Indian Takeaway (23 page)

I kill the fifteen minute wait by phoning my brother-in-law Unni in Bombay. His wife, Anu, is my wife’s cousin; they’re very close. Unni is a commercials director who has started making movies in the new vibrant, modern India. His love of European cinema and my love of modern India seem to be a happy intersection in our lives. He holidays annually in Goa.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks me.

I explain to Unni where I’m staying.

‘We are buying a place there. There, in that complex.’ Unni is incredulous. That makes two of us.

Now I am aware of the dimensions of the globe, the circumference, the radius, the surface area of the planet. No matter how one looks at it, this world is many things but small. It transpires that the house he has made an offer on is four houses away from Orlando’s. You travel halfway round the world but coincidence is never far away.

I bring the robust peas to the boil in heavily salted water. I don’t know what it is about these peas but they really scare me. My fear is well placed. I have never in all my life witnessed peas emit so much green to the water they boil in. Now, when I say green, let me explain. At the start of the cooking process, the peas were green (correct) and the water was clear (correct). By the end of the cooking process, the peas are less green (not right) and the water is radioactively green (very, very wrong). I am really not sure whether I should serve these peas, but on balance I’m serving the peas and not the radioactive water, so I feel a little more comfortable about their presence on the plate.

It’s time to bring everything together. A frying pan with oil is heated on the hob. I dry the milk-soaked pork belly in the vain hope that the oil, like some biblical miracle, will manage to crisp up the skin. It’s never going to happen. I place as many pieces of pork belly into the hot oil as will fit and genuinely pray. I’m not quite sure who I’m meant to be praying to, given my own personal confusion towards the supreme being and the fact that I happen to be in the most Christian place I have ever been to (including the Vatican). Nevertheless, I find myself almost audibly uttering the words, ‘Please God, make them
crispy.’ I distract myself by mashing the now boiled potatoes, embellishing them with luscious Indian butter and a little milk. I retrieve the apple sauce from the fridge. Now I’m muttering, ‘Please God, make it saucy.’ Clearly, if there is a God, she or he is otherwise occupied since my apple sugar and fenny mix is sticky rather than saucy. I’m hopeful that Orlando and the kids will have very limited experience of proper apple sauce.

We eat. Carlos, being Carlos, feels it is too hot for mash and rightly deems the pork belly too fatty. Having said that, I can’t ever remember seeing him eat anything. He would have been very happy with a bowl full of Coke. Charlene likes the fat when it is crispy and loves the mash. Orlando leaves nothing, but then again, Orlando is a lovely man, so I wouldn’t let that be any sort of reflection on the quality of the meal.

The meal over, the afternoon heat descends and with bellies full, a kip is required. So we sleep, with the promise of a drive down to the beach for sunset.

It takes no more than twenty minutes to drive to the beach, chasing the sunset full of pork for the second time in one day. A few hundred people gather at Colva to watch the sky darken, to eat ice cream and to paddle through the ebbing, incoming waters. I would have thought that coming to Goa, the very epicentre of the traveller’s journey of self-discovery, might have offered me a few more answers. But I am feeling that I am leaving with yet another clutch of questions. The last thing I expected to find on this quest was an Indian duality like my
British duality. Orlando is a proud Goan, but does not regard himself as Indian. Is Orlando any different from me? He is, in so far as I am engaged with my dual heritage, my Britishness and my Indian past. For Orlando, life in that regard is very simple.

Perhaps that is why Goa doesn’t really feel like India. This is an alien land, a mini-nation of fiercely proud and independent people that bears very little relation to India herself. I am almost halfway through my journey and I seem to have seen a hundred different Indias and a hundred different Hardeeps on the way.

Perhaps my dad was right. Maybe I should not have bothered with Goa. And maybe cooking British food for Indians is futile. The journey is beginning to feel futile. I am not at all sure what I am learning.

The waves crash and the sky is incarnadine, the multicoloured bodies slowly become monochrome as the glorious gloom of night descends. Suddenly, for a moment, my whole journey becomes clear in fading twilight. I have travelled halfway around the world to find myself. But I now realise that I cannot truly do so until I lose myself in the experience of India.

All the while I have been travelling, from Kovalam through Mamallapuram, Mysore and Bangalore I have been trying to relate everything to what I already know, as if I were some sort of scientist. Standing on this beach, feeling the sand between my toes and the grains of time slipping silently through my fingers I begin to understand. The darkness brings light.

Then I hear in the distance an all too familiar sound. A broad Lancashire accent.

‘Have we missed the sunset? Bloody hell. My feet are bloody throbbing …’ A fat, sunburnt tourist is waddling towards
the beach, wholly unaware of her own volume and blissfully unaware of her terrible dress sense.

