The Way To My Stomach

I just spent 41 days as a vegetarian. It was the most unpleasant experience of my life.

42 days ago, my mum celebrated her 60th birthday – her sashtipoorthi. So the brother and I decided to break the piggies and invest in some gold. Which was a testament to our filial love – gold was going up faster than Hugh Hefner on Viagra.

But I wanted to disprove the little voice in my head that told me that my mother would want something more from me – the prodigal son, the (literal) black sheep in wolf’s clothing – and so I asked her if she wanted anything a little more… umm… metaphysical.

“Go get yourself some vegetarianism, my son”, she said.

I batted many eyelids. “Mater of mine! Oh venerated umbilical!” I exclaimed, “What injustice is this? You might as well have asked me to stop eating meat!”

She gave me an old-fashioned look. It was the Mother. She proceeded to give me gyan about how one needs to detox from the meaty juices every anon and how one should eat saatvik food because it was good for the soul – forget all that nonsense about chicken soup, that’s the work of the devil – and I could get a leg up the ladder of moksha if I shunned eating carcasses.

I saw the cause was lost and knuckled down to six weeks of herbivoring. It started the next morning, right after I had the omelette in my flight out of Kerala.

The next month and a bit was just a blur, but one of those long-drawn out, shot-on-low-shutter-speed, smeared out thin blurs that happens when one hungers to push one’s pleasure buttons but can’t. Like Hugh Hefner before Viagra.

I was veggie during Ramzan when I was invited to gorge on dabba gosht at Noor Mohammadi – the only place fit for gastronomic enjoyment in Bombay. I would look on, sighing wistfully, when my mates would dig into tandoori chicken at Urban Tadka. I’d make a moue when roast beef sandwich (from Indigo Café – makes you believe in God!) made its way into welcoming stomachs. I went to Goa and stared resentfully as the mates pigged on prawn vindaloo and stuffed crab at Souza Lobo. I went to the Handi restaurant in Jaipur, with its laal maas and nalli nihaari, and ate Paneer Butter Masala, to the consternation of my friend Azhar Habib. I declined offers to Al Kauser’s melt-in-the-mouth kakori kababs and other food – any food – in Delhi. I stuck to the veggies, devouring cauliflowers, dal, potatoes, tomatoes (now I don’t even care how they are pronounced), cucumbers, cabbages, potatoes, dal, mushrooms, more peas than a month of Switzerlands and the entire GDP of Micronesia in paneer.

It was hell. I couldn’t understand why people would want to live like this. God, or the Big Bang or the Great Sneeze or Brahma, wanted us to eat the flesh of dead animals. We have canine teeth – they help us rip apart chunks of meat for easier processing. We used to be hunter-gatherers; those spears early man carried weren’t to knock apples off trees. We learnt to eat sabre-toothed tigers and stuff before we figured out agriculture. Some of the best food in the world – most of it – is stuff that used to walk, fly, swim, crawl and generally perambulate all over the place.

And now we have vegetarianism. I guess it all started when those sadhu dudes in the olden days used to deprive themselves of the good stuff and gave up their tandoori chicken. That was deprivation enough. Now it’s become the cool thing to do. Like quitting smoking. Ptchah!

PS: On a related matter, this Swiss court has ruled that killing plants is immoral. Tell it to’em.