My Relationship with Garlic

From childhood jealousy to post-modern enlightenment

I clearly remember the first time I felt an incredible pang of jealousy because of Sarthak, one of my closest friends in 4th grade.

He brought for lunch a set of toasted bread with garlic chutney, which was not a common thing to find in the remote town where we used to live and go to school. And the reason I felt that way was because I could smell the amazing aroma coming from those garlic-infused toasts, and I would look on lustily as he ate them.

I think that was the first time I registered garlic as an independent entity, purely because of its aromatic pull. The result was me getting deeply attracted to whatever that herb/thing was.

The aroma of garlic would fill the whole bus we used to sit together-in while coming back from summer school. Summer school used to finish earlier than regular classes, so it would be around noon as we were coming back, and all of us would open our lunch boxes. But nothing ever matched the aroma of those toasts that Sarthak used to bring.

Very appropriately, I prodded my parents with this new discovery, and they eventually had to give in to my constant clamoring. Within a few weeks, I managed to get hold of the secret ingredients and started getting them in my lunch box too.

And that is how I actively participated, for the first time, in building my relationship with garlic.

Next, when I was in 7th grade, in a different school in a different city, I was enjoying my lunch when a friend looked at me and remarked, “Dude, is something wrong with you? For I am seeing a garlic addict for the first time!”

I couldn’t really register what he meant until I realized that I had not touched any part of my lunch except the mango pickle that my mom used to provide on the side. And within that too, I was specifically plucking out all the whole garlic pieces and swallowing them like you would eat peanuts.

He was not wrong.

I loved taking a whole jar of pickle at home and eating just the garlic pieces from it. And it was only then that I realized this love affair with garlic was perhaps not entirely normal, for not everyone seemed to share it.

Over the years, I started noticing that I would like a simple dish only if, at the end, it got infused with garlic. The best example is Indian dal. There’s a version of it which, when infused with garlic at the end, becomes an absolute beast of a meal, which I could drink like one would drink any other liquid.

Noticing that many people swore by this garlic-infused dal, colloquially called tadka, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was not just me who was crazy about something as specific as garlic. It was a shared experience, for otherwise this garlic dal recipe wouldn’t have become a staple food for so many people across India.

As time passed, I discovered garlic naan and garlic bread, both essentially garlic mixed with some form of bread, and the flavours were deeply satisfying.

This obsession recently culminated in its climax when, much later in my life, I discovered garlic bagels in NYC.

To me, a garlic bagel is the epitome of human creation, for when it is eaten with jalapeño cream cheese, it breaks my inner guardrails to the point that I lose all connection to tangible reality and start swimming in the garlic-reality, which eventually brings inspiration to my heart and a twinkling to my eyes.

People fight over whether pineapple belongs on pizza or not, but that, to me, is an irrelevant question. It should have been all about garlic.

Beyond that, why are we not building garlic-flavored ice creams or garlic-infused protein powder?

I believe once we figure out how to add garlic to all the recipes known to humans, we will finally reach our post-modern enlightenment era, which has been due for far too long.