I’m in Bhilai this week. On the first evening a friend asked what I wanted to eat, and like always, even with all the options the town has now, I said I wanted chicken chilli from one of the food trucks at Civic Center first. We went to Blessy. The chicken chilli was exactly how I remembered it, full of green chillies and thin slices of ginger, heavy on the sauces and heavier on the Ajinomoto. It’s the Indo-Chinese dish you’ll find in some form all over India, the one that came out of Kolkata’s Chinatown.

My first time at the food trucks was in the late 90s, when the first one opened at Civic Center and my father took my brother and me out to eat. I think we had soup, paneer butter masala, a dal fry or a dal tadka, I can’t remember which, and rice. There was no chicken, because nobody in my family eats non-veg. To this day my brother and I only eat it outside. It isn’t cooked at home, and without anyone ever quite saying so, it isn’t eaten there either.

I was in middle school then. I started college in 2004, and that’s when eating out became a regular thing. If you wanted non-veg food in Bhilai in those years and didn’t have much money, there weren’t many places to go. The food trucks at Civic Center were where we went. There were still only one or two trucks then, and we ate at either Anna Ghar “Meals on Wheels” or Lata. The tables were set out in the open, and sitting at one of them on a winter evening with a plate of piping hot chicken chilli felt especially good.

We always went as a group, because eating out alone was a luxury none of us could afford. Everyone put in fifty or a hundred rupees, and together that paid for soup to start, a chicken chilli, a chicken curry, a pile of tandoori rotis and jeera rice to finish. I can still taste that jeera rice all these years later. If there was a vegetarian at the table, a PBM went on the order too, which is what we called paneer butter masala. Most of the table wanted chicken curry with their rotis. I loved the weird combination of chicken chilli gravy and tandoori roti.

I was a fairly social person in college. I had a couple of different circles of friends and ate out with one or the other a couple of times a week, and most of those evenings ended at Civic Center. Over those years it became the place we celebrated things. Birthdays ended up there, and so did New Year. When Girish got his first salary, we celebrated at the food trucks, and I did the same when mine came a while later.

We ate at those parties like it was our last meal. We were usually short of cash and never knew when we’d next be able to eat out, so every plate went out full to the brim, like the wedding-crashing scene in 3 Idiots. Girish and my younger brother were the two biggest eaters at the table, and at my first salary party they got into a contest over who could eat more tandoori rotis. My brother won, and it was the only thing that went his way that week. He fell sick, and three or four days later he had his 12th board maths paper, which did not go well.

There are seven or eight trucks there now. Anna Ghar and Lata are both still around. Anna Ghar has been parked there for decades and has probably changed hands at some point, but the name and the truck haven’t changed. According to my friend, though, Blessy is where you get good chicken chilli now, which is how this week’s plate came from a truck I never used to eat at. A full plate of boneless chicken chilli cost me around 300 to 350 rupees. Like everything else, it isn’t as easy on the pocket as it used to be.

The food was hit and miss back then and it’s still hit and miss. Most of the old crowd isn’t around for it any more. Some have moved out of Bhilai, and some of the ones still here would rather eat somewhere else now that the town has plenty of options, which is fair. I still go at least once whenever I’m in town, and if nobody wants to come, I go alone. The food was never consistent enough to be the reason I go back.

I’ve shared chicken chilli at those tables with people who aren’t around to share one with me any more. Those tables are the closest I can get to those evenings, so I sit at one of them, order the chicken chilli with a tandoori roti, and eat it whether it’s good that night or not.