Travails Of A Pure Vegetarian

When Shobha Mathur comes across advertisements for Indian travellers complete with vegetarian meals and even cooks, she turns green with envy. 

- Shobha Mathur

In the 70s and 80s the scene was quite different. For my sins I am a total vegetarian – not even eating eggs. My husband has no problem anywhere. He believes in trying local cuisines and mostly enjoys them. Even I believe in that theoretically, but could not follow for obvious reasons! Not that it is from want of effort. I tried several times but always ended throwing up. Having suffered on my various travels, I made sure that all my children eat non-vegetarian. When we went out in 1969, apart from Air India no other airline had a clue about vegetarian food. We could have a choice of meat/chicken/fish. I used to steal buns/ vegetables from my family’s trays.

When I told someone I was a vegetarian, I had some stock responses depending on the responder: 1) Fear: Vegetarian? Are you contagious?, 2) Amazement: You are a vegetable?, 3) Anger: How can you decline to eat this? Our chef has specially prepared it/it is our national dish/you are insulting our cuisine! Finally I took to fibbing. I said I could not eat as I had a medical condition. That brought on mostly concern asking what I would like.