‘My bloody feet … ’

And in an instant, clarity, like the sun, has vanished.

‘H
i, Dad.’

‘How’s it going? Where are you now?’ He was clearly happy to hear from me. ‘Left Goa this morning. I’m in Bombay now and heading for Delhi,’ I said. The bus from Goa had been remarkably unremarkable. It had been the single journey I was dreading the most. Yet I have arrived in Bombay rested and relaxed. It promises to be a smooth onward journey all the way up to the north. But promises can easily be broken.

‘You flying?’ my dad asked.

‘No, Dad. Train. Change at Bombay.’

‘Are you not stopping in Bombay, son? If you are you have to meet Joggi Saini.’

‘No, Dad. I’m not stopping here. Can’t do everything. I’m going straight up to Delhi. I’ve done Banglore. How many cities can I see?’

‘OK.’

‘Dad, quick question. When you left India, did you know who you were, or were you trying to find yourself?’ No sooner had I asked the question than I knew the answer.

‘I never understood this finding yourself nonsense. Maybe it’s a cultural or generational difference. I always knew who I was. Finding myself was never a luxury I could afford.’

‘OK. Sorry, Dad.’

‘Now, have you told Manore Uncle you are coming to Delhi? I spoke to him yesterday and they are expecting you. Rovi will look after you.’

‘I’ll call them today. Everything else OK, Dad?’

‘Yes. Fine. How’s the cooking?’ he asked.

‘You know …’ I allowed my answer to tail off in a noncommittal sort of a way.

‘Son?’

‘Yes, Dad?’

‘When you come back …’ He paused.

‘Yes?’ I prompted.

‘There are some documents to sign. Call me from Delhi.’

I hung up.

I’ve been to Delhi many times. When I was a boy, Delhi was the gateway to north India. To get to Ferozepure we had to fly into the capital. Delhi was also the last Indian city my dad lived in. His wanderlust was nascent even when he was a young man. The vista of Ferozepure was never going to be enough to satisfy him, much as he loved the place of his birth. He was bound to seek his fortune elsewhere. My father as a man in his mid-twenties left his physical and spiritual home for a short placement in New Delhi; he planned to be there just for a few years. That was more than forty years ago.

He ended up never returning home. Home. This echoes with my own life. I too left Glasgow – my home – at the tender age of twenty-two. My plan was to leave for three months. That was in 1992 and I have never returned there to live.

Delhi to me is a strong and shining beacon from my childhood. I remember with astonishing vividness the fun that
my dad always seemed to have whenever we were there. He would be relaxed and smiling, even though we were always in transit to another place. He knew the city intimately, despite the changes it had gone through since he’d lived there. He very much loved Delhi. We would venture out on a Vespa, hugging him tightly for dear life; such journeys were probably memorable for those very hugs, stolen from a loving but non-tactile father. Delhi felt like my dad’s city and because I loved my dad, admired him, I too wanted Delhi to be my city; I wanted to be just like my dad.

The thought occurred to me as I prepared myself for the last few stops on my journey that my emotional energy was increasing. Maybe this entire journey I was undertaking was actually about me and my dad. Maybe, in launching myself on this quest of self-discovery, all I really wished for was my father’s approval. After all, he sprang to life when I had suggested the possibility of such a madcap escapade. And although he expressed his reservations, as only he could, about my desire to share British food with the Indians, he was nonetheless supportive of my endeavours. Wouldn’t it be the sweetest of ironies if I was going halfway around the world and enduring thousands of miles of travel around the Indian subcontinent in order that I might seek the approval and blessing of a 74-year-old man in the West End of Glasgow? Maybe this whole trip was about the big fella …

Twenty-one colours of turbans I have seen my dad wear

My father was a customs officer at New Delhi airport. He planned to spend only a short period there, enjoying the metropolitan buzz of city life while he surveyed his options. He ended up making a home for himself and living a bachelor lifestyle. His best friend, Manore Kapoor, had settled there with his wife, so my dad was as happy as he could possibly be.
Manore Uncle’s wife, Kapoor Aunty as we affectionately call her, was a legend in the kitchen, even in the sixties. My dad had the best of both worlds: all the fun of bachelordom with great home-cooked food from his best friend’s wife.

I think in many ways Delhi was the making of my father. He was a small-town boy with aspirations. Delhi gave him a flavour of a life less ordinary. It nurtured his aspirations. It was the start of a journey he has yet to complete. And how poignant for me that I am on an as yet incomplete journey and I find myself in New Delhi. As I arrive in the city I think back to the beach in Goa, to my moment of clarity when I realised that I would have to give myself to India rather than hope that India had anything to give me. As you know, I have visited India many times, for many reasons, but never have I travelled here seeking knowledge through the prism of myself. That is what is making this journey so significant and so daunting.

I feel I should be learning about myself, I should be acquiring new information about who I am and why I am here. The problem is that stepping off the plane in Kovalam all those weeks ago was an entirely different man. Now I’m in a city I have known for most of my life and I feel like I barely know who I am; this quest has changed me. I am sure of very little, except that the notion of Indianness for me is utterly meaningless. I am not Indian; not in the slightest. Did I feel Indian in Kovalam or Goa or Mysore? I felt Scottish, British and Punjabi. Here, almost in New Delhi, I feel Punjabi. I am a Punjabi Sikh Glaswegian who also feels some empathy with being British. That’s how I feel today, on my way to New Delhi.

I have never arrived in Delhi before by train. There’s a very good reason for that. The train journey from Bombay to Delhi is listed as lasting twenty-nine hours but they could pick any
prime number and that would also be believable. The number bears no resemblance to the actual journey time. I find myself in carriage A at Bombay station. Now, I thought Madras station was swollen with humanity; Bombay station makes Madras look like Chipping Campden mid-morning on a wet Wednesday. It is as if all of India and their extended families from overseas have decided to descend upon the city at the same time. The concept of personal space is constantly being questioned. On the way from the taxi to the concourse, I am simultaneously touched in seven different places by six different people.

You would think it relatively straightforward to hop on a train between the two of the biggest Indian cities, but logic doesn’t always apply to India. There are four trains leaving this station for Delhi in the next four hours. I’m not altogether sure which one I’m meant to be on. All I know is I’m in coach A of one of them. As I’ve become so accustomed to doing, I take a small census of opinion from those on the platform and then from those in the carriage of the most likely-looking train. It seems as if the Indian mail train that leaves Bombay at 16:43 is the train I’m destined to be on.

Destiny is a word with thousands of new connotations in India. Was I predestined to be on this train? If it’s the wrong train and I was predestined to be on it, was I predestined to realise I was on the wrong train? Or, was I predestined to be on the wrong train and not realise I was on the wrong train and, so predestined to travel on the wrong train? But what of that predestiny, if it has placed me on the wrong train and not alerted me to this fact? Yet I still find myself arriving at the same city I would have arrived at had I been on the train I was predestined to be on. I’m not sure I understand any of this, either.

Coach A it is. I happily place myself in the hands of destiny. I am in many ways destiny’s child; I’m a survivor. In a strange way, the length of this journey doesn’t scare me. There’s almost something biorhythmic about a journey of this length; something magical about the way one’s body starts to move with the motion of the train, becoming one with the steel, the wood and the glass of the locomotive. There is comfort in the length of the journey, an inherent sense of preemptive accomplishment. There is the ebb, there is the flow, there are the peaks, there are the troughs, there is the ying, there is the yang. And then, there’s the diarrhoea.

And what diarrhoea. In the world of needles, there are a multitude of sizes, shapes and styles. Jesus once spoke of the difficulty of a rich man gaining entry into the kingdom of heaven being on a par with the ease at which a camel could slip through the eye of a needle. Imagine, if you will, the smallest needle with the smallest eye. Fix that image clearly in your mind. It is easier to slip a camel through the eye of that needle than it is for me to stop shitting through it.

I didn’t even get an hour or so’s honeymoon period before the liquidity in my bowels made itself known. And when I say it made itself known, it was a bang rather than a whimper. No sooner had we left the station than I’d left my seat; and the contents of my guts left my body. (At least I thought it was the contents of my guts; I’m a big man but even I was astonished at the ability of the human body to produce liquid excrement with such regularity, such immediacy and with such pain. Such deep, deep pain.)

I thought the best thing to do upon evacuating my bowels for the fifth time was to seek some solace in slumber. It is amazing what happens to the human body when assailed by what we can euphemistically call ‘internal difficulties’. There’s
a reason why you very, very rarely defecate in your sleep. Your body will not allow it. Therefore you endure the shallowest of sleeps, a sleep that is essentially not sleep at all, but rather what we in Scotland call a
dwam
; a zombie-like state that exists somewhere between a sense of full wakefulness and a vague feeling of sleeping. It’s the worst of both worlds and extending that into a third dimension is the gurgling promise, nay threat, of a belly you thought you had emptied for the last time somehow filling itself up again with liquid drawn from the four corners of your already battered and bruised body. I think it is clear that I wasn’t having the best of times.