The tanginess still resided in my mouth; the dinner my mother had just made was bringing back nostalgic memories of my midsummer vacation in my homeland: India. Many cultures, customs, and religions are added like ingredients to the melting pot of Indian food. The result is an endorphin rush. And let’s not forget about the emotions, wholeheartedness and love that goes behind the making of these recipes.
Last summer during the hot months of July and August, I had paid a visit to the fierce Bengal Tigers, the mystical architecture of the Taj Mahal, and finally the most wonderful of all: the pani puris. Indian cuisine is lauded for the complex flavor pairings and creamy mouth-burning curries that it has been honing for years and years in different traditions and communities. The intoxicating experience that the food provides is a multidimensional one like no other.
The prime beauty of the summer still captivates my taste buds: the round, hollow semolina puff made to crisp mixed with the piquant mashed potatoes as the eye-irritating onions retained their pungent taste. The invigorating mélange of flavors were accompanied by its friend: the ambrosial and aesthetically pleasing tamarind-mint water. As I stuffed the entire puri in my mouth, the barrage of tastes and textures released in my mouth, slowly dancing around the insides of my cheeks and resting under the tip of my firing tongue. Though the mint and tamarind had equal proportion, the spicy mint dominated over the aromatic tamarind. I looked up and recognized the man; he had a deep-black mustache with curvature, along with a relatively thin physique for a typical Indian. Visiting the pani puri stall almost every week, I had now been acquaintanced with the man; he knew how I liked my pani—theeka (spicy) but full of sweet imli. I was addicted immediately. One plate was never enough. I gulped down the pani as fast as I could, suddenly bringing my tongue to an extreme fiery state. My cousins had bet I’d succumb to the spice, but little did they know that spice was the only way my taste buds would be aroused. My nose instantaneously became runny and my heart was racing beyond limits. My sympathetic nervous system was activated while I suddenly realized that you can have passion for various things in this life. At the root of all, my India experience was rooted in the passion of forming connections with my culture—whether that was through meeting people from different backgrounds than my own or traveling to places that made me more spiritual. But mostly, I formed a deep relationship with the cuisine. For me, my passion was the food. It was my pani puri.
Perhaps this had been a very small portion of my venturesome trip. However, it was the sole factor that helped me appreciate delicacy and contact with the motherland that had given me more than simply a diversity of rituals, a plethora of different languages to practice, and government-owned historical buildings. It has given me my tastebuds.
