Priorities

A chai stall: kettle, saucepan, glasses, strainer, biscuits. Instant satisfaction.
Most street chai comes in tiny throwaway clay cups but this stall, located somewhere in the Varanasi old city, served such great chai that I offer it as the type irrespective of the atypical glassware. The best chai I drank in Varanasi, and probably in India was at Ashish Café just off Assi Ghat. Ashish might be the loveliest man in Varanasi, a smiling man who cooks delicious food very slowly and serves it on his verandah; his chai is heavy with fresh ginger and served as an excellent antidote to the cold I contracted whilst in town. There’s plenty of air pollution everywhere in India so it’s not beyond my imagination why one might wear a facemask to filter out the gunk. Still, tourists in Calcutta, Bodhgaya and Varanasi prancing around, their respiratory systems protected by clean white masks, did not strike me as particularly dignified or sensitive. It was only when my nose and eyes had been streaming for a couple of days that I realised what a great service the masks might have been.

Ashish’s gingery chai has eased my cold and kept me walking up and down the ghats. ‘Burning is learning,’ a young chap told me on my first day in Varanasi. This line runs through my head each time I walk past the burning ghats where bodies are being constantly cremated. I can’t quite bring myself to watch the duration of a burning (three to four hours, I’m told) or even a funeral, I just rush on by. If burning is learning, I think I’ve learnt that I’m a little uncomfortable with death rites as a tourist spectacle. If the numbers of foreigners hanging out to watch the burnings are any indication, I may not be siding with majority opinion on this one.

I’ve had to get used to it though as I need to pass Harishchandra Ghat, a burning ghat, to reach Mansarowar Ghat from where I’m staying. The Lotus Lounge is located at Mansarowar and I’ve been able to satisfy my dumpling cravings there. I was initially a little reluctant to patronise the Lotus, it being so obviously a retreat for foreigners from the Ganges-side trials. Everybody wants to pretend they’re being intrepid and doing it like the locals and places like the Lotus – with a shiny pink and green and white balcony over the Ganges, clean low tables, a snazzy, well designed sign painted all over town, menus in proofread English and, each time I’ve visited, an Indian-free clientele – don’t really help to sustain the illusions. On the plus side, the food is cheap and delicious, the cushions are comfortable, and there is a happy absence of marauding children. Sitting on the balcony, I couldn’t help thinking of the Lotus in Potts Point and, had I a 2011 resident on hand, I would have offered for discussion the contention that the Lotus of Mansarowar Ghat is Varanasi’s answer to the Lotus of Challis Ave: really rather lovely once one has discarded the notion that one should be languishing in slightly seamier surroundings. The PP Lotus may have charming wallpaper and a bewilderingly lengthy cocktail menu but it doesn’t have the dumplings offered on the shores of the Holy River. Up there on the balcony, one more dazzling success was registered for the Tibetan veg momo, the dumpling of 2008, as far as I am concerned.
Stuffed with a gooey, garlicky mix of softened veges, steamed and lightly fried like gyoza, these dumplings are a stunning riposte to any existential angst. Is life worth living? With dumplings like this, most certainly, yes. Any doubts can be quelled with reference to the sauce. Someone has taken handfuls of garlic, chilli and tomato (raw), thrown them in a blender with a dose of salt and pressed pulverise. From my rheumy perspective, this sauce embodies the qualities some people seek in a guru: healing powers, charisma, certainty, sex appeal. I have always been easily lead.

Alas, I fear that whilst I live within reach of such delicacies, my spiritual well-being will lag. I have been to two Buddhist holy sites in the last week, Bodhgaya and Sarnath, and have been sleeping in one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. Whatever it is that is in the air in these sacred places, it has given me a cold and I find myself, as ever, bound to earthly cravings.

Plumdingers

Momos in soup at the Tibetan Om CafÈ, Bodhgaya, a locale particularly favoured by out-of-town spiritual questers dropping by that holy city. Not only is it a fabulous spot for the sceptical eavesdropper, it is a fine, flea-free, low fee place to eat. The soup was full of garlic, green chilli and some kind of leafy weed, a hearty, nay, pugilistic counter to the chilly, depressing situation outside and, indeed, to the drippy sanctimony of the clientele.

Barely visible in the background is an excellent glass of strong milky filter coffee. The Om crowd stopped comparing meditation stories for a few moments as it was brought to me, the punchy aroma of coffee in the morning briefly obscuring the incense burning in the corner. As their eyebrows fell and their gazes turned from my glass and back to their own, full of chai, hot ginger and lemon, Tibetan tea and lassi (salty, no doubt), I wondered whether the mild stimulus afforded by coffee drinking was viewed with some chagrin in this sacred place. Was mine a paranoid reaction? Hard to say, but in the half second before the puzzled, slightly disapproving glances stopped and the dharma chatter resumed, every demon in my chart urged me to yell out, Dudes, it’s my karma, right?, like some obnoxious precocious adolescent diva in a coming of age film set in Northern California. I kept the noise down and concentrated on broadcasting the vibes via my cosmic ham radio instead.

Hail the Dumpling!

A friend of mine proclaimed 2001 the Year of the Dumpling on the first dawn of that very year. Early in the morning after the year before, steamed dumplings struck the assembly as extraordinary entities: delicious misshapen orbs, miraculous in their very manifestation and the rapidity of their transition from freezer to steamer to plate to belly. As it has turned out, 2001 wasn’t the Year of the Dumpling, rather, its first dawn marked the beginning of the Decade of the Dumpling. It may even happen that we happy beings are living our lives in the Century of the Dumpling.

Anyway. I love dumplings: I can’t remember ever being seriously let down by dumplings. A little bit of stodginess, over-frying, under-steaming, gloopy filling, chewy pastry, none of these misdemeanours ever defeat the goodness of the dumpling experience. The Global Dumpling League admits a broad range of foodstuffs into the category of dumpling: something carbohydrate-y wrapped around something else and steamed, boiled, or fried. Gyoza, ravioli, frozen Chinatown dumplings, pelmeni, gowgees, dumplings homemade with Laura, samosas, dim sum, won ton, Chinese Noodle House and Silk Road fried dumplings, Mavis’ golden syrup dumplings, tortellini…all these take their place in the pantheon of dumplings.

On the streets of Kolkatta, I discovered a new variant: the Tibetan momo. Momo are small dumplings stuffed with spicy, super-garlicky vegetables and served with a chilli sauce. The street stalls in Kolkatta served five dumplings with a dollop of chilli sauce and a little bowl of peppery soup sprinkled with shallots for 10 rupees (about AU$0.30). Momo are ubiquitous in Bodhgaya as there is a huge population of Tibetan refugees here.
These may not look like anything special but they were dynamite: the best momo I’ve yet tasted. They exploded with hot golden curry veges – I love it when garlic is treated as a vegetable! I could hear the salsa in the centre being prepared as I waited – dice, dice, dice – raw onion, garlic, tomato and chilli in equal proportions. I think if I ate salsa like this every day, my immune system would be a stronghold with Death Star defenses. Mutton dumplings are also on offer but I haven’t tried them for several reasons: I’m wafting through a vego phase; I’m convinced that meat is the cause of all food poisoning; Indian mutton is goat.

I’m committed to eating plenty of momo before quitting North India in the hope of figuring out what’s in the filling. Are there any Tibetan restaurants in Sydney?