#5: Living like a batata vada, from Pune to Goa…

Hello and welcome to Fried Lines, a newsletter that helps me talk about my fondness for potatoes.

I have been writing this issue between visiting family and friends in my hometown. While I earlier assumed that working on this edition would be overpowered with feelings of despair and darkness in the Delhi winters, things eventually turned out to be just the opposite. I recently went for a fun, midnight walk with a group of women (also popularly known as @wewalkatmidnight on Instagram) near my parents’ neighborhood. As a woman, there is something very obviously liberating about being able to go for a walk in the dark, but nothing beats the excitement of being able to loiter after midnight along the petrifying streets of Delhi NCR and attempt to indulge in basic things that are usually taken for granted by most cis-men. (At this point, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry!) Nonetheless, it’s one of the many reasons that helped me knock out any winter blues that tried coming my way! 

But that’s not it. Writing this issue has mostly been about remembering the potatoes of Pune. And I am the happiest when I am writing about Pune. So brace yourself for a very intense love letter to Maharashtra loaded with a lot of images on my camera and a bunch of external links that I referred to while throwing fun facts about potatoes in this issue.

I’ve reserved a special place in my heart for all the potatoes that are made and served in Maharashtra. I love eating potatoes everywhere, but biting into a crunchy vada pav on a rainy day in Pune always hits differently. The spicy batata vada slipped between the buns, the crisps of batata bhajji coming straight out of a piping hot cauldron, the irresistible chunks of potatoes tossed in bhaaji - I could go on and on about my fondness for all the potato dishes and snacks Maharashtra has introduced me to.

A lot of what I remember about Maharashtra is tied to the very specific aroma and taste of a freshly fried batata vada. 8 years later, I still find myself reminiscing about the rainy days in Yerwada every time I inhale the collective aroma of a batata vada and a pav. I think I’ve conveniently associated most of what I remember from my days in Pune and Bombay with the fried colours of hot batata vadas and samosas. The skin of a fried potato often reminds me of the indescribable moment right before we get to see a sunset - a certain kind of yellow transitioning to a shimmery shade of brown and orange. I am not too sure if we have a term to describe this feeling. Perhaps, the best feelings in the world can’t be articulated in mere words.

Transitions have always intrigued me. I am not always enthusiastic about changes, but they have always been an integral part of my life. In the earlier issues of my newsletter, I’ve talked about the impact of consistent transitions in my life. As much as I try to step away from embracing new beginnings in life, they somehow find me and push me to clear a chapter and embark on a new one. I’ve been observing transitions for the longest part of my life, and my fondness for potatoes has only evolved and grown with every new change I’ve swum across.

Moving to Pune was one of the first and biggest transitions I had experienced in my life. It was certainly a different time, and also a different place - a place that I had no familiarity with. Until then, most of my memories and experiences were confined within the landscape of North India and a little bit of the East. I was just a girl, wandering the streets of Delhi and taking aaloo tikki chaat for granted. But it took only a couple of hours, two suitcases and one flight to the heart of Maharashtra for my world of potatoes to change overnight.

Suddenly, aaloo was called batata, and every corner of the street wasn’t filled with just aaloo tikkis anymore. I could still find tikkis at many places but a lot of them were now sandwiched inside a pav and peanut chutney. Many people called them tikki pav. As I dug into my first tikki pav in Pune, I was overwhelmed with the feeling of familiarity as well as an emotion that signalled the arrival of something new in my life. As much as I missed the potato snacks I would find on the streets of Delhi, the onset of Maharashtrian snacks in my life didn’t bother me as much. My first experience of eating potatoes in Maharashtra was successful and with that, I decided to tap into my curiosity to explore it even further. Gradually, my curiosity led me to vada pav, a snack that I would continue remembering 8 years later.

