When rattling trams and battered buses don’t change colours with the season and red banners and flags are perennial blossoms clambering up our walls, our lampposts and our psyches, and the only real flowers you see are in pots laid out on your southern balconies, you can hardly expect to understand koels and crows proclaiming an alarming change in our weather systems.

Up in the mountains, there has been unseasonable snow in May. Log fires burn in June. The Agapanthus Lily-of-the-Nile that blossoms in July and the Bignonia Trumpet Vine that sets masonry walls and rolling thunderclouds alight in July and August have been in bloom since May. The brown crested Tit has strayed into the sub-Himalayan ranges of Mussoorie from Western Nepal and brought with it the white collared Blackbird. Yet, the plains broil and even the hills were steaming in early May.

The poor meteorologist sweats under his collar to predict the upward crawl of a monsoon that has seldom confronted blistering cold blizzards advancing southward from Mt Meru. It’s a crazy world we live in today where middle-aged patrician men jostle with chilled-out teenagers to watch libidinous remixes on television. It’s all happening in a land where once buxom wide-hipped seductresses gambolled innocently around trees and up and down Kashmir’s valleys. Today’s svelte heroines, in blue-green contact lenses, are hybrids who writhe and grind tempestuously for muscular robotic heroes who acrobatically take on the world in locations like Switzerland, France and, of course, Kanada (often spelled with a “C”).

No. I’ve dealt with Pish Pash. Let me, instead, introduce you to something quite as wacky. A dish that lets you eat, drink and make merry all rolled into one.

On a summer’s afternoon, this tricky ensemble of flora, fauna and soma rasa is bound to have a somatic effect on the biggest prude, the committed Communist and the slimiest sophisticate.

The Vodka & Bagda Prawn Mould

Ingredients (Serves 6)

3 tbsp gelatine, 4 tbsp freshly made thick mayonnaise, 1 pint warm fish or chicken stock, strained through muslin, leaves of 1 head of lettuce, 8 fl oz tomato juice, plus 2 tsp tomato paste, 3 large avocados, seeded, and the meat cut into cubes, 2 (p’raps 6) tbsp vodka, 3 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice, ½ tsp celery salt, 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce, 6 tbsp olive oil, 5 drops Tabasco, 1 tsp Dijon (French) mustard, 1 tsp finely chopped fresh dill, 1 clove of garlic, smashed, peeled and finely chopped, the meat from one large cooked bagda prawn, cut into chunks, ¼ tsp salt, ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper, 10 cooked prawns/large shrimp, 6 of them shelled, 2 hard boiled eggs, shelled and quartered, sprigs of parsley

Method:

1. Dissolve the gelatine in ¼ of the fish stock. Pour in the remainder of the stock and stir well. Add the tomato juice and tomato paste, vodka, celery salt, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and dill. Stir everything together well.

2. Chill a large ring mould, and pour ¼ of the tomato and stock mixture into it. Chill it until it begins to thicken. Arrange the chunks of bagda prawn in the mould, alternating with the cooked, shelled shrimp, cut in half, length-wise. Pour just over half of the remaining stock and tomato mixture around the shellfish and set the mould back in the refrigerator to let the next layer thicken.

3. Stir the mayonnaise into the remaining tomato stock mixture and blend it in well. Remove the mould from the refrigerator and pour in the pale pink, creamy mixture. Put it back to chill.

4. Line a large platter with lettuce leaves.

5. Place the avocado cubes in a bowl. Blend together the lemon juice, olive oil, mustard, garlic, salt and pepper into a dressing and pour over the avocado. Mix it well.

6. Remove the mould from the refrigerator and turn it out carefully on to the lettuce-lined platter.

Fill the middle with the dressed avocado and garnish with the quartered eggs and sprigs of parsley. Take the remaining unshelled prawns and drape them over the mould equally apart.

Chill until you are ready to serve.