The masked waitress had placed a wooden tray with three little black porcelain bowls: one, the staple green chillies in vinegar, another a reddish-brown chilli chutney and the third, dark soy. Of the first two I placed both my spoonsful at a demure distance from the Pad Thai but the soy sauce I scooped and slathered generously over the rice noodles. Without doubt it was genuine soy, its first taste potent enough to promptly transport me to forty years back; the jump in time smoother than custard jelly on the tongue. That evening was special because noodles had made an entrance for the very first time into the Bhattacharjee household: my Dad having placed a special demand for this exotica to Piggie at the local shopping complex. I had no idea about Piggie’s real name; but I knew Dad had named him so because it was Piggie who was the source of our ham and bacon and pork sausages. I was vaguely aware that Piggie was the son of that Sikh gentleman with the pristine white turban and whiter cotton T shirt, luxuriously crinkled, that he ran the shop with his black-turbaned brother who limped and that he himself did not wear a turban but kept a fashionably styled bead-moustache combo which I found extremely interesting even at the raw age of 10. Dad was inordinately fond of Piggie, the moniker being an expression of his fondness for the young man’s entrepreneur spirit and we kids actually addressed the chap as Piggie Bhaiiya. Since Piggie also catered to the Russians expats who lived in the neighbourhood, he stocked stuff a little hatke from the routine bread and anda that the desis of HEC normally shopped for: things like ketchup, English mustard, noodles, and of course, soy sauce. I think it must have been a Saturday evening for everyone seemed relaxed; though a sense of elated expectation did permeate our tiny 800 square foot home, sprinkled generously with subdued excitement. After all, it was not everyday that one had noodles for dinner. In fact, neither of the four of us (i.e., my parents, my brother and me) had ever tasted noodles before, not even my foreign returned Dad (he had spent 1.5 years in USSR for his training). Only we were not referring to it as ‘noodles’ but “chowmein”; unaware that the latter was the name of a prepared dish and not of its main ingredient. But even had we been aware of this fact, it wouldn’t have made any dent in our excitement for no one cared about semantics except me, obsessed with words even then as a ten-year old. And there were far more pressing problems at hand than the names of ingredients to be tackled: the foremost being the fact my mother had never cooked “chowmein” before. Thankfully, the instructions on the packet were adequate though here too I was able to point out three spelling errors, a little superciliously; to the intense exasperation of Dad and my kid brother and the extreme delight of my mom. Following those instructions to the T, Mom churned up a whole steel pateela full of coils and coils of white noodles, gleaming from the tablespoon of refined oil added to it to prevent the strands from sticking to each other just like it instructed on the package. My brother had the first go at tasting and as the noodle strand slithered into his mouth we waited with bated breath for his analysis. My brother had always been a precocious kid and I remember him nodding his head like a wise old gourmet cook and pronouncing his approval with a serious: good. Both my parents heaved a sigh of relief at this five-star review, happy to have overcome the first hurdle. The next problem was determining what it was that people ate with chowmein with. Obviously, it was not to be eaten alone in its current virginal state, being too plain and too bland and too white. Everyone knew that staples like rice and roti had to be eaten with something, something like daal and subji………………… It was my ever-practical Mom who came up with the answer. Daal of course, she said matter-of-factly, what else. If one ate rice with daal, roti with daal, even idli with daal : it seemed absolutely logical to be eating chowmein with daal…….. And right at that point where Mom’s dimaag ki batti thus lit up, as if to compensate, all battis went out in Sector 3 HEC Colony via the day’s nth loadshedding, plunging the whole neighbourhood and our little 800 square foot home into darkness. And that is how I remember that dinner even to this day: one hurricane and one lantern, both kerosene fuelled, casting a warm yellow glow all around and bringing shadows and walls and family close, closer to the rickety dining table loaded with a steel pateela of ‘chowmein’ doused in mustard-oil, red chilly and nigella flavoured dhuli masoor daal… I also remember clearly my Dad suddenly disappearing from the table into the dark depths of one of the rooms where the refrigerator was housed and re-emerging triumphantly with the bottle of dark soy from Piggie’s. He liberally slathered the chowmein-daal combo with the dark soy, ladled large generous helpings of it on all four steel plates and thundered: Ab khao….. And eat we did, with our fingers instead of forks as if it were daal chawal: ravenously, excitedly, happily, contentedly…………………………………… My dad is no more, at least on this plane where I currently exist; though I’m sure wherever he moves these days, he is happy: giving subtly witty names to the creatures around him, cooking great mutton and even better daal tadka and when he feels exceptionally happy, putting one hand on his lungi clad hips and the other at the side of his head and dancing his trademark cute jhatka….. My mom is battling poor health and memory loss and my once precocious and Dennis-the-Menace kid brother is all grown up and submerged in the sea of mundane and boring lives most adults live these days….and that that dark summer evening full of chowmein with masoor daal tadka, lashings of dark soy and the undefinable simple joys of childhood was almost deleted from our collective memory …till the dark soy of Giant Panda a South East Asian cuisine restaurant atop DB Mall at Bhopal suddenly broke a bund and caused a sepia deluge to flood over me. Memory has two avatars, alter egos. And I have never made been more acutely aware of this than these days. I have, living within my brain marauding memories that often descend into the plains of my consciousness with vicious suddenness; like plundering mercenaries, tearing asunder my heart and soul with a ruthlessness that has no parallel, leaving me shaking and sobbing and lifeless with pain… And then there are also these memories, of the chowmein-masur daal-dark soy variety from my childhood, that tread softly like autumn morning dew and draw me gently into soft, safe, comfortable places, places where I can cocoon myself to heal and be whole again. And as for the taste of dark soy, it flavours these safe cocoons with the comfort of its sweet and salty caramelised pungency. And if I give a shake to my memory dabba, I can sometimes also smell far-off noodly base notes of nigella seeds and red chillies in a mustard oil tadka…..