There stood before us a little, non-descript shanty,not different from the several others that stood in proximity in any way save for the words ‘Momos’ scribbled with chalk on its wall. Yet, I instinctively knew that this place would be like no other eatery I have been to in Ahmedabad. As we entered the shack, I took a second or two longer than usual to open my shoes-customers are to leave their shoes at the threshold here-because I was enthralled by the view that greeted my sight. I am no good with measurements and I shall, therefore, make no attempts to convey how small the room that housed the restaurant was. In the waning light of the dusk, I could not read the name of the eatery on the hand written menu card stuck on the farthest corner of the wall and it is my friend who read out the name of the joint-Amdo’s. It had no furniture save for the pieces of wood that were placed in a horizontal line along the walls to serve as tables for the customers who ate sitting on the floor. There were some unusual paintings or sketches on the azure-hued walls which, I guess, I could have appreciated better if I could figure out if they were drawn with oil paints or charcoal but the state of euphoric enchantment that I was in, had rendered me too nonplussed to try doing that. There was a little kitchen in one corner of the room where sat a wiry person of Mongoloid features, taking orders, cooking and watching some Hindi film on a tiny television set.
It took me no more than a minute to discover that the place had nothing to offer my palate because it was not serving vegetarian momos today but it was barely anything more than a trifling disappointment for me-my mind was in a state of excited frenzy at having discovered an inn like this one in Ahmedabad.Maybe, there are several others like it but for me who had, during the past five months of stay in the city, been wont to the sight of plush outlets of corporate chains of restaurants in ubiquitous malls and to smaller eateries which proudly flaunt ‘pure vegetarian’ signboards, discovery of Amdo’s was, to use the cliché, like discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb- there was a possibility of experiencing immense excitement. And so I did. As I sat at Amdo’s, staring at the back of the cook or rather at the message printed on the back of the his t-shirt, ‘I support free Tibet’ while my friend ate beef momos with a beatific expression on her mien, I decided to blog about the restaurant the existence of which is apparently not known to shop-keepers running stores at a distance that is less than a five minutes walk away.
I wondered, as I sipped lemon tea in the tiny restaurant, feebly lit by the weak streams of light of the setting sun at the hour of vesper, why am I feeling so ecstatic at this moment? If there is anything to feel, it should be anxiety because there is a great deal of work which I had left unfinished in order to be there. But unalloyed exuberance is what I felt-maybe because the sight of momos made me a bit nostalgic about my home town Guwahati, where every little inn in every neighbourhood have momos as a fixture on their menu-cards. Or maybe because, even when I woke up this Sunday morning I had not expected to find myself in so unusual a place at so beautiful an hour- a visit to a bookstore was what I could imagine as the most absorbing weekend activity until now. But there was another reason too.
The obscure location of Amdo’s, its unostentatious surroundings, its sinewy-looking host and its unusual menu all reminded of the coffee-house of My name is Red. The novel, in its vivid elucidation of the milieu at the coffee houses of 15th century Istanbul, portrayed them as a hub of dissidents, as a place where its patrons drank the socially and culturally forbidden coffee and in doing so, expressed perhaps, in the most idle manner, their protests against the existing socio-religious straitjackets. Maybe, I am being a little too maudlin in drawing parallels between Pamuk’s Turkish coffee house and the little Tibetan restaurant, tucked away in one remote corner of Ahmedabad; there is no blasphemous poet or recusant raconteur of tales of rebellion here unlike at the coffee house. But there certainly is something ineffable about the place that makes it redolent of iconoclasm-perhaps that ‘something’ is the beef on my friend’s plate which is not something the most-renowned and well-established of eateries serve in this city. Given the demigod status bestowed upon the bovine creatures in this land, it cannot be easy for these people to serve beef. Or maybe, there is another reason which makes this place so unusual,a better and profounder reason that I am yet to fathom. But I hope to be able to do that, in the course of my subsequent visits of Amdo’s. Amen!
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