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The pursuit of the perfect...desert?

 Back in the good old days, when I had more hair on my head than growing out of my ears, there was a girl I dated briefly. She was on a quest to find the perfect coffee. Every weekend, she would visit a different café across Dubai , choose a Cappuccino and pen down her observations in her journal.

I had no such interest. Going out to a café became a thing in Mumbai roughly in 1996, when ‘Barista’ started popping up as a trendy chain of outlets across the city. Or maybe that was when I first began venturing out of my sheltered little pod because it was my first year of college. Until then, I hadn’t seen much of the city except a square kilometre around my house in Juhu which included my school, the doctor, the pharmacist, two churches and a graveyard. Basically, everything I might ever need was in that space and I had never ventured outside it.

But now, I was in Bandra – the cooler, more hep cousin of all the other suburbs with shorter skirts, tastier food and a lot more entertainment options guaranteed to appeal to everyone. Like the McDonalds -first in the city that had opened there. Or, as I’ve just mentioned - a coffee shop.

Except, coffee, funnily enough, held no appeal to me. The best coffee I had ever tasted was a cold version of it available at Churchgate. Sadly, that had shut down. A very close second was Bru instant coffee made at home. With milk and sugar. Coffees in these cafes were expensive. And tasted horrible.

A decade had passed since I discovered coffee shop and they hadn’t died out. Instead, they had multiplied. Which is why, this girl was occupied every week.

It got me thinking – what could I pursue with single minded passion and chronicle for myself.

I settled on Gajar halwa.

See, I have a massive sweet tooth. And of all the sweets I have ever eaten, this one is my favourite. It’s yummy and if you ignore the sugar, has some health benefits. This would be a pleasurable pursuit. One that I could continue with until I was old and diabetic.

People told me that carrots improving our eyesight is a myth. They were wrong. In one single year, I had to change my glasses twice. The number for my spectacles dropped twice by 0.25 in each eye. I was eating boxloads of it and my eyesight kept improving. There were no other changes in my lifestyle or reading habits in that year.

Eventually, I cut down. My waist kept widening and I really didn’t want to spend on new glasses every six months. My wife also found it annoying. She tries to eat right with a salad for each meal, minimal sugar and oil in her food etc and here I was causing a carrot shortage in Singapore.

There is perhaps one footnote I should add here – which is about my pursuit of another wonderful Indian sweet – the gulab jamun. But I am going to save that tale for another day.

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Rohan is an amateur photographer, an open water scuba diver, a mountaineer, an obsessive bibliophile, an intrepid traveller and a highly successful mutilator of the Spanish and French languages (often at the same time), a consultant in the fields of market research, client partnerships and Artificial Intelligence, an author, and more recently, a dad. Among other hobbies, he can also lay claim to half-baked cooking attempts (no pun intended), chess, computer gaming, badminton, swimming,board gaming, indoor wall climbing, poker, adventure sports, reading fantasy novels, and a string of other very forgettable endeavours. His first novel Keep Calm and Go Crazy - a true story of how he met his wife, was published by Harper Collins India in 2016. His second published piece was a short horror story The School that featured in the Best Asian Speculative Fiction of 2018 anthology. Curse of the Yaksha is his latest novel which is an Urban Fantasy series set in modern day Mumbai. Roha...
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