Indeed, I was now living further away from the Hindi-speaking belt and eating vada pav for the first time. But my first encounter with the meal happened further down memory lane, almost a decade ago, as a teenage baby. My classmates and I were on a rather extraordinary school trip to Goa - in which playing water sports and wearing short skirts were off-limits. Those were the days of enabling misogynistic sentiments among children in the cutest way possible. We spent two days travelling on a train together where I accidentally rebelled against our teachers’ regulations on changing clothes on the train because well, I had stained the whole of my trousers. What was I even supposed to do? In any case, I think it was easier for our teachers to see me break an unquestioned rule than to let the boys know that girls have blood flowing out of their bodies every month. It’s easier to talk about it via Biology textbooks but difficult to witness it first-hand. While I wallowed in my misery and discomfort, I stumbled upon my classmate getting a plate of vada pav from one of the train stations in Maharashtra where our train had halted. My classmate took the burger-like snack in both hands and took a long bite of it. At that time, I had only heard about the snack in a few Bollywood movies and this was the first time I was seeing someone eat it in the real world. I kept watching and wondering if it was a little dry for most people to have it. I assumed it would come with some sort of ketchup or dip, but here it was, completely devoid of any kind of moisture in it. And yet, my classmate seemed to be eating their heart out and having a great time. I conveniently deviated my attention to look for something ‘more delicious’ that could help me feel better - a chocolate or a bag of chips, perhaps? A decade later, I am realising that I couldn’t have been more wrong about my judgment.

When I started working in Pune, I was welcomed with overwhelming degrees of change in every possible way. I embraced a different culture, a different language, and of course a different world of potatoes. Needless to say, I loved all of it. Some of my early days in Pune were consumed by draining myself out and grading papers in classrooms. On one exhausting, rainy day, I stepped out of my school to eat something as my co-teacher happily (I guess?) covered for me in our classroom. I was still figuring out what to get when I saw one of the teachers in my school getting an unusual plate of bread and potato patty with a guava shake. I looked at my colleague digging into the bread bun slit in two different directions and a deep-fried patty put in between. Of course, it was made of potatoes - mashed potatoes and chickpea flour. I finally discovered that the simple, irresistible meal was none other than our beloved vada pav.

Overpowered by the sight and aroma of the batata vada inside the pav, I grabbed a plate for myself too. Finally, the grand moment was here. Vada pav and I, in a classic face-off, were ready to intervene in each others’ lives. I took my first bite and experienced an unforgettable moment of bread mixed with the fried crisps and spices of the potato patty flowing in my mouth. As I was flattered with this delicious snack that I couldn’t stop eating, I was hit with both excitement and a certain kind of grief - the grief of not having discovered it sooner in my life. With this revelation, I already knew I would just be alright living in the city for the next few years to come.

I used to roam the streets of Pune looking for the blissful snack. What seemed to be a big and slightly difficult shift in my life was now taken care of by truckloads of batata vadas in my belly. I have had different kinds of vada pavs and batata vadas in Pune - pavs laced with spicy peanut chutney and batata vadas slipped inside them, vada pavs served with salted, fried chillies, and batata vadas served separately on a plate. My heart and my belly were truly full. The fast food which was native to Maharashtra had made its way through the corners of my heart and how. 

I remember grabbing vada pavs with my colleagues almost every day at our school dispersal on cloudy days in Pune. Some days I had them for breakfast, sometimes they would give company to my evening chai, and sometimes they would become my dinner when I didn’t want to cook or order in. Those were some wonderful days full of the wonders of potatoes that truly helped my 20-year-old heart deal with the change my life had welcomed.

Since I’ve experienced transitions and moving among cities for most of my life, sticking to a constant element and finding my identity in something have been difficult. It’s almost impossible to identify with my own culture and the food that is native to my homeland. After all, I never managed to spend substantial amounts of time connecting with my own cultural identity. And suddenly, here I was, standing in front of a vada pav and feeling a familiar connection with this snack that was supposed to be an unfamiliar intervention in my life. I wondered if I had started finding some strange sense of my lost identity in this apparent potato burger every time I took a bite of it. I found an odd sense of belongingness with vada pav and Pune that I had longed for most of my life. Since then, I have tried leaning on the familiarity and belongingness I feel with vada pav amidst the chaos of my constantly changing life that rarely gives me the space to find my true self.

Vada pav is also symbolic of the warmth and acceptance that Pune had welcomed me with. As a kid, I moved around different places with my family until we finally made a seemingly permanent space in Delhi. As a 6-year-old, I entered Delhi amidst a lot of chaos and confusion. The overpowering changes and alien concepts made my little Bihari heart worried and perplexed. I don’t even know how I made my way through understanding the dynamics of the new city because I swear I didn’t know how to respond to people every time they answered ‘awein’ to a perfectly articulated question I asked them. I vaguely understood the idea of letting go of old memories as I subconsciously started making room for new ones in the city. I tried changing my accent and speaking Hindi like a North Indian. I even incorporated the usual Delhi people terms in my language like ‘oye’, ‘yaar’ and ‘koi ni’ to sound like one of them. And yet, it always felt like something was missing - it felt that I was trying too hard and yet, nobody was helping me fit in. I am not sure why I felt what I felt because I have been told that many newcomers in Delhi often feel the opposite. Over the years, I started sounding like a North Indian and things began to look up. But the very first moment of stepping into a big city with nothing but samosas to hold on to is hard to forget.

