Dharamkot Pizza

September 18, 2011

As planned last evening, we (Sersang, his dad, and step-mother and I) manage this Sunday to go to Dharamkot at the café for killing pizza, the known one there. His dad and step-mom arrive here almost just past midday on their scooter from Norbulingka at Sidhpur, the expanding valley town mingled with Lower Dhasa. Thanks their company makes the event more fun-filled. After a strong sweet-milk tea prepared at our small rented room we walk up to MacLeod Ganj and from there to Tushita along the road with peeled tar and potholes as damaged by rain. Just ahead the buildings we are in the thicket of cedar forest like in a horror movie seeing the abruptly blanketing grey hazes gliding through the thick-trunked and moss-streaked cedar trees.

We pass by the old palace (Phodrang) of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, an ordinary bungalow with the corrugated iron roofing of low ridge. It’s my second time along this way. Tushita Meditation Centre, a Buddhist centre in the sanctuary, is just ahead among the refreshing cedar greenery. From the point with those shops and the gateway to another Hindu Meditation centre it’s to walk down to Dharamkot on the paved concrete walkway and steps. As we walk downward I find some Tibetans with children ahead of us but I don’t expect Acha Dolma can be the one among them. She is as she sees me first and turns to me to talk. I approach her and have a brief time for conversation; I find her expression suggesting the same under the circumstances—she is with others and I’m with others as well and I do also feel a sort of distancing air…

Sersang did come here once almost a year back to the same pizza café that we have trouble finding first as he can’t remember well now. We get it at last, the open front yard laid with cheap plastic tables and chairs. We find a place in the open just on the other side next by the narrow strips with sparse drying limp maize stalks, by the stone-built low fence.

Yeah, pizza. It’s Sersang’s dad's first time and he shares this joke that hearing the name gives him the impression the stuff being sort of not tasty. And it’s my second time only (the first one bought by my friend Yeshi once here at Dhasa but at the other café) and his dad’s joke turns out almost right for me this time, not like the last time when I tasted great. I find all the 3 different items (chicken, mushroom-garlic and mixed veg) rather stale must be of poor cheese. But thanks for buying them for us by Sersang; I, however, have my full. But, much more than pizza, I enjoy the time, walk and viewing the landscapes amid laughter and jokes but not pranks.

After the sour pizza we walk along the way down the opposite side, not back up from where we come, to the proper valley to Bagsu, the holy site for Hindu devotees. The view of the short fall, the stream, the railed well-paved walkway winding across the waist of the hill up to the fall, the swimming pool next below the Hindu temple from where the water seems to flow down (the blessed one as like flowing from pouring on to the dark stone sculpture of Lingam), those dippers and swimmers mostly Indians, there are a few young Sikhs who swim without removing their dark head turbans put on so smartly of a compact form rather than the old fashioned one: I enjoy them all. But I don’t have a mind to swim this time or dip in the holy water. Thanks especially for the weather seemingly in equipoise like trying hard to stop showering down like yesterday.

Dharamkot Pizza: A Complement

16 June, 2013

Browsing through those ranges of readymade pizzas in the refrigerated glass show cases in a supermarket here in France and learning from a reliable documentary film[1] that most food stuffs are fake these days, those in colorful packets arranged neatly and attractively, I had the instant impression that then, even if sour that I found, the pizza back there in India made from kneaded dough rather than from readymade one fattened by embalmed baking powder and yeast is far real with the touch of homemade care rather than produced in industrialized way. But I found the pizza at Dharamkot bought by Sersang was sort of readymade dough, not like at the other café on Bagsu Road run by a Tibetan. At the latter as taken by Yeshi I found the dough home-kneaded and the pizzas served on dark open pans on three feet so real and of great taste.

Even if I haven’t ventured to taste one here in France even at a simple restaurant, I can tell I can’t find the one like back there in India. And even if I am not a perfectionist, who isn’t a mediocre one who can tell about food stuffs and their tastes, I feel how lucky Sersang and those back there in India to be able to taste the real homemade stuffs.  

Sersang’s dad’s satire about such fast food stuff is still ringing in my ears and I can visualize his contemptuous countenance while being at the table and taking his share as to see what his son had got to give him.

‘Ha, ha! The stuff called pizza is really strange. Is it a food?’ I found, as being on the opposite side across the bleached red plastic table, his dad immersed in a sort of self-jest. 

[1] FOOD Inc presented by Participant Media & River Road Entertainment

A teaching one on web:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGL3iT5MMdQ