LANGAR WALI DAAL

"Humility, that low, sweet root,

from which all heavenly virtues shoot.”

Thomas Moore

What makes food delicious is not just the ingredients and recipe, but also the love and reverence with which it’s prepared and served. That’s why, a very ordinary and easy-to-prepare dish, like ‘Langar Wali Daal’, tastes so, so delicious!

A couple of days ago, I chanced upon a video in which a village woman in Punjab was showing us how they prepared ‘Langar Wali Daal’. She was preparing it on a Chula using the typical village utensils. I was so tempted to have it, that I tried to describe what I had just seen to my wife and son. That’s enough for my son to go on and on and on… I mean, raving about this traditional daal dish from Punjab. “I have tasted the ultimate one in the Golden Temple, Amritsar,” he proudly let us know, “That experience of sitting on a Pangat and savouring it bending your head amidst some 50,000 people, regardless of their class, colour and creed,  is an out-of-the-world experience.”

Well, I had heard about those stories right since I had my first association with members of Sikh community. It was around 1981. A teacher-friend of mine (a Sikh gentleman) and I would, often, eat at some of the local Udupi/Mangalorean hotels. That’s the food, back then, I was familiar with. My Sikh friend would, always, pull my legs, saying, “We have to dive down to find daal in these katoris!” Yes, he was right… Our daal would, always, sit quietly at the bottom of the katoris… One had to dive down to fetch it! “I will take you to our gurudwaras,” my friend said one day, “to show you how the daal is prepared.” Thus, a couple of days later, he took me to one of the gurudwaras at Koliwada. As my son described, I had my first experience of sitting down in the pangat, covering and bending my head down, and savouring the Langar served to me… some daal, sabzi and rotis.

“This is our daal,” my Sikh friend said with the same pride with which my son had described his Golden Temple experience, “This is called ‘Langar Wali Daal’.”

I never argued with anyone, since then, about the claim, that it’s the best daal in the world… Because, it is!

I remember my teacher-friend, often, telling me, “The mystery is, no one can prepare this daal outside the gurdwaras with such taste. It tastes divine when we savour it in the gurudwaras.”

Let me confess: I did think, initially, that it’s the typical feeling of ‘Bhakti’. But, as years passed by, I stopped analyzing this claim. If the ‘Langar Wali Daal’ tastes most heavenly when served in the gurudwara pangats, I said, “So be it.”

Yesterday, when our son - who is a typical rationalist, and doesn’t easily buy any sentimental or cock-and-bull stories – started harping on his Amritsar experience, my wife and I thought in our minds, that it’s time to have a glimpse of this golden experience at home. So, we both placed him atop the proverbial chane ka jaad and flattered him to give us the taste of a lifetime. By the way, our son is a grand cook (Has the record of winning a big cash prize for a chef-contest in college where he was studying Animation) and loves to experiment in the kitchen. Last evening, he cooked for all of us some amazing Langar wali Daal and rotis (plain chapatis as well as butter naan).

Oh yes, we did eat this ‘Home Langar’ together with our heads bent down in gratitude, regardless of who was big and who was small. Only thing we didn’t do was sitting down in a Pangat. Anyway, even if we had done it, the experience of savouring it in a gurudwara, especially in the Golden Temple - as my Sikh-friend and our own son insisted – would have been totally different. Out-of-the-world… Divine!

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: traveltriangle.com  

Video: SonyMusicIndiaVIVO