Kishore Singh: Chicken out, no way

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For a fortnight now, Sarla has been distraught "" and all because her husband has banned chicken from the house. Sarla, who's never eaten anything that hasn't consisted of chicken in a very visible form, says she's rapidly losing weight "" not that you'd notice. "What does he expect me to eat?" she complained to my wife, "Paneer?"

That has my total and complete sympathy. I can't abide paneer. It's a tasteless piece of sponge that has neither texture nor taste; but then, my feelings for chicken are equally ambiguous. Like paneer, it's white, tasteless and, when it's cooked the Delhi way in a mix of cream and tomato puree, tastes so foul as to make you sick.

Sarla may not stand for paneer, but she's besotted with chicken. And yes, she doesn't mind the odious "butter chicken" (beloved of the Punjabis), but fried, steamed, boiled, curried, stuffed, sauteed, grilled or tandooried, she must have it for lunch or for dinner.

This week saw Sarla plumb the depths of depression. She thought she'd fool herself into believing she was eating chicken simply by disguising what she was in fact actually eating. But if there's anything more horrible than butter chicken, it's mutton dunked in a sauce of tomato and cream. Fish "smelled", she cried, meat was "too tough", prawns were "ugh", venison and hare "illegal", beef and pork strictly "no-no" "" so what was a non-vegetarian to eat?

So she did what any desperate housewife would have done. First, she cooked dishes for the family saying it was chicken from before the bird flu attack in India, and she'd just got it out of the deep-freezer. Her husband said that didn't count and had it thrown into the garbage. Then she tried to disguise the fact that she was serving (or at any rate, eating) chicken by calling it something else ("duck", "quail") but her husband forbade any flying animal being served at the table, so that was that. Finally, she had it turned into mince and served it up as fish koftas, but a chicken bone (which is very different from a fish bone) survived to tell its tale, and it was decided that Sarla would no longer tell the cook what was to be made at home.

But Sarla isn't the only one suffering withdrawal symptoms from chicken addiction. Most Delhi hostesses are merely a shell of their former shells, and all because it's very well to have salt and pepper prawns and fish fingers for snacks, but no murg malai tikka? No chicken drumsticks? No chilli chicken or manchurian? And absolutely no tandoori? How in heavens is one to have friends over, if one is not allowed that favourite pastime of pharoing (literally, tearing into) chicken?

That it's taken its toll on the supply chain was brought home to me when, out for lunch at a predominantly seafood restaurant, the maitre d' wouldn't stop pushing chicken as "absolutely safe". We wanted crab, he recommended the Thai chicken curry; we wanted lobster, he suggested substituting chicken instead; we chose grilled fish, he though we might prefer fried chicken instead.

Yesterday, phoning our favourite takeaway for supplies, I asked for mutton barras for snacks and a raan or leg of lamb for the main course. "I'll give you a discount on the chicken," the takeaway manager counter-proposed. "Oh, we don't have a problem with chicken," I assured him (after all, Parliamentarians had been eating the stuff on TV in a show of solidarity with the bird), "we'd just like mutton instead." Either he didn't hear, or he was deliberately obtuse, for what we got a half-hour later was chicken tikkas and butter chicken. So we did what any self-respecting neighbour would have done "" we invited Sarla home for dinner.