Every day, at precisely half past noon, my uncle Kersi Kolah makes his way to the Ripon Club on Mahatma Gandhi Road in Bombay. Kersi uncle is a sometime stockbroker, and fancies himself as a bon vivant, a connoisseur as it were of the fine art of living. His little office on Dalal Street is nearly always empty, because uncle's leisurely lunch hours tend to carry on until tea time. And then, of course, it is time for tea. The Ripon Club is a large, gloomy place with polished planters chairs where you may sprawl in sybaritic splendour after sampling the delights of the dining room. Members are mostly Parsis and the chief attraction, of course, is the food, spicy dhansak and chutnied pomfret steamed in banana leaves -- cooked in huge iron ghamelas that Kersi's grandmother would have recognised. Special days like the Parsi New Year provoke a near stampede, and would test the patience of a saint, let alone the overworked kitchen staff. In fact, there is a tale, apocryphal now, of a former cook who used to make the best sali chicken in the world. At the Ripon Club, it used to be the Sunday special, eagerly awaited through the week. But when the dish was finally passed around the tables, it would come back virtually untouched, because every member, you see, had to have a piece of leg. No other part of the unfortunate bird is considered worthy enough by a community that worships its tastebuds. At last unable to stand the hollers of indignation the cook resigned. 'Call me when you find a chicken with ten legs,' was all he said in his resignation letter. Whenever my uncle related this story to his friends, they would laugh incredulously and shake their heads. "Mad bawajis," Hurkwan Mehta would conclude, and uncle would laugh heartily. ''But that's tautology, isn't it, my dear Mehtaji!" he would quip. ''Can a bawaji be anything else?'' Diya Parakh is, what else, a spaced out bawi herself!
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