Chandni Chowk – Unending Parathas and Alleyways (Part 3)

You are around still?? Good good, I have a story to tell and if you remember I had found my mother after losing her in the enormous crowds.

It was almost 3pm and we were famished. Partying till earlier today, we woke up too late to think of breakfast and needed nourishment before we collapsed. Sridevi was demanding to be fed immediately. So we went to the famous parathe-walli gali and sat down to have a few of the famous deep-fried parathas. They have the whole operations perfected amazingly – one guy chops the veggies, the other guy stuffs it into the dough, another flattens it to be fried, and another guy fries it till it’s unhealthy enough to give you several heart attacks.

As we lost track of what we had ordered and started having other people’s parathas as the little boy (barely 13 years old) announced them, it was as if life was being injected into our veins. A hearty glass of lassi topped the whole effect. One can’t have a Pepsi even if one tried – I don’t think they have heard of such a drink. How charmingly rustic, I thought. I was being the foreigner in my own city, in my own country!! It was all so new, so different…

Stomachs full, we decided to ignore the unhygienic conditions and found to our horror that the mother was running off into some alleyways. We thought we were going to head back onto the main road, mommy… that’s where the big shops would be, no? Apparently not. As we stumbled into step and found that the mother was in fact following some man who claimed he knew where the shop was. And what if he was just taking us around the galis to commit heinous crimes?? Delhi is an unsafe city people.. it’s a perfectly plausible situation! My mother is indeed courageous. We went through alleyways that only had the capacity to have two people stand in its width (preferably face to face so that there is some space in the middle).

Through corridors of other buildings and narrow lanes we finally reached a deserted shop where some fat men sat folding saris. Is this where I can find lehngas?? There are no women around to suggest it might be a preferred destination for such things….

To be continued (I promise I will end the story in the next one)…