Now that we have reached back to NY, and are no longer on the road, chronology seems somewhat over-rated. So, I am going to jump around and blog about people and places, not necessarily in any order. Will start with what must have easily been the best meal that we had on the trip. A list that includes some mighty fine other meals.
This was dinner on our second-last night. At the home of Carrie and Sanyog Rathod (and their eight week old son - Valmik) in Cincinnati, OH.
Sanyog went to architecture school in Mumbai with Mamta, is a LEED AP (as are Mamta and I) and generally speaking a sustainability enthusiast (if you just had a baby, what choice do you have, but to work for a sustainable planet?). Carrie works for P&G and is, we weren't told specifics due to secrecy that surrounds these things, also working on making some or all of their products more sustainable.
Sanyog had cooked. The recipes, or at least one of them, were from his mother in Nagpur. He comes, as we learnt that day, from a Rajasthani family that has been settled in Nagpur for several generations. He speaks, as do his parents, Marathi fluently. The shrimp we ate that night, must have had something to do with that assimilation.
The shrimp was dry, very spicy and cooked with potatoes which had disintegrated a little over the course of cooking and formed the base of the dish. It was divine. I regret not finishing the last bit, which I absolutely could not even bear to look at, by the end of the meal. Still...
He had also made chicken, spicy and rich.
There was a gobi ki sabzi and a daal, I think. Forgive me for not remembering much beyond the shrimp. I could go on...
Carrie had baked a pistachio cake, which was awesome. 'Deceptively light', I seem to remember, were her words to describe it. Served with ice-cream. What she meant is that, you run the risk of eating way too much. I figured that out, much later.
All this was washed down with some Belgian beer and later still, some Johnny Red.
They live in a beautiful house in a neighborhood called Over the Rhine. Once beautiful, then crumbling and now slowly making its way back. In large measure due to the confidence reposed in it by folks like Sanyog and Carrie.
They took us on a driving tour of Cinti, through the University, some of the beautiful old neighborhoods, downtown featuring Ms. Hadid's Contemporary Art Center (cold and deserted on a Sunday morning) across the road from Cesar's Aronoff Center for Performing Arts.
The tour concluded with brunch at Amma's on the edge of town, with Bua da and boudi - my first cousin and his wife. Boudi grew up in Mumbai, like Sanyog and two of them - neither Maharashtrian - struck up a brief conversation in Marathi.
We headed out of that brunch, remembering Carrie's parting words about a twelve hour drive following a heavy Indian meal not being a good idea, ringing in my ears as I started what would be our last leg of this epic journey.
PS: You are probably wondering, why I have posted so many photographs from a near-identical vantage of pretty much the same subjects. Actually, its been technologically frustrating. Thats why. I had taken these pictures to do a time-lapse study of the evening. Camera on tripd and all that. Have been trying to string them together into a single animated sequence. No success. Tried everything I could think of - exporting from Powerpoint, using an old 1995 technology - animated gif - and so on. No avail. The animated gif file is fine, it works on my computer, but clearly blogspot is not set up for this. If anyone has a good idea as to how half a dozen such images could be put together so that they keep looping within, please suggest.
PPS: Am tired and sleepy. Leaving this post as is, Mamta has promised to organize it tomorrow.
