I’m not particularly good at traditions.
My father is. He believes strongly in them and, as long as I can remember, has tried to follow as many of them as possible. At home, Ganesh Chaturthi has always been a serious affair. The same pooja happens twice a day for all ten days, with prasad made separately for the morning and evening. My mother still does all of it, even now, when age makes it considerably harder, because it is what we’ve always done.
I suppose I’m the black sheep of the family in that respect. I’ve never had much patience for traditions simply because they’re traditions, particularly when they’re tied to organised religion and become something you’re expected to do rather than something you choose to do. I don’t mind that my family brings Ganpati home every year, but I mind the idea that something has to continue simply because it has always been done. Which makes what happened with Shabri slightly ironic.
It was a Monday afternoon and I had a flight to catch at 4 PM, but my priorities that day were elsewhere. Lunch with my girlfriend at Shabri on FC Road, for Ganesh Chaturthi, a Maharashtrian thali. It occurred to me at the table that this was the sixth year we’d done exactly this, at exactly this restaurant, which means it has slowly turned into a tradition. Unlike the ones I usually resist, this is one I agree with completely.
It started in 2021, when my girlfriend took me there. I’d eaten Maharashtrian thalis in Pune before but none of them were close. By the time I finished I was nearer to tears than I’d like to put in writing. The kadhi was as good as my mother’s, which is not a sentence I hand out, and I hadn’t eaten kadhi like that since the last time I was in Bhilai. I thanked her afterwards, mostly for having brought me.
The Ganesh Chaturthi thali comes with modak, which I only worked out years later is what the place is known for. My girlfriend has a serious sweet tooth. That first year I was sitting there taking in the room while the dishes arrived one after another, and at some point I looked over and one of her bowls was already empty. I assumed they’d skipped her. They hadn’t. She’d finished the modak before I’d noticed it arrive, and by the end she’d had at least three. I managed a couple.
We dress for it now. The first year I turned up straight from a Ganpati pooja at my old office in a Starboy T-shirt and torn jeans. These days it means a kurta, or at least a shirt instead of the black T-shirt I default to. She turns up in a bright kurta, which is what she does anyway. Some years we’ve brought friends. The conversation is always the same conversation: the first time she brought me here, who we’ve brought since, what’s changed and what hasn’t.
Six years is longer than it sounds. We’ve both changed, the city has changed, and the thali itself has been rewritten at least once. We still end up sitting across from each other on the same day, eating the same food, talking about the first time. I look forward to it for weeks now, which is not something I expected to feel about a lunch.
Last year it nearly came apart. I think there was a change in management, because the thali changed with it. The food was fine and the refills were still unlimited, but the modak was capped at one. Not one to begin with. One in total, and offering to pay for another made no difference at all.
That sounds like a small thing to be annoyed about and it probably is. But modak turns up once a year. I’ve never eaten more than two or three at a sitting and don’t particularly want to. What I want is the option, and the knowledge that if I feel like another I can have it, because once lunch is over that’s the taste I’m carrying for the next twelve months. We left slightly sour about it.
That rule was still on my mind when we sat down this year. The modak came out with everything else and neither of us touched it. We got halfway through the thali with it sitting there, both of us quietly working out whether this was the only one we were going to be given. Eventually I asked the server whether there would be more. He said yes, enthusiastically, and that everything was unlimited. I was more pleased about that than a grown man ought to be, and I still didn’t eat more than a couple.
Maybe that’s why Shabri never feels like the kind of tradition I usually resist. Nobody decided we’d do this every year. We went in 2021, liked it, went back the next year and somehow never stopped. I don’t remember when it became something Ganesh Chaturthi needed, but at some point it did. I just know that this year, with a flight waiting that evening, the lunch was still the first thing on the day’s plan.
I suppose that’s how some traditions happen. You don’t follow them because you’re supposed to. You keep doing something because you don’t want to stop.
