Indian Takeaway (24 page)

Contradictory though it seems, although your body keeps spewing out more liquid than it could possibly have absorbed, you need to replace your fluids. I know this thanks to Rajiv Sinha.

Smoking cigarettes is absolutely the biggest crime in the Sikh religion. You can harm small animals, beat your children and embezzle funds from the
gurdwara
committee and still maintain some degree of respect within the community. If however you were to light a cigarette, not only would you be burning tobacco, you would also be setting light to any prayer, any hope or any chance of not being completely and utterly ostracised by the wider family of Sikhs. Smoking is forbidden within the scriptures of the religion; it is outlawed; it is forbidden. Sikhs hate smoking. I feel my point has been made.

When I was thirteen years old, I smoked. I was a rebellious and foolish teenager. (This will be the first time my parents will know about my smoking; I suspect my mother had her suspicions, but this is as confessional as it gets). I smoked, and I was wrong to smoke. I was a fat Sikh boy at a Catholic school; I had no friends and wanted to do all I could to ingratiate myself with anyone who would stop for a moment and allow me to
be ingratiating. You have to understand that the eighties was all about the hair and as a kid with a turban I was always going to suffer. This is all about my childhood struggle for identity. I had no idea who I was when I was growing up in Glasgow. There were no role models for fat Sikh kids. No pop stars, footballers or actors that looked like me. All the people I could relate to were of an older generation; they weren’t British-born Scots. I was clutