Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi expressed her desire to serve papaya for breakfast and the chef of a five-star hotel in Goa had to scour the streets of the city in a police jeep to buy the best papaya. This interesting story has been narrated in a new book. Chef Satish Arora, while reliving old memories in his book ‘Sweets and Bitters: Tales from a Chef’s Life’, has written that in the year 1983, Indira Gandhi came to preside over the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting held in Goa. He had expressed his desire to eat papaya in the morning breakfast, after which it became a challenge to arrange this fruit for Hotel Taj.
Arora writes that at that time it became a challenge for him and his team to find fruits that were “uniquely Indian, extremely local”.It was November 1983 and then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was hosting prominent leaders of more than 40 countries for a 48-hour ‘retreat’. The objective of organizing this meeting in Goa was to bring Goa on the world tourism map. According to Arora, in view of the program, roads were widened, bridges were built, street lights were repaired and the airport was repaired. And at the center of this entire event was Hotel Taj, which was preparing to serve more than a hundred dishes.
While all this hustle and bustle was going on, news came that Indira Gandhi wanted to serve papaya for breakfast every day. Arora said in his book, “Where will we find naturally ripe papayas in Goa at that time of the year? Seeing the shortage of good papayas in November, I arranged for raw papayas to be brought from Mumbai and they were wrapped in paper to speed up the ripening process.” The book said, fate had something else in store. Papayas were to be served for breakfast and on the very first day it was found that the papayas had become mushy because the man who was given the responsibility of wrapping them in paper had left them wrapped in paper for too long.
Meanwhile, the employees were informed that Indira Gandhi and her special guests would be arriving for breakfast. “Panicism” was clearly visible in the kitchen. The chef says, “I could not have served overripe papaya to our Prime Minister. I couldn’t understand what to do. Don’t even ask what happened after that. Police jeeps were arranged to search for good papayas. Chef Arora was in that police jeep and some uniformed policemen were with him. “After this, a police jeep was arranged to take me to a nearby market in search of ripe papaya,” the chef wrote in the book. I was lucky and got a dozen papayas. At that time, I felt like a warrior returning in a police jeep after winning the battle, and that too with 12 papayas.
