Feel Good Food.

I think it's because my grandmother's Tam-Brahm heritage decreed it, but every afternoon after school I was taught to love my veggies. Sitting on the verandah with a book in my hand, I ate tomatoes with sugar sprinkled on them. Also slices of cucumber and pieces of beetroot. They somehow seemed to go with the afternoon sunshine and the adventures unfolding before me - I read nicer books then, Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo and The Children of the New Forest. I guess it helped to have something to munch on while impossible things happened elsewhere, but nothing went with adventure as much as raw carrots. And raw carrots in winter were the best things in the world. Like revelations that made a munching sound halfway through some story read alone on the tank in Jamshedpur, hidden away behind the brinjal and ladies-finger plants.

Sometimes, if I was in the mood, I'd have Complan powder. And if I was in a better mood I'd mix Complan and Bournvita and spend a lot of time detaching the sticky paste from my palate while racing through Asterix. The bus that carried me home from school invariably saw me with a candy cigarette in my mouth and a frown on my face, I think I used to read Holmes then.

Apples and oranges went with littlegirl books that imparted hidden wisdom; Anne of Green Gables and The Chalet School books were all apple-orange books. Guavas for The Jungle Books. Chocolate for fairytales. And Nesbit was grapes all over, green and purple with pips swallowed in surprise.

Look what I found :)

Now that I am old and wrinkled I sit by my window and read with a cup of tea in my hand. Tea is a bookish beverage, but when I'm feeling modern and gung-ho I read magazines with coffee. And as a mark of getting older and more wrinkled, I still steal Complan from the kitchen when I'm with a comic book (and do furious jaw exercises from panel to panel).

Death to e-books and potato crisps. May you all get dyspepsia and die.