For the love of lauki

Illustration/Uday Mohite

I report here a recent whatsapp exchange on between my friend M and I.

Me: M, are you home today? M: Ya why? Me: I've made tori/turai, I want to send you some. At night an ecstatic text from M arrived. "Paro. I haven't had such good tori in years. Thanks! Teach me how to make it!"
Yes frenz, this can happen.

People say age is just a number. But as your friendly I-will-not-tell-a-lie-even-though-no-one-asked-me columnist I will, well, not lie to you. Age is a sabzi. You may waltz experimentally through youth, acquiring tastes for sushi and olives, silk-worm larva and escargot, but will draw the line at lauki and tori. "I will do anything for love, but I won't eat that!" you will scream as you flee.

In Sai Paranjpe's film Sparsh, a group of hostel boys served a dire lunch break into a chant. "Hai re kaisi uljhan, phir se alu baingan!". When we saw this as kids my sister and I were delighted. We had found our song!

Which young faces will not take on Charlie Chaplin expressions of betrayal and horror, self-pity and terror when confronted with lauki, turai, tinday and baingan? A vegetable civil disobedience will be attempted, even by vegetarians, but at least in my childhood, these uprisings were always doomed. One tayiji would definitely say, "Hain, what do you mean it's yucky. It's so delicious. Finish it." And so you would be left to languish alone with your plate, clinging to your pride and disgust, while others, especially some sickeningly obedient cousins went off to eat mangoes.

It's understandable. These vegetables are slimy, pulpy, and snotty. They cannot really be gussied up (yes, your heirloom recipe for tinda gosht is a lie). Add spices, and it's just masala snot. Don't add much and it is, well, itself.

But one day somehow it will happen. You will realise you have been chasing frothy romances with bok choy and endives. It has been tori all along. Tori is the one you love with depth. The hills are alive with the sound of tori! For some it will be karela. For others, lauki. But the moment will come.

I found my tori truth in the pandemic, when sabzi became aspirational. Things were hard to get and when it was tori I got I shrugged and took it.

Never having made it, I had to look up a recipe, and choose the simplest one. It was a revelation- this clean, green, mild taste. This silky texture I'd been calling snotty. And oh its glassy shade of jade. Gosh. Yes milaad, ladki mature ho gayi.

The path of true love always has doubters. My friend S refuses to eat it. (yaniki refuses to mature). "You have very western tastes" he scoffs. "Things should taste of themselves and whatnot." If so, may we all be loved like tori I say! Ladki badnam hui, lauki tere liye.

At first I was embarrassed to admit this new love. But now I flaunt it. I once made lauki for a dinner party. I take tori in my dabba and press it upon people. "It's delicious" I say. "Just try it!" as they look trapped and embarrassed. Ah well, one day we all become our least favourite tayiji. Pass the kaddu.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com