It’s with this memory that I moved to Pune hoping things would meet similar ends. But I was pleasantly surprised by the way Pune welcomed and accepted me. Despite not knowing the language, not being familiar with the culture or the cuisine, or not having a familiar accent, Pune received me with its openness and love. Maybe drawing mere comparisons between two different memories of transition is not quite fair. There could be a lot of variables involved such as the time, the era, the people whom I first met in the cities, and the list could go on! But all I can remember at this point is how loved I felt when I started living in Pune. It felt like I mattered unconditionally, and feelings like these rarely occur in my heart. It’s no surprise that vada pav became a symbol, a tasty little entity I would want to find myself in after questioning my sense of belongingness throughout my teenage years.

Pune, being a slow, lazy city of its own also helped me get acquainted with the idea of taking breaks and relaxing. After spending several years in a fast-paced city like Delhi, Pune was a delightful awakening about understanding leisure and the power of taking things slow. As a woman, the city surely helped me unlearn the pattern of burning myself out to mean something, and supported me with defying the usual expectations our society tends to have with women. Of course, only a laid-back city like Pune could help me do that.

I think it’s safe to say that vada pav is quite an emotion as it reaches out to people’s hearts in Maharashtra with a lot of warmth and tenderness. A lot of us living in Maharashtra didn’t just see it as a snack or means to satisfy our hunger, but also as a figure of love and hope. Monsoon just happened to be my least favourite weather but something about holding a vada pav in my hands made it all worth it. Some of my fondest memories of Pune are connected to holding my broken umbrella in one hand and a vada pav in the other, with a steaming cup of chai waiting for me after I finished digging into my dearest meal.

Vada pav tells the story of the firsts many people get to experience in Maharashtra. And I am surely fortunate to have been one of those people. It’s quite interesting how vada pav remains a constant character in every story of new beginnings in Maharashtra. People surely aren’t kidding when they talk about their initial days of struggles in Bombay or Pune, and mention eating vada pav when they had nowhere else to go or nothing to look forward to. I can’t help but hop on to the usual clichéd stories - stories that have been passed down among many generations in Maharashtra, stories of coming to Bombay and Pune with nothing but 50 bucks in hand. I too had vada pav as one of my first meals when I moved to Pune and didn’t have enough cash in my pocket. It just seemed convenient and cheaper to stuff your belly with vada pav instead of buying a proper meal. Many moments later, after being able to have a bank account filled with actual numbers, I would still be drawn to having vada pavs when I didn’t know what to cook. 

Vada pav is a tale - a tale of hope, love and resilience. With the onset of moving to a new city, navigating a new job, living by myself and cleaning up after myself for the first time, vada pav remained one of the only characters that helped me deal with the transition. Needless to say, it is symbolic of most of the firsts I got to experience in my life as an adult. (For more interesting facts about vada pav, you can read an old blog of mine that helped me talk about the history and politics of the snack.)

My tryst with munching fried potatoes was not only experiencing this new, exciting snack, but also celebrating evolving companionship with my beloved samosas. Not only did I discover the happiness of eating samosas among the airy greens of Koregaon Park, but I also uncovered the potential of teaming up a samosa with fried chillies. Whether it’s a small bite across the road or a treat during school functions, I truly loved the drill of serving samosas with fried chillies everywhere I went in Maharashtra. 

Later, when I started visiting Bombay either for weekend getaways or for work, I continued the ritual of eating vada pavs with my friends/colleagues. (I once even enjoyed a vada pav on my way back to Pune from Kolhapur!) 

