Good Indian Food After Long

Today evening, I went to meet my distant relatives. My dad's buaji and her family, they had been here since 1970s before moving back to India a few years ago. Since then, they have been coming to Oxford to spend a month during summers every year.

This was the second time I was meeting buaji and Sunil in my entire life! And the first time I was meeting uncle, Sonia, Shivani. I had a really good time, they were very welcoming and I immediately felt a part of the family. The first time I was meeting an Indian English family where we were mostly coversed in English - that was the only peculiar thing in the setting :)

I stayed there for 4 hours, and the discussion revolved around a lot of things - Indian summers, traffic, tax evasion, salesmen in Indian malls who always flock you if you make the mistake of entering at a non-busy hour (apparently, the family went for shopping the morning and were still in the shopping mood), IIT (ha ha ha, uncle had done his graduation at IIT D - the moment I got to know about that, I felt even more comfortable talking to him, he was a participant in the first IITD batch, and yes we talked a lot about IIT :)), sai baba and puttaparty (the family is a great devotee of baba and are now settled at baba's ashram) and so many more things.

I didn't realize that time went by so quickly. It was already 3 hours when buaji asked for dinner and then I had the time of my day - karhi, paneer, salad, puuurrrrriiiiiiiiiii. Desserts including strawberries, mangoes (Indian mangoes), ice-cream and hot love (some fudge which Sonia/Shivani had prepared from ice-cream, cream, and some more stuff - i didnt have it). Really good food and again we had a very good discussion over the table. One thing which really stood out during the entire 4 hours was that kids and parents were debating on a whole lot of issues - uncle, buaji, sonia, shivani and sunil - all were talking about regular day to day things and ne'er seemed like stopping and taking a break :) As I now know, this is quite common in an Indian English family.

Back home, I still have kaju ki barfi to gorge on. Buaji gave me a box of barfi before I left. Indian sweets are just too good - I miss them.