Yessir-ji, I am your humble tomato, tamatar, thakkali parzham, Lycopersicon cycopersicum—call me what you will—at your service. But if you need to speak to me these days you’ll have to fix an appointment with my secretary. I’m busy, man, I’m studio-hopping these days, answering all those anxious queries from breathless anchors about inflationary trends, sky-rocketing prices, and what the UPA Government must do to rein my prices in. Did you see me on TV looking red and luscious as usual? Bet Aishwarya Rai couldn’t look half as alluring if she had to pose for the cameras in an ordinary market stall. It was not for nothing Pablo Neruda once referred to me as the ‘‘star of the earth’’.Last night the Prime Minister called me in to take a good look at me, and then had these long meetings with the Finance Minister and an impressive line-up of economists. I nearly split my sides laughing as they yabbered on about price rise indices and elasticity of demand. You know what they say about economists. If there are five of them in a room, you get six opinions. Well I counted five of them in that room, and I heard at least 12 opinions!What delights me about the current fuss they are making over me is that for a change it is not about those silly lilies who strut about in their pink diaphanous negligees—better known to you folk as onions—who are getting all the public attention. Or, indeed, their stodgy companion, the alu, who is really just a potato-head, totally flavour-less without the spiritual upliftment we impart to them. For a change it is the tomato that has got the government in a soup. It is we who are being measured and projected by the kilo. It is us—not onions—who are making politicians cry.Of course, some ultra-nationalists sometimes term us as infiltrators. Nobody is quite sure how I landed up in this country, man. How did a true-bred South American like yours truly—who goes back, some say, to the great Incas—insinuate himself to the gastric juices of a billion-plus Indians? Food wonks claim that I really came to India in the ships headed from England and that I was grown here initially exclusively to cater to the colonialist’s palate. But it was I who ended up colonising the country. The British had to quit India, but no Mahatma Gandhi or Lokmanya Tilak demanded my ouster. Tell you my secret: be global, think local. So you can sauce me in Kentucky and salsa me in Mexico City, soup me up in Warsaw or pasta me in Rome, but I do just as well swimming with the coriander and curry leaves in the rasams of Thiruchi or being pulverised into the pav-bhajis of Mumbai.Take me on a Bharat Darshan, go on, take me. Can any self-respecting north Indian rajma dish be made without plenty of tomatoes as its basic masala? Of course, they pair us off with some onions and a bit of garlic too, I’ll grant, but the best rajmas are the ones that luxuriate in their tamatar. Go on, check this out with any Mrs Khanna or Mrs Kapoor worth her salt and, if I’m wrong, I’m prepared to be squashed underfoot.Go east, and there is the sweet and sour delights of Orissa’s tomato khatta or the exotic tomato-raisin chutney that Kolkata would die for. Go south, and there is the tomato kurma of Andhra, the tomato kozhambe of Tamil Nadu and the tomato pachadi of Kerala—delicious with its ground coconut base. Come to Maharashtra and you can gorge on tomato pitla, with just a touch of asafoetida and a dash of fenugreek.Ketch up to what I am saying? Slice me or dice me, mash me or smash me, freeze me or tease me, but you ain’t getting rid of me in a hurry, mate, forty rupees a kilo notwithstanding. Tamatar times, they just keep rolling on. And on.
