Indian Takeaway (17 page)

In India there is a lot of talk about the state of the roads. The difference between travelling on a good road and a bad (and sometimes non-existent) road can be hours of journey time. India’s biggest challenge over the next century is that of improving its infrastructure. There are hundreds of millions of highly educated graduates, hundreds of millions of manual workers, hundreds of millions of merchants; they all just need to be hooked up with decent roads, transport links, communications and the rest. Once India joins up its myriad of dots, it will be ready to take on the world.

Surprisingly, this highway is good and clean and straight. We bisect fields and coconut groves; palm trees and red-tiled bungalows appear sporadically and then melt away. We pass the odd sandalwood forest. The movie seems to be ending happily; the fat, shotgun-toting, kurta-wearing Sikh lies dying slowly in some field and goodness has been restored in the world. Our gleaming white Volvo coach now labours its way treacle-like, through the suburbs of Bangalore. Our vicinity to the city is evident in a number of ways. The sky has darkened with the clouds of industry; our pace has suddenly diminished to a constant crawl; and tiny shops start dotting the side on the road, increasing in frequency and product offering.

The industrious nature of the Indian psyche is something to behold. It is exemplified best perhaps in the tiny little shacks offering every imaginable service from mobile phone repair to document lamination to tyre repair. Everyone everywhere is trying to make a living, predominantly an honest, hard-worked living. If there is a single quality about India I most admire it is the industry of the place. Growing up with the negative images of poverty, famine and the like I was never aware of quite how hard Indians worked. That my hard-working, industrious parents were Indian, the hard-working industrious community
in Glasgow that they belonged to were Indian, and my hardworking and industrious wider family were all Indian, was proof lost on me.

Scenes like this always seem to put life in the affl uent west into some sort of context. These tiny little businesses exist cheek by jowl with massive urban redevelopment projects. There couldn’t be a more pronounced sense of the past meeting the future at the crossroads of the present. I see a cartload of sweet perfumed orange mangoes in the shadow of a sky-blocking shopping development, aptly named the Big Bazaar. I wonder how long the mango vendor will survive. The entire Bangalore skyline is punctuated by cranes. There is building work on every side. Ever since the arrival of the global multinational fifteen years ago, Bangalore hasn’t stopped growing and developing. Once, what set Bangalore, the garden city of lakes and a cooling breeze, apart from almost all the other Indian cities was its mellow, well-planned urban calm. People from all over India would flock to enjoy the well-designated city space, stroll by the lakes, play in the gardens and shade under the abundance of trees. It was a city full of light and shade, both literally and metaphorically. Now the shade has gone and the incandescent light of international redevelopment shines on Bangalore, perhaps a little too brightly. The once-famous city lakes have been filled in with concrete and built over with more apartments, feeding the seemingly insatiable hunger of the chic young city dwellers; the verdant urban gardens have been razed and developed into yet another shopping centre. The trees and lakes ensured a unique microclimate in Bangalore. With their systematic disappearance the once temperate and mild city is now gradually becoming a breeze-free conurbation with leaden, pollution-filled skies.

I have been coming to Bangalore on and off for the better part of a decade and I have seen the city slowly morph from an oasis of calm into a vibrant and thriving metropolis. On my last visit, some four years ago, I remember thinking that enough had changed, there had been enough development. I felt that the city had reached the correct size and should grow no more. Even on this short journey through the suburbs and into the city I realise that the city has grown massively since I last made that observation. Four years ago I was already starting to worry that if Bangalore wasn’t careful, it might well lose the very charm and beauty that attracted all comers. My current impression confirms that charm and beauty has been lost.

The coach station in Bangalore is mayhem, proper mayhem; it’s the place trainee mayhem is sent to study and learn the true nature of mayhem before it returns to its own state and visits its newly acquired knowledge upon the locals there. Bangalore, as well as being the capital of Karnataka, is the transport hub for the entire south Indian area. Trains are sent trundling off in every direction; buses and coaches tear a path to and fro; planes block the sun on domestic and international flight paths. Bangalore is a busy place. And of all the available modes of transport the bus and coach are the favoured amongst the hoi polloi. The trains tend to be for the more genteel, even with their scary third-class carriages; and their service is less frequent than the eight-wheeled option. The bus is the Everyman of the Indian road.

Stepping off the bus I enter the massive station looking for my designated meeting point. Within minutes I feel as though I have seen or heard every possible destination in India. If they aren’t hauling signs up on front of their buses, they are shouting their destinations repeatedly, at breakneck speed as
if competing with fellow drivers. They shout like they drive: noisily, aggressively and selfishly.

It feels as if the entire world and its mother-in-law sits and waits, or ups and boards, or yawns and sleeps, or sips and eats, or alights and arrives.

I feel excited and nervous about Bangalore. This is the first destination on my quest that is familiar to me; I have spent time in Bangalore with my wife’s family. It is also the first destination where I will be cooking for someone I know, someone I know well. Bharat Shetty is my wife’s cousin and I have known him for the better part of two decades. Bharat Shetty is a bon viveur. He likes to smoke, he likes to drink and he likes to party. But most of all he likes to eat. Bharat is also a stranger to tact and diplomacy, a quality in him that I have always enjoyed. One knows exactly where one stands with Bharat. But while I have enjoyed his candour thus far, I’m not altogether looking forward to his candour when applied in relation to my food.

How old he is, I’m not sure, but I reckon he must be at least in his mid-fifties by now. He used to travel often to London and Europe on business and we would invariably end up dining out at some fancy restaurant or other. In those days I had next to no money, no real career to speak of, no prospects of a career, two kids and an overdraft. I would always feel very nervous about having to pay, for fear of the card being declined or the machine exploding with fatigue at my continual impertinence in asking for cash that simply didn’t exist.

