it has long been maintained by authorities more knowledgeable than me that the only two gharanas of biriyani are the lucknowi and the hyderabadi. and that if all the rest of indian civilisation went to pot, we would still have justified our existance by having invented biriyani. there has to be a little aside at this point, were i make my personal claim that the only people who know how to make a perfect roganjosh are kashmiri muslims. just the way an ilishmachher jhol attempted by anyone who is not a Sen, Ghosh, Ganguly, Bhattacharya, Mukherjee, etc is doomed to failure, the perfect biriyani is best left to the people who have had centuries of institutional experience making it. a digression into the rather innovative calcutta biriyani which somehow transcends mere biriyanis, but then, its not a classic biriyani. in fact, if the pun involved were not so ridiculous, i would have said that the calcutta biriyani is not kosher!!
statesman house: this building near chouringhee you can walk to either from the esplanade, or in our case, on a bunk from college from presidency. kinjal, my esteemed friend is the bloke who knows the ins and outs of calcutta in a way that i do not know. yet. so we walked to the statesman house. where we, impoverished and hungry(this was during my second year in college, when most people experience of leftist revival) stumbled into a roadside dokan which smelled like heaven. beef biriyani in its best form, with a dash of achar(pickle). rubbing shoulders with wannabe journalists dreaming about copy which will sell(statesman house), random dalals("take, take, take, no take to no take, one time to see!") and people employed by random dalals(still trying to equate the city to their mental idea of the chhapra zila, "chhapra zila mein gharwa, to kaun cheez ka darwa?"). the best biriyani i ever had in the holy city. aminia and sabir didnt come close. forget bedwin, bawarchi and the johnny come latelys hich are springing up near colleges in south calcutta. ok,, so my grandma used to make some awesome biriyani, but it wasnt kosher!!!!!
bangalore: three years later. me and debuda hunting shivajinagar for plastic wine glasses. why? cos when jonathan brewster is about to drink elderberry wine from the wine glass, someone comes in and he drops it. or something to that effect. noone had ever seen or heard of elderberry wine before, but we assumed that at thirty feet, the audience wouldnt know the difference between elderberry wine and grape juice from the chowdeswari juice centre. and buri(inspector rathod) had threatened to do nasty things to debuda and me if plastic wine glasses were not forthcoming. so here we were, hunting through the shivajinagar market where on a thursday afternoon, you are likely to hear english, kannada, hindi, tamil, malayalam and the two of us speaking bangla. its fun, everyone curses everyone, and no one seems to mind. until then, i had dismissed bangalore as a hopeless land of vegetarians where rasam was the best substitute for food. till we smelled something, from this somewhat hidden alley. almost like it was an entrance into the magical world. the gazes of the folk walking back and forth seemed to just slide off it. with a cry of "fire burn and cauldron bubble!!!!!" we leapt into the alley.(ok, i just made that up). halfway through, we were stopped by a bunch of rather huge, ill tempered goats. a quick correlation analysis said: livestock-smells-ahaha! we edged our way by the goats and walked down. we eventually reached this shop where for the minor sum of 10 Rs, we could have a whole plate of sheekh kabab or masala kabab or biriyani. negotiations with the stallowners involved us talking in bangla and hindi and him replying in kannada and ultimately hand gestures won the day. we sat down to kabab of the kind which is not served in random expensive places. you have to go there, forget about hygene and all that. and take your own water bottle. and then finish with a up of sweet tea at the stall at the corner of the market, near the bus stop, with a classic mild shared between us.
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