Tale of the cookie rookie

It is raining and thundering so hard and so unexpectedly that the howling gale blows shut the door of the Sweetish House Mafia, the newly-opened cookie-only store in Mumbai’s Todi Mills. Outside a banyan tree has landed on a vehicle, jamming the road, and the street is flooded both with water and people.

Stuck inside are a 34-weeks pregnant and the hitherto anonymous maker of the cookies, Neha Sethi and I, along with Urja Ketkar, a manager at ICICI bank who leaves for Mussoorie the following morning. Away for the long weekend, Ketkar is packing a box of cookies, with one of every kind, in the hope of being able to give it to her idol, Ruskin Bond, who she means to track down, and hopefully, meet.

A Joanne Fluke mystery novels fan, Ketkar has spent much time salivating over the perfect cookie reading The Cookie Jar, and has been determined to present Bond with cookies if and when she meets him. She had read somewhere that Bond was thrilled to receive a gift of Karachi fruit biscuits from a visiting reader.

One home-made iced coffee made of organic milk from Pune and several cookies later, there is happy girlie banter.

Neha is a born-and-brought-up-Mumbai-girl, who studied at Cathedral school, UC Berkley, and did a degree in finance from the Wharton School. Bored of banking. Returning to Mumbai as a Mrs Fields fan, she went “cookie cookie cookie”, as she puts it, found none, and began to bake for herself and her friends till one of them, Hriday, egged her to at least start selling them from her front gate.

“I thought, what’s the harm?!” Sending the Nano out with her staff, and with a Twitter post pointing to the location, Neha found people gradually queuing up to buy.

“I was very clear I didn’t want to become a brand," she said. "I wanted the car, the cookie and the Sweetish House Mafia name each to have a clear identity that was not linked to me at all.”

She still won’t reveal her identity, but Neha married the distinctly non-sweet-toothed Gaurav Sethi, grandson of cardiologist BK Goyal and son of Rajiv Sethi, of Omega builders, in a lavish Bollywood-themed wedding in 2010. It remains a part of her private life she keeps meticulously under wraps!

Her brother-in-law Akash Sethi, partners with her in this venture. A former party hopper, the cookies consumed 29-year-old Neha as much as the city consumed her cookie.

Expecting a no-pressure one-random-delivery-in-two-weeks routine, Neha suddenly found herself baking three deliveries a week to meet the demand.

One rainy night, after cancelling and then rescheduling a small batch in Bandra, she found a few hundred people lined up to greet her Nano, tweeting about being stampeded, crushed and pickpocketed in queue, with cops involuntarily enlisting for crowd control.

“My staff called in tears to tell me a Bollywood actor sent his bodyguards to muscle their way to the front of the line and grab 15 cookies from the car," she told me. "To this day we don’t know which actor it was because my staff were just so swamped trying to ensure they were collecting payments for the cookies being handed out in the frenzy.”

What selling cookies anonymously has done is given Neha a glimpse of the city very few get to see. Hungry and greedy, yes, but also patient, and warmed by a disc of comfort food.

In the days of her anonymity, she would head down and watch Mumbai’s cookie munchers line up behind her Nano from a distance. “Some would wait in line for up to ten to 15 minutes just for one cookie or two. I would wonder how patient and giving this city is,” she said.

She once got an email from someone who took her cookies home to his children, who fought and bonded over them. “You bring families together, you bring smiles to their faces. I hope you know what you’re doing for this family,” he wrote. She had tears in her eyes.

From babies and pregnant women to doting husbands and college students, Neha has been exposed to many a hearts.

“The fact that people were willing to endure the chase of a mobile store around town, amazed me. There were those who didn’t appreciate that as well, but to each their own,” she said.

“People’s expectations of food in Mumbai are now sky-high, it’s no less than a NYC quality, because we have the chefs, the ingredients, the exposure and obviously the expectations follow.”

With the function of food becoming more intimate and personal, especially in the retail of comfort food, cookies set no particular precedent. “I don’t know how many people ate cookies before you know,” she said.

Cookies are definitely more of a woman thing. And she giggles when she mentions that she takes it on herself to actively dissuade those who come too regularly from eating too much because of how decadent they are.

She experiments multiple times to come up with variations for her cookies. Smores are next.

A drenched young girl with a torn folder of wetted documents walks in, close to tears. Cookie stores seem perfect havens and those behind the counter have weapons to soothe all.

At some point our conversations begin to falter into a fleck of sea salt, a flick of Nutella, a tongue-coating of milk, the thunder and lightning outside the darkening picture window offering no real view.

Cookies do that. Make silences comfortable to chew on.