I can remember one time when Bharat and his then new wife Anjani came to visit. They wanted to eat Chinese food. We suggested the Royal China, regarded by many as London’s finest Chinese restaurant. We opted for the Bayswater branch; the dark almost conspiratorial vibe of the place always reminds me of that restaurant in
Scarface
when Tony Montana gets drunk
and starts referring to himself as the ‘bad guy’. I feared that this evening I would be the ‘bad guy’. We sat and we ate; wave after wave of food came and I spent the whole meal wondering how the hell I was going to pay. By the time the chilli squid in black bean sauce had come, I resigned myself to the ignominy of the credit card ‘decline’. I enjoyed not a single mouthful, thinking through all the times Bharat had looked after me in Bangalore; my hand never once went into my pocket. The bill eventually came, too early. As my hand reached out for it Bharat snatched it away.

‘Hey, you silly bugger,’ Bharat barked lovingly at me. ‘You are not paying,’ he rebuked as he took out his bulging wallet. ‘Silly bugger … ’

He always chastised me in the way only an older Indian relative can, irritated that I would even consider such an affront. My relief was palpable.

It is Bharat who has come to meet me at the predesignated meeting point, under the broken clock. Up ahead I can see a clock that looks broken as I batter my way through the human traffic, head down and insensitive to the needs of others. India makes you like that, and in the time I have been here, I realise that my well-mannered polite Britishness is a millstone around my neck. It dissolves daily in the war of attrition you must wage to buy a coffee, cross the street, board a train. For a nation that can be so polite and so helpful, the people of India can also be terribly rude. But rudeness is in the eye of the beholder and I decide not to behold anything but my end goal, which is to meet Bharat Shetty. I bump frail old ladies out of my way, accelerate in front of a nursing mother, cut across a wheel-chaired grandfather. And as I make for the exit the cries of the small child I kicked out of my way start to subside, and I see the welcoming face of Mr Bharat Shetty.

‘Where are your bags, man? Bags?’ he asks, looking no doubt for more than my single wheely case.

‘All here,’ I say patting my beloved travelling companion.

‘What the hell!’ He really does speak like that.

Bharat takes me to his apartment and it’s damn good to be home. And what a home! The seventh-floor apartment is smack bang in the middle of India’s most vibrant and growing city, the very epicentre of Bangalore. There are few tall buildings in the centre of the city, so the top of this one with six storeys below affords an unbroken view of the urban landscape. Wherever you look there is new development, new building. The traffic below is chaotically Indian. The street is one way and as dusk descends legion upon legion of white lights descend the hill past the apartment morphing into red-lighted smears as they melt away into the Bangalore night; the flow from white to red seems constant.

‘How was the journey, man?’ Bharat asks.

‘Fine,’ I reply rather unconvincingly.

I look out of the window and admire the view again.

‘Finest city in India, according to CNN, man. Finest city in India. Glenfiddich or Glenmorangie?’ he asks.

There’s no place like home.

Driving around Bangalore, it feels like the perfect place for me to understand my colonial past and my modern future. We often forget that as an independent country, India is but six decades old; it is still very much coming to terms with itself politically and socially. Many argue that Indian civilisation has existed for millennia, and that my theory about the nation being so young is vacuous and historically naive. But Indians

never ruled themselves democratically prior to 1947. The British governed like any good colonial power, dividing and ruling, crow-barring open the already existing fault lines of religious, geographical and cultural differences that were rife across this massive subcontinent. These fault lines defined the different monarchies and territories prior to the British invasion. As much as India has the most ancient of world civilisations, philosophies and religions, as a unified, democratic force it is but a toddler. I am fascinated to understand what it means to be Indian because being ‘Indian’ is only really a recent phenomenon. It is much easier to talk about being Punjabi or Scottish or British, identities that have endured for hundreds of years. But being Indian is a less established a concept. And Bangalore, with its new wave of western business travellers, is new India. The people of this city are being asked new questions by the incomers from Germany, Holland and the US. What will these economic migrants make of Bangalore? What will they make of India itself?

‘Do you want to see the city or shall we grab a drink?’ Bharat loves a drink, but I want to see the city.

‘Show me the city,’ I answer. ‘According to CNN it’s the finest city in India, no?’

He smiles. ‘Cheeky bugger!’

Cubbin Park, named after the eponymous lord, is a beautiful memento of the British, sitting as it does so near to the new Karnataka’s State government building, which is itself a wonder of Indian architecture. Hordes gather to view this edifice which is across the boulevard from the High Court of Bangalore. Rounding a corner I see a statue of Queen Victoria. I am reminded of the images in the post-Glasnost Soviet Union of the populus tearing down statues of Lenin and Stalin, often with their bare and bloodied hands. But not here, not in India. There
is still a great affection for the Brits in some quarters. Certain philosophers and thinkers believe that it is this fondness for the British that intellectually and politically holds India back, the notion that things would have still been better under the Raj. I do think that some Indians are prone to a slight inferiority complex about Britain in particular and the west in general. There is a belief that the west is best. I am fairly certain that this attitude pervaded my own upbringing to some extent. I’m not sure where it came from since my parents have never felt that way, but I do recall faceless drunk ‘uncles’ (not my real uncles) bad-mouthing India in a way that I can only describe as ungrateful. I distinctly remember thinking that it was bad enough that the local white folk were less than complimentary about India; they didn’t need the support of Indians themselves. And this inferiority complex still exists today amongst a certain constituency of non-resident Indians as we are known. Perhaps as globalisation takes hold and the free market solidifies in India, as it seems to be doing, these archaic notions will dissolve and disappear. Perhaps.