But it was in Bombay that I also learned the joy of a samosa slipped inside a pav. This combination was popularly known as samosa pav. On one of the weekends, my best friend and I were hanging out at Bandstand when she told me about samosa pavs. We saw a few people enjoying samosa pavs with sizzling cups of tea near a tapri. At first, I was a little reluctant to try eating a samosa with bread. This is not something that I was accustomed to. But so much had changed in my life that this later seemed fitting. And anyway, new, inconvenient shifts always made way for new revelations. So I let the thought go and decided to immerse myself for once in the strange combination of a samosa and a pav. I took the tiny burger in my hand as I saw a piping hot samosa sandwiched between both sides of a pav covered in peanut chutney and spices. And of course, it was served with fried chillies and salt. The delight of having my first bite of this unusual burger by the glorious sunset of Bombay was unparalleled. My favourite fast food was reimagined in my life, as a delicious snack full of happiness.

The nostalgic corners of Bombay and Pune have given me so many priceless memories of potatoes. It didn’t just end at eating vada pavs and samosas pavs. Eating pav bhaajis in Maharashtra is surely an endearing moment, a moment I have never experienced anywhere else outside the state. There’s something about the bhaaji and the way potatoes are mixed in the concoction that I could never get enough of. A lot of my lunchtime and dinnertime meals in Pune were defined as pavs toasted with some butter, dipped in the entirety of bhaaji filled with spices, potatoes and spiced vegetables. Interestingly, my takeaway from most meals and snacks in Pune was a simple green chilli deep-fried in oil. But the highlight of eating pav bhaaji would always be lots of butter and spiced onions and lemon served with the bhaaji.

Similar to pav bhaaji, I also discovered misal pav. I often found myself finishing a plate of misal which was loaded with potatoes. But truth be told, I didn’t enjoy this dish as much as I thought I would because I rarely found misal mixed with potatoes. Perhaps, someday I’ll try making my version of a potato-filled misal pav and thoroughly enjoy every inch of it.

I think most people from Bihar love mixing potatoes with almost everything - at least my family and I do! While I drowned myself in the beauty of Puneri cuisine, I would often make impromptu modifications to my meals as well. I would take the legendary meals of Pune in my hand - a bowl of spiced bhel puri and a small plate of poha, and throw tiny chunks of potatoes on them. I often say that if you haven’t uncovered the joy of eating bhel puri and poha with potatoes, you haven’t lived a full life after all! Maybe this was one of my attempts at mixing my own apparent culture with my newfound interest in another one.

But I surely wasn’t short of finding actual potato snacks in Pune anyway. I loved sprinkling my favourite chaat masala on fried bhajjis dripping down a small piece of a national daily. And of course, a lot of times they too came with fried chillies. And what’s more wonderful than hot bhajjis? Bhajjis filled with potatoes! Yes, I wasn’t just in love with bhajjis in isolation but my heart was also connected to the most endearing wonder of all - the meticulously fried batata bhajjis! In my Bihari household, we call these little nuggets of fried potatoes ‘bachkas’, but if Maharashtra wanted me to embrace them as ‘batata bhajjis’, I was so ready for it. A lot of times, my chai-time endeavours would meet the beauty of batata bhajjis served with salt and fried chillies in Pune.

Though conveniently found and eaten in most parts of India, twister potato sticks are another set of delightful gems that I actually discovered in Pune. After spending a long day at school, my fellow teachers and I would often talk about eating the best kinds of potato snacks in the city, and twister potato sticks definitely stood out. The large sticks of twisted potatoes came with different kinds of flavours that I remembered from a lot of Western fast food joints (or even from different kinds of potato chips at a grocery store) - classic salted, peri-peri, chilli garlic, pepper and salt, and so on! I first ruined a whole lot of my face with a gigantic stick of potato twisters sprinkled with peri-peri spices.

After finishing the potatoes twisted around my stick in one sitting, I had only little room left for my actual dinner. So naturally, I ended up calling it a day by grabbing nothing but a plate of vada pav.

It’s so heartening to see the relevance and versatility of pavs in the culinary culture of Maharashtra. No matter where you go, you’re sure to find a pav teamed up with pretty much everything you can think of. Pav, is indeed very sacred to the place and you surely know you’re in Maharashtra when your rotis and rice are conveniently replaced with pavs. If it’s not your favourite bhaaji, it’s misal, if it’s not misal, it’s tikki, if it’s not tikki, it’s a batata vada, if it’s not a batata vada, it’s a samosa, if it’s not a samosa, it’s keema (keema pav, anyone?), if it’s not keema, it’s your favourite curry, if it’s not your favourite curry, it’s a fried egg (hope you know about the popular anda pav?), and if all of that goes away, it transforms into little, fluffy pieces of bread toasted with some butter, and served with a cup of chai in the morning which is lovingly called bun maska by the Maharastrians. Of course, the origins of bun maska in Maharashtra can be traced back to the Iranian community that started to serve it in several Bombay cafes in the 19th century. 

But it’s not just bun maska alone that was introduced by people who hadn’t been a part of Maharashtra since its inception. Pav itself has been influenced by the Portuguese living in India. Back in the 16th century, the Portuguese started baking bread and buns in Goa that they used to consume back in Europe. This bread was called ‘pao’ in Portuguese. It is believed by many that the term ‘pav’ came from the same. Before you knew it, Goans started using pavs for every possible meal they consumed and the culture of eating pavs made its way through Bombay and the rest of Maharashtra. But it wasn’t just the pav that was introduced by the Portuguese. Long before the British had introduced West Bengal to potatoes, the Portuguese played a tiny part in bringing the potato culture to Goa, which naturally also spread across the streets of Maharashtra in no time. That explains the Marathi word ‘batata’ for potatoes which is derived from the Portuguese language once again (although, the origins of the word are linked to Spanish as well).

My relationship with the potatoes of Goa surely doesn’t end at my little research on potatoes and pavs. Goa, a breezy getaway from Pune, is a place I’ve always found myself going back to. It’s not just the duo of the seas and the vintage bookstores of Goa alone, but the potatoes in Goa also make for a fascinating experience. One moment I am boarding a bus to Goa, and the next moment, I am eating potato chops on the streets. If you’re enthusiastic about both potatoes and Goa, you would be aware of the irresistible potato chops found in Goa. Some of my favourite days in Goa have been spent relaxing by the sea and digging into the crispiest potato chops filled with potatoes and spiced meat. The blissful combination of minced meat and potatoes on a plate is unmatched. 

And only recently did I manage to stuff my belly with a plate of aaloo paranthas and hash browns as I stared at the sunset by the Anjuna beach and completely suspended myself from doing anything ‘productive’. Goa, tells the tale of leisure, a place that compels you to slow down and do nothing. I certainly cannot emphasise the power of enjoying leisure as women and resistance against the patriarchy enough (I literally cannot, I’ve already talked about it in the last issue), and eating a bunch of potatoes in a lazy place like Goa (apart from Pune, of course) always helps me achieve that goal, rather spectacularly. 

It has been 8 years since I bid farewell to my life in Maharashtra, and tried living in other cities. When I moved back to Delhi, I would try finding places to quench my thirst for eating good vada pavs. I found some Mumbai-inspired fast food joints, and of course, everyone’s favourite Dilli Haat offering vada pavs. Later, after moving to Bangalore, I still loiter along Church Street only to find some vada pavs at a few tapris and food courts. I even tell my friends to get me a couple of vada pavs stuck together with a candle on top instead of the usual cake on my birthdays. 

While I try sewing little pieces of vada pavs in my heart together, nothing compares with the ones found in Maharashtra, and understandably so! And yet, I do end up eating vada pav sometimes, or buying a samosa and tossing it inside a pav with some chillies. The silly things that I do in memory of my favourite city ever!

Pune was a special time in my life, and certainly remains a special place that I have lots of gratitude for. All it takes me is a plate full of pav bhaaji on a rainy day in Bangalore to get transported to those nostalgic monsoon days in Pune. Perhaps, one of the reasons I like Bangalore also hides behind the fact that both Pune and Bangalore, two cities that appear to look different from each other, are actually not different at all. A lot of things about Bangalore often remind me of Pune and eating potatoes with chai under the shade of a gigantic tree is certainly one of them. And it’s not just eating potatoes alone, but also the aroma of a fried samosa or a batata vada that takes me back to the best time of my life. 

A month ago, I was working late in the night and suddenly started yearning for bun maska and chai. Here I was, sitting in Bangalore at midnight, miles and hours away from all the Irani cafes in Pune, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the softness of the bun slices that I used to dip in my chai. And the next thing I knew, I was boiling tea leaves in water and toasting leftover pavs with butter. I took my first bite of one of Pune’s treasured breakfasts that I tried recreating in the middle of the night, and I swear in that surreal moment, I felt I was home again.