Previous chapter : Banking in Bongaigaon https://jayanta13.wordpress.com/stories-from-assam-banking-in-bongaigaon/
INTRODUCTION
This is an anecdotal account of some incidents in the life of a twenty-something young man from Kolkata fresh out of banking training college and posted in rural Assam on his first independent assignment as an officer of a nationalized bank. The four years of exile from the metropolitan city passed slowly but there was no dearth of varied experiences for all that. In fact, some were downright unforgettable.
My employer bank of the time had nearly a hundred and fifty branches in the North Eastern part of India spread across all the seven states. Many of these branches were located at far flung and truly God-forsaken places by urban standards. I was lucky to have got a branch at a hick place called Dhaligaon that was not too far from a town called Bongaigaon
Bongaigaon had very acceptable infrastructure including a couple of nice vegetable markets, some grocery stores, some simple eateries, a handful of medicine stores, a hospital of sorts, a telephone exchange, a few schools, half a handful of doctors, two movie halls, a railway junction and assorted other support services and lacking only in the supply of tap water and cooking gas.
Life was hard, far from being urban, electricity was forever in short supply, the summers were hot and extremely humid, the rains were really heavy and the winters were chilly. There was no piped water supply and we had no water filter. There was hardly any public transport. Snakes visited often and one had to be careful not to step on one, on the visits to the external toilets at night. For someone born and brought up in cities, it was a daily dose of adventure. Add to that the chronic attacks of waterborne stomach diseases and you have the complete picture.
One word of caution. The stories may be anecdotal in nature but they have been fleshed out in order to improve readability. Therefore, this is not an autobiography by any stretch of imagination.
Now that I have confessed everything, please read on
(Most of the photos and sketches used in this collection have been collected from the internet, without attribution, because I did not know the names of the photographers/artists)
CHICKEN CHUTNEY
About six months later my dentist friend moved out to another accommodation along with his fifteen-year-old assistant. Andy, a recently transferred friend cum batch mate from Calcutta moved in with me to replace him.
Andy was posted as Assistant Manager at Bongaigaon branch of my bank and after his arrival, our house became a sort of Clearing House for the two branches of the Bank. This is so because we exchanged all the cheques and other collection instruments at home, thus providing our respective customer’s faster service. Of course, it had also to do with convenience. And also, conveyance – because we didn’t have to pay our office peons to carry the stuff and spend an entire day travelling between the two branches by cycle.
Our first cook was also substituted by his younger brother Pramod, who was all of twelve years old. Pramod was not as polished or experienced as his elder brother, but he could manage to rustle up a plate of rice, dal and a vegetable subzi mornings and nights. He could also make tea and sweep the house. That was good enough for us.
Andy, having grown up mostly in Delhi, was more fluent than me in Hindi but he couldn’t speak a word of Assamese to save his life!! When Pramod’s Hindi proved inadequate, I usually had to step in to the breach as interpreter. Hilarious situations sometimes ensued due to phonetic similarity of some Assamese words with Hindi. One such incident had to do with making roti. Pramod announced to Andy one morning “Sapatti nahi hai”. To this Andy replied “Well, Nahi hai to tum banao. Abhi to bahot time hai”. To which Pramod said “Nahi hai to kaise banaye ga?” And it went on in that vein for some time. Then I intervened and explained to Andy that what Pramod had meant was that we were out of tea leaves (Sah Patti) and not roti (Chapati)!!!
On some evenings either Andy or I would try our hand at cooking, usually with disastrous consequences. While on the subject, one incident of cooking chicken readily comes to mind. Both Andy and I had grown up in hostels, with access to canteens, and therefore had almost zero idea about cooking. Of the two of us, Andy was somewhat better, having watched his mother more attentively than I ever did.
So – to get back to the incident alluded to hereinabove – one evening while returning from office I had this bright spark of an idea and I wanted to surprise my house mate with some inspired cooking.
