13-06-2025
What the boys ate: The gastronomy of growing up in Delhi
There are two types of food stories in Delhi. The first is about Mughlai gravies, royal khansamahs, and secret spice mixes. The kind you see on the Epic channel narrated by Prof. Pushpesh Pant, or experience on a heritage walk with Ms. Rana Safvi. The second is about what the middle-class boys ate and where. This kind has no place in curated food walks or five-minute reels. It has little to do with heritage and even less with presentation. But it is real. It is grounded. And woven, indelibly, into the muscle memory of an entire generation of Delhi boys.
This food was not glamorous, and almost always eaten standing up. This was not food for indulgence, but food for function. What the boys ate was simple: rajma chawal from a stall near Shankar Market, bread pakoras from Kamla Nagar, coffee at the Indian Coffee House, and on special occasions, the hot chocolate fudge at Nirula's. No dish cost more than Rs 100 and no transaction took longer than two minutes. Yet the memory of the taste that lasted decades.
Back in school, the tiffin was a socioeconomic document disguised as Tupperware plastic box. One boy had a cold, hard aloo ka parantha. Another had a vegetable sandwich in a Ziploc pouch. The rich kid had foil-wrapped cheese toast. And then there was the boy with aloo-poori, the food that everyone secretly loved and publicly hated. Because food, like masculinity, was hierarchical. While some meals conferred status, others invited ridicule.
There was also the samosa. Not samosa in general but the school canteen samosa. It was misshapen, rarely hot, and left an oil stain on the school uniform that spread faster than the news of the cancelled maths class. Its brownish, blistered skin crackled when we bit into it, revealing a mash of aloo and green chilli, the occasional raisin, and a rogue ajwain. But, no one complained. The samosa did not taste particularly fancy, but still felt like an achievement, typifying a quiet rebellion against the conformity of the home-cooked tiffin.
Beyond the school, the food outside coaching centres formed its culinary micro-climate, whether it was FIITJEE in Kalu Sarai or VMC in Pitampura. Amidst back-breaking routines of juggling the delicacies of Irodov and RD Sharma, there was the veg cutlet sandwich passed off as an artisanal aloo-tikki burger, and the kulfi, which was served on sticks that bent if you did not consume it fast enough. The vendors who stood outside with their wooden carts knew their market well – boys with cavernous hunger, shallow pockets, and iron constitutions. Sanitation was a rumour. But no one cared. These were not merely meals, but pit stops. It was food that made you feel like you were surviving something important.
Every neighbourhood in Delhi had its unofficial cricket ground – a public park with an uneven wicket and at least one interruption by a jogging uncle. After the match, the boys, some in whites and others in yesterday's T-shirts, would congregate around the juice stall. Not to drink protein shakes or carrot-beet combinations. But the half-sweetened mosambi juice in plastic cups that always tasted faintly of iron. As an accompaniment, there was bhel puri – the crunchy, chaotic mix of murmura, peanuts, chopped onions, green chilli, and a dash of nimbu squeezed from a rusted squeezer. It came wrapped in newspaper cones, always carrying the faint smell of old ink and Delhi's crime stories. One bite and our mouths lit up with joy rarely found in gourmet eateries.
In college, food was laughter, rivalry, heartbreak, and the embarrassment of a female crush walking by just as you slurped down the redolent upma at Triveni Kala Sangam. Ordering food for her was chivalry and sharing a brownie from Wenger's meant something special. Middle-class Delhi boys, awkward in communication, relied on food as their Meghdootam. They did not write her a poem, but bought her golgappas from Bengali Market, without her having to ask.
The boys of Delhi did not grow up on fancy paneer tikkas or the (depressingly) ubiquitous soya chaap. They grew up on chowmein. You would be hard-pressed not to find it at every street corner. And mind you, this was no hakka or schezwan. It was the old-school Indian variety: soy-heavy (poured from a repurposed Bisleri bottle), oversalted (to a default), served in flimsy plates, and stirred in blackened woks. You asked for it to be extra spicy and with more of that red, fiery ketchup, because red signalled the richness of food. The hissing steam, the clang of the ladle, tossing of the noodles, and the sprinkle of chopped coriander on top – all of it added to the experience. And, trust me, it was some experience.
Eating was not merely an afterthought but an event. The boys would pool money and even run errands for the vendor, just to get a discount. Delhi itself seemed to hum with food. The air smelled of frying oil, roasting chana, the sizzle of tadka in a kadhai, the smell of melting butter, the floral whiff of agarbatti from street temples, pressure cookers hissing in the background, kulfi wallahs ringing their bells, and the distant puk-puk of banta bottle tops being popped open.
Today, many of these food habits and those food spots are gone. The juice stalls have been replaced by Blue Tokai. The chowmein corners have given way to momo stands and the Rs 10 samosa is now Rs 130 with peri-peri sauce. The boys now eat not at Chaina Ram Halwai or Sitaram Diwan Chand, but at joints with Instagrammable lighting or (worse) alone in their office cubicles.
That is fine; change is the only constant. But in some corner of the city, some schoolboy still stands, licking chutney off his thumb, and stuffing a samosa into his blazer pocket to eat later in secret. That, I hope, never changes.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.
