Lunch is off...

8:00am:

Since I'm not a Bengali villager, I'm obviously missing something, and by that I mean apart from a tiny mud hut with a thatch roof, six children under the age of 8 (five of them unwanted girls who are going to cost a small fortune to marry off), a shrill voice that would terrorize a regiment of Taliban trainees (and that's just casual chatter with friends), the ability to continue to walk in the middle of the road despite the fact that a the deafening horn of a bus is blasting the ear drums from every living entity in sight except for other similarly deaf or unaffected Bengali villagers, and the prospect of being burned alive on my husband’s funeral pyre. I hasten to add at this point that this is not an introduction into discussions of bride burning and dowries. Please be patient. It will come.

The dahl went off overnight, you see.

Shall I backtrack?

OK: Dahl. Indian soup. It must be soaked overnight before cooking. Not split mung dahl. No problem with that, it cooks it's cheery little yellow heads off in record time with no need for soaking beforehand. But channa dahl is different. Don't ask me why, this isn't a cooking column. It simply must, that's all. And so I soaked it.

Only this morning when I started to cook it, the smell was like a dead dog trapped under the floorboards (ignore the fact that my floors are marble). It had gone off overnight, while soaking.

I mean, what gives here? Oh sure, I could have put it in the fridge. But that's my point, you see. Bengali villagers do not have fridges. So how do they soak their dahl? I am missing something, aren't I?

I rest my case.

10:00am -- Update

There have been some developments in the dahl situation. Anjana, my maid, arrived mid-morning and assured me that the dahl was not off and was in fact completely edible.

There are several possibilities:

1. I have no idea how bad channa dahl can smell before it's cooked, and should accept Anjana's conclusions and get on with lunch.

2. She didn't understand a word of my Bengali and was giving general advice on how good channa dahl is for the health without realizing I was speaking of a pot whose scent was admittedly not as dead-dog-under-the-floorboards as it had previously been but was still not something I'd consider eating, or,

3. She's trying to kill me.

If anyone has anything to add they should contact me before 2pm Bengali time. After that, it could be dodgy...

3:00pm -- Conclusion

The dahl was great.