HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE. Crafty afternoon

“Is he always so bouncy?” our guest wants to know. She’s referring to Rocky, who is literally leaping up and down with excitement. “I think he likes you,” I say, diplomatically. “No!” squeaks Rocky, airborne. “I’m bouncing because I can’t wait to go to the Crafts Museum!” Then he adds as an afterthought, “...AND because I like her.”

Kitty is a young friend visiting from the UK, where she lives and works as a designer. She’s in Delhi so that all four of us can go to the hills later in the week. Rocky and she bonded over the mishti doi she thoughtfully shared with him, having bought it in the nearby Mother Dairy booth. I could have told her it was a mistake. Rocky licked the container dry and begged so much for more that we had no choice but to go buy the rest of the stock at the booth.

Bins excuses himself from the museum visit because, he says, his nerves aren’t up to it. We all laugh at him on our way out. We’re going to have lunch at the wonderful Café Lota inside the museum grounds. We decide to eat first because even when we get there, just after noon, only two tables are vacant. Rocky promises to behave himself but his nose twitches in ecstasy as fragrant dishes are circulated around the busy eatery. “When is our food coming?” he asks in a desperate voice as a tray laden with plump golgappas filled with mango slices and cream goes past. “I don’t think I can hold out much longer...”

Lota’s cuisine is famously composed of dishes from around the country, creatively tweaked to be pleasing to the palate as well as to the eye. We have mustard fish tikkas, semolina “popcorn” dumplings and spicy mutton-mince Bombay pao . Kitty and I are totally stuffed but Rocky HAS to have a dessert. He goes for the mishti doi cheesecake. The waiters are giving him strange looks. “Is he a dog?” one of them wants to know. “Not really,” I say, “but he’s just as greedy.” Everyone laughs. But when we get up Rocky claims he’s so stuffed he can’t move. “It’s a problem we raccoons have,” he whines. “Food paralysis. We eat so much we have to be carried!”

He climbs into my backpack and we enter the Folk Art section of the museum, with its giant wooden statues of fearsome guardian deities carved in polished black wood. “Whoaaa!” says Rocky, staring up at the giants. “I would want protection from THEM!” Sadly, much of the museum seems to be locked up behind ornately carved wooden doors, for “renovation”. It looks as if the guardian deities have not been able to protect this wonderful institution from being mauled by Demon Indifference.

We spend a couple of hours in Khan Market before finally getting home. Rocky throws up in the garden. Kitty and I collapse in our separate rooms. “Tired, huh?” asks Bins. “Expired,” I reply.

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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