Woes of Being an Edgy Veggie

Being vegetarian, I’ve realized, is not so pertinent as an unbecoming ‘desi’ thing anymore. It’s more like a kooky thing. So, what does sheepishly ordering onion rings and fries (discounting the fact that they’re ‘fried,’ in all probability, in lard), amidst an ocean of hamburger hogs make me? A hippie desi with very poor levels of health consciousness and probably, very high levels of cholesterol. Although, in my defense, it doesn’t really show.

With a 14-month-old elf for a daughter who complicates my life as it is, I have complicated it further by turning vegetarian. Or rather, returning to being a vegetarian. I was actually born and raised a vegetarian, and then, rather gingerly, took to eating chicken just for the fun of it. In retrospect, I didn’t exactly love it, but it just made things easier, in India, and around the world (except Fiji, of course, which I don’t intend visiting anytime soon). And then the pregnancy brought in a blast of nausea and I simply had to relinquish it. But that was the easy part. I had to make up by feasting on insipid bunches of broccoli and mushy mouthfuls of tofu.

And now, not only do I have to live with being known as the freak that doesn’t eat beef or pork, but also as the ostracized lunatic that doesn’t eat chicken or fish. And unless I’m attending a ‘desi’ shindig, where I can be pretty sure there will be at least one veggie dish on the menu, I should either be well-versed with excerpts from Sue Coe’s “Dead Meat,” to save my skin, or simply, chicken out. Else, I’d have to inform my hosts beforehand, and drive them up the wall, quite literally, to dust off their vegetarian cookbooks. On second thought, it’s much easier to eat before I go, and, feigning a queasy stomach, munch on salads and desserts. Yet, that doesn’t make me any more likable, because the hosts have either burned themselves out barbecuing the steak, or broiling the chops.

But I always end up giving restaurant staff a hard time by forgetting to say ‘no meat,’ (instead of, to use the good old Indianism, ‘without meat’) or gorging on gorgeous stuffed mushrooms, only to later realize that the stuffing was, in fact, made of creepy bivalve clams, or other squishy mollusks. And many a time, I am humiliated further when people, in all their effort to be polite, raise a brow and say, “Oh, vegetarianism – sure, I’ve tried that,” like it’s an eccentric cult and they just had to go back on it in order to subsist in the real world.

While I struggle to justify vegetarianism without sounding like a prudish party-pooper, I can safely say that I don’t eat anything that bites back, given that eggs, as I know them, do not. And apparently, Alex Poulos has said, “I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me.” Surely, he hasn’t visited Fiji.