OUTSIDE the GTB Nagar metro station in North Delhi is a dense bustle typical of mornings in the city. Hundreds of people brush past one another at the crossroads; women stand on tiptoe to scan the snaking lines for the day’s trains; rickshaw drivers shout their prices to people exiting; students wave at one another across the street before bunching up to head to Delhi University campus; and street vendors set up shop, opening their umbrellas over trays of sliced papayas or pots of milk, soon to be boiled for chai.
At this intersection, Raj Kumar Yadav sells litti chokha, a dish from Bihar in eastern India, where small litti—balls made of sattu, a multigrain flour—are cooked on coals and served with chokha—roasted spiced eggplant. Yadav runs this business from a redi, or five-foot-by-three-foot wooden cart, which he covers with tarpaulin when it rains. On one side he cooks the litti on hot coals lined under a metal grill; on another he has a round steel pot for the chokha, which he serves with green chilies and coriander for whomever asks. “I do half the cooking at home,” he says, “since I have a small space to operate from on the street.”
Maybe thirty vendors are stuffed into the fifty-meter nook where Yadav runs his cart. They face a wide road, from which they are separated by a pedestrian footpath cluttered with bicycles and parked scooters. Vendors sit on plastic stools to sell plastic jewelry; a juice maker advertises a new chiku shake with tutti-frutti in a singsong chant; a young man sells pakoras (fritters) made of moong dal, or yellow lentils, to a couple of teenagers who eat quickly and ask for more. This choreography is routine and strategic. It determines the clusters and patterns that define how millions in urban India make, sell, and eat food every day. Yadav’s stall gets crowded during lunch hours, when students, working professionals, and vehicle drivers come to eat a filling, affordable lunch. His litti chokha is delicious, a customer tells me. “Ghar ka khana lagta hai—It tastes of home food.”
Yadav’s small bicycle cart is a momentary home for his hundreds of customers every day, but his own home is far away, in Madhubani, Bihar, a village where many livelihoods have been lost to poor governance, landscapes reduced to the gravel of postindustrial ruin.
