Dnyan. Mandir Road (II) (9)

I know, I know. But a vada pav laced with irony is not the same vada pav as before, is it? Darned if it didn't taste different, too. On my first trip, see, I hadn't registered how difficult, how obstinately contrarian an exercise it is to run a vada pav stand opposite a Jain temple. One swarming with white-robed, broom-and-bucket hefting, surgical-masked world-renunciators, at that. Saint Dnyaneshwar, it turns out, did so by burying himself in a cave on the banks of the Godavari.

If our culinary sins really do add up, I'll be coming back as a pork tenderloin. But the illicit substance being trafficked here is, of course, potatoes. They're excluded from the Jain diet to avoid inflicting injury upon earthworms, etc. So aLike a cash-and-carry shop opposite a mosque, or "Love it or leave it" t-shirts on the ACLU website, sales are outnumbered here by dirty looks. Those who play the odds are better off avoiding neighborhoods where Reliance runs ads in Gujarati.