In the end, of course, Christmas cheer prevailed, fortified by a lot of alcohol and laced with not a little marijuana, but for a long while out there it had been touch and go.
It all started when someone in our Pondicherry guest house asked for a Christmas dinner, and the Americans thought it would be a lovely idea and went off to the local market to do the shopping, to return full of stories about how exotic, or enticing, or different things were, and how they were going to enjoy cooking a traditional meal for us philistine Indians.
By a lovely coincidence, one of the visitors was a true-blue chef with her own restaurant in New York to prove it, another on the way, so what was a meal for a dozen-odd people but a twirling of knives and skillets — now if only you could find the knives and skillets, the pots and pans in the shack that appeared to be the kitchen from where our meals emerged thrice daily.
The shopping was done, the roles assigned, when the first in a series of disasters occurred — there was no oven, therefore there could be no roasted birds, so we’d just have chicken, with stuffing by the side. No problem, said the chef, who by now was committed to the enterprise, oven or not, so she was taken for a round of the kitchen where you had to sit on the floor to chop, wash, grate, pound, stew, blanch, boil, steam, sauté or cook any which way. She was pale to begin with so I couldn’t tell whether she got any paler, but things didn’t look good for a while. And then they got worse.
By the time we spotted the rodents in the kitchen, a variety of them — field rats and moles and bandicoots — only the béchamel sauce had been done, the potatoes boiled, the onions fried, the beans steamed. The chef’s husband by now had the kind of look that tells you he knows he’s in trouble later, the kind where you expect your spouse to say, “Honey, can you come here for two minutes?” and you really don’t want to go but know you ought for peace and goodwill to prevail. But she didn’t call him away, and the kitchen shifted to the pantry instead with its one burner stove and even more makeshift pots and pans. Here, there were only geckos under the sink, but I thought it best not to so tell the chef, whose squeamish would have pleased the health inspector back in New York but would have done us out of dinner in our guest house in Pondicherry.
The chef’s assistant, a hobby cook, couldn’t find a masher for the potatoes, so he used a beer bottle instead. The chef found the chicken too bloody, and didn’t much care for the way it looked either, but some whisky after the beer helped quell that particular uneasiness. Besides, the meal had to be finished one way or another — who’d thought of this as a Christmas treat anyway?
With some more stirring and churning and bubbling, things got done and a Christmas meal did get served in the best stainless steel of the guest house, and though it wouldn’t have won a Michelin star, or had a finicky food writer in raptures — it was a miracle that it happened at all, and everybody said the stuffing was quite good, and it didn’t matter that the apple crisp was not so crisp after all, or at all, and at least some of the wine was nice, and if it was the spirit that counted we had it by the bushel, so maybe it was a Merry Christmas after all.