| Zohra Segal "" she's particular about the spelling "" sits comfortably in a chair by the window. It is early evening yet and the sun is streaming in, lighting up the still vivacious 95-year-old visage. |
| Daughter Kiran, an Odissi dancer, is taking a class downstairs, her great granddaughter, who shares the top floor with the veteran actress-dancer-artiste, is away, and this is the perfect time for a tête-à-tête with a journo from a newspaper "" mind you, not magazine, for then, of course, she would have charged us a fee! |
| The nation's favourite, if temperamental, amma is in a good mood. She tells me of a rare, fulsome lunch that she has enjoyed that day at the India International Centre where she had invited British actress Indira Joshi (of the Kumar's at No 42 fame): "biryani" and "that delicious honey fig ice-cream", still savouring the name of each dish, because ordinarily, it is just one toast (with peanut butter and chillies), soup and fruit for her every afternoon. |
| The secret to her energetic, age-defying personality is not sex, as she had famously and irreverently proclaimed in an interview with the BBC, but a measured lifestyle. |
| Forty-five minutes every morning on the terrace, reciting "" with expressions and from memory "" exactly 32 pieces; poems, dialogues, speeches... Half hour walks, every morning and evening, on her floor "because when I used to walk in the colony, the neighbours would offer coffee", some dance exercises "" sitting down, ever since a knee operation a year ago "" and, yes, a spartan, unvarying menu. Except, of course, "when I invite people over to the IIC", when she can also indulge in "a small drink", she winks. |
| These days, the routine has an addition. There are dialogues to be learnt for a small part in a play based on The City of Djinns, to mark 150 years of the first war for independence. That's in April. |
| "But your column is about food?" she asks. I nod. The recipe has been requested for earlier but when she says she doesn't cook these days, my heart sinks. This column is not happening. |
| It is. Segal will not be urged into the kitchen "" but she more than makes up for it with her stories. "I was always a tomboy, I had never seen the inside of a kitchen." |
| Husband Kameshwar would cook for them though. One day, he asked her to watch a pot of rice on the flame. "When it started to bubble, I screamed. Something was going wrong, I said." It was only in London after he passed away, that Segal learnt; "pulaos, kebabs, pooris" "" and improvisation. |
| The recipe she shares here is basically that: "One day Papaji (Prithviraj Kapoor) was visiting. I used to stay in Hampsted and a whole lot of people, some from Prithvi Theatre, turned up. I did not know how to feed them all..." That is the genesis of the sausage pulao ("in Anchor butter", Segal mimics the Brit way, and chicken, not pork), that became quite a hit in the London circles of the time. |
| AVOURITE RACIPE |
| SAUSAGE PULAO |
| 2-3 chicken sausages, chopped 2 cups basmati rice, soaked for an hour 3 onions, chopped 1 tsp garlic, chopped 1 tsp ginger, chopped 1/2 tsp cumin seeds 1 bay leaf 1/2 stick cinnamon 1 black cardamom, pounded, skin removed 2-3 tbsp butter Rose water |
| Brown the onion, garlic, ginger, spices and sausages in butter and keep them aside. Cook the rice separately. When it is almost done, mix in the sausages and the masala and cover and keep till fully cooked. Garnish with browned onions and sprinkle some rose water before serving. |
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