So, while passing Bongaigaon market I stopped and bought myself a largish chicken. Soon as I stepped out of the market, realisation hit me that I had no idea where to start even. Dumb struck and cursing myself for being a total idiot I put my scooter on its stand and waited for inspiration to strike. Which it did, after about ten minutes, in the shape of Dilip Das, an engineer from a Calcutta based company which was then involved in the construction of BRPL. Das, a bachelor like us, was my customer as well as friend and he lived close to our house. The shout that I directed at him could have stopped a speeding taxi on Chowringhee Road during rush hour traffic. Das was a small fry in comparison. He stopped, put his bike on stand, and strolled over.
He was an angel in disguise. The first thing about cooking chicken is vinegar, he assured me. And I dived back into the market for a 750 ml bottle of the brown stuff. “Then what?” I asked. “Well, you get onions, ginger, garam masala, Tej pata, garlic, chilli powder, haldi powder, a bit of salt and you are in business,” he said. “Don’t forget to soak the chicken in vinegar for an hour before starting”, was his parting shot as he climbed back onto the saddle of his Yezdi and zoomed off into the semi darkness, while I dived back into the market once again.
For those familiar with cooking this will come as no surprise but for those who aren’t, it is a different matter altogether. A chicken, irrespective of its size, pedigree, and family background, requires less than half an hour’s marinating. But in my case Das had never told me how much of vinegar to put. Not to be found wanting, and too proud to ask too many questions, I took the one and a half kilo dressed chicken home and emptied the 750 ml vinegar bottle over it in a large dekchi, totally and satisfactorily submerging the contents.
Then I settled down to wait. In the meantime, I also cut up the onions, the garlic and got all the other spices ready.
All our cooking was done with firewood, as gas supply was not available in Bongaigaon those days. It was messy business, to say the least, and it blackened all our cooking pots and everything else in sight. The saving grace was that pre-cut, foot-long firewood, locally known as khori, was readily available in head-loads and they were kept stockpiled in a corner of our cook house.
I cannot possibly call the place a kitchen. It was a separate “Assam-type “room with a tiled roof, ultra-thin walls made of woven bamboo mats plastered over with cement and rough mud flooring. It was built on one side of our courtyard and away from the main house, probably to avoid contamination from wood smoke. The single oven was made of brick and clay.
Well the chicken was given a thorough dunking, the masalas were duly fried, and the entire lot sautéed for a time that I deemed suitable. Then, not wanting to waste the precious vinegar in which the chicken pieces had been soaked, I added the entire 750 ml into the pot and added some more water in order to be on the safe side. Then, when the concoction started boiling, I left the cook house, wiped the profuse perspiration the effort had caused me, and settled down for an estimated hour’s wait, with a glass of very stiff whiskey and a Beatles “Rubber Soul” playing in the tape recorder, to ease the tension from the system.
I think Andy got home around that time and asked me what was cooking for dinner. Somehow, I cannot remember Pramod being there that evening. Probably he was visiting his parents or some such thing. So as the evening wore on Andy and I sat on the outside verandah in our plastic folding chairs, listened to music with half our minds and chatted about this and that and generally kept an eye out for snakes.
About an hour and a half later when the hunger pangs hit, I looked at the watch and almost jumped out of my skin and ran helter-skelter to the cook house. The chicken had been well and truly cooked by then. Most of the liquid had evaporated and there was a faint smell of burning to boot. But Andy was very magnanimous and supportive about it and we sat down to eat – then realised that there was no rice, no roti, no nothing, to eat it with!!
By then both of us were too hungry to care and Andy miraculously produced out of nowhere a loaf of sliced bread which he had bought on the way home for the morrow’s breakfast. So, we made do with that.
The chicken, though dry and devoid of any gravy, was actually pretty well cooked, even if I may say so, and the burning was within acceptable limits applicable to famished bachelors.
Only Andy told me later that it was the best “Chicken– Chutney” that he had ever had.
The ungrateful so and so.
Next chapter : Me and My Mac https://jayanta13.wordpress.com/?s=Me+and+my+Mac
Fifty Shades of Random Ramblings 