To me pani puri, with its explosive juices and racy flavors, was the most mind-altering chaat. A fine tribute to pani puri appears in a 1991 memoir about Mumbai by Ganghadar Gopal Gadgil. After several thousand words describing the process of eating and experiencing pani puri, he concludes with this tribute to the afterglow that, as I can attest, follows a pani puri binge:
"In that state of beatitude the Maharashtrians stop being surly, the Marwaris look at the millions of stars without being reminded of their own millions, the Sindhis admire the horizon without any intention of selling it, the Gujaratis speculate on the moon instead of the scrips they should have sold, the North Indians dream of things other than Hindi as the official language of the United Nations, and even the Parsi ladies stop nagging their husbands."
Now I'm dying to know what those several other thousand words were. Just reading about the afterglow transported me.
crossings as in traversals, contradictions, counterpoints of the heart though often not..
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