, the bread will collapse within seconds of entering your mouth. It will take on the texture of plasticine and stick to the roof of your mouth while wrapping itself around your teeth.

In Bombay, in the Sixties, we were not savvy enough to know about whole-wheat bread (till the Nineties, even the fancy hotels would make the traditional maida bread with either caramelisation or food colour and sell it as brown bread) or rye bread or French country baguettes. But we knew enough not to buy prepackaged bread. Once again, it was the small bakeries that made the best bread - and Muslim bakeries were better than their Parsi counterparts - with a nice crunchy crust and a fragrant inside. If you spread butter (usually Polson in those days) on this bread, you had a treat. Otherwise, you soaked up your mutton curry with hunks of bread. (To this day, I can't eat a good keema curry with naans, rotis or whatever; I need bread).

Now, I more or less subsist on Diet Coke. But when I was growing up, Diet Coke had not been invented, and my parents were not wild about Coca Cola. In fact, as far as I can remember, the only bottled drink we stocked at home on a regular basis was Roger's Soda Water (as a whiskey mixer). If guests wanted a cold drink, they were offered sherbet - either gulab or khus. If we wished to add a North Indian touch, then our range stretched to Rooh Afza.

I was the first to rebel against what I then saw as the tyranny of the sherbets. Why couldn't we have squashes, like all the other boys had at home? My parents pointed out that all the orange squashes available in the market had never even been near an orange - they were synthetic. Bizarrely, this got me even more excited. You could get the taste of an orange from a test tube. Wow! What magic! And so on.

Eventually though, I saw their point. (It helps that I don't even like oranges, anyway). And they agreed to let bottled drinks into the house. We started with Duke's Mangola (does it still exist? I wonder), and after a few disastrous experiments (I could never work up much enthusiasm for Sosyo or Gold Spot), I finally got my way: I was to be allowed Coca Cola. Perversely, I then decided that I didn't really like Coke by itself that much and would insist on making what was grandiosely described as a Coca Cola Float.

This involved putting a large scoop of vanilla ice cream at the bottom of a tall glass and then pouring the Coca Cola over it. Some kind of chemical reaction clearly took place because a volcanic eruption resulted and a brown foam gushed out of the glass. The drink that emerged tasted neither of Coke nor of ice cream but that's probably why I liked it.

Soon, this became my party trick. Whenever guests came home and said that they wanted something non-alcoholic, I would rush into the room and offer to make them my Coke Float. Out of politeness, they would agree, and then I would dash to the kitchen and watch delightedly as the Coca Cola volcano erupted in each glass. The bemused guests would then have to pretend that they liked the brown sludge that I served them.

Funnily enough, it is the sherbets that have stayed with me as I have grown older. One of my favourite smells is Vetiver, which is a fancy French way of saying khus, and while many people find the scent of roses too oppressive, I find it strangely reassuring.

I miss the peanuts too. These days, the only times we are likely to encounter peanuts is as a free bar snack. But during my childhood, they were pretty much my staple diet. Each evening, when I returned from junior school, my father would give me a rupee and the driver would be told to take me to the Cooperage Bandstand.

Younger readers will probably faint on reading this, but in the early Sixties, you could get a pony ride around the Bandstand for twenty-five paise. So, I would take two rides. That left me with the princely sum of fifty paise. This always went to the shingwallah (in Bombay, peanuts were always shing, though when I tried using the word in Delhi, people thought of a sardarji with a speech impediment.)

The shingwallah carried a large basket in which he arranged the following: channa, shing or masala shing. For as little as fifteen paise, he would roll a funnel of paper and pour the channa or shing into it. Because this was necessarily a makeshift arrangement, and because all funnels have holes at the bottom, the shing would nearly always start dropping to the floor and the trick was to eat it all up before the container collapsed.

I don't know if there are still shingwallahs at Bandstand. I know the ponies have gone, though. And perhaps, you can now buy your peanuts prepackaged in polythene bags. No doubt we are told it is healthier and safer that way.

But me, I miss the old days, and the old ways. I miss the Bombay of my childhood and lament the plastic Mumbai it has become.

Vir Sanghvi is Editorial Director of the Hindustan Times.

Courtesy Brunch