The "Other Gastronomic Adventures" from the previous post

Well, after that 6000 rupee butter chicken, Ajay asked me if I had ever sampled the wares at Muhammad Ali road and thereabouts, at Ramzan time.

What with all these world events happening, it so happened that I had not. I said so. Ajay immediately raised eyebrows and gave me the "what stone have you been living under, my friend" look. I squirmed under his critical gaze and implored him to remedy that defect in my otherwise blemishless character.

"Alright", he told me, "present yourself at Kala Ghoda at 6 pm tomorrow. I'll see what I can do."

Kala Ghoda, for those of you who are ignorant of Mumbai geography, is an important city landmark named after a black horse (kala ghoda) which does not exist.

I know this for a fact. I have searched high and low for it, often when I was perfectly sober, and found no evidence of horses of any color.

And the search was never easy, let me tell you. Can you imagine walking around in broad daylight, or worse, dark night light, trying to look nonchalant while actually seeking out a large black horse among automobiles, office goers and random municipal corporation teams digging up the road in the hope of finding buried treasure?

Which by the way is a confirmed fact, the fact that they're hunting for buried treasure, I mean, because another fine thinker  (who blogs  here)   arrived at the same conclusion independently, as we both discovered recently while having a philosophical beer, proving that it MUSt be true. And what the devil am I rambling about here? Get back to the point. Right. Sorry folks.

The other important thing about Kala Ghoda is that it lies 35 traffic filled kilometers south of Malad West where yours truly resides. I decided to take the train. Now local train journeys are something I really look forward to, in Mumbai, for the simple reason that nowhere else in the world can you find so many people digging out little bits of snot, rolling them into balls of nanometric dimensions and sticking them under the seat or on the dangling handles overhead, with such dexterity and precision. It's hypnotic. I did not join them. I wanted to, really did, but when Yo Yo Ma plays the cello, you listen, however much your own fingers are twitching to play, if you get my drift.

By the way, if this post lacks the usual precise, compact, power-point-presentation-to-the-board-of-directors quality of my arguments, you can blame it on a rather jolly little beer called Tuborg which is so named because if have tu many of them, and you happen to be with Bjorn Borg, you are liable to see tu borgs. There. I've gone off the rails again! At this rate, I really doubt if I will ever get to the point where I tell you about what I ate at the Mohammed Ali joint.

So here goes, before I fall asleep.
1. Tandoori Chicken
2. Paya barahandi
3. Khichda
4. Firnee
5. Malpua with cream.

All of which were made from low calorie ingredients, of course, and had special cholestrol lowering vitamins added to them.

(It might have occured to the alert reader that I could have said this right at the beginning and saved myself the trouble of typing a few thousand words. Hmmm. True. But it's such fun to ramble on pointlessly. Also, my MBA training requires me to use a thousand random words for every little thought or else they will formally strip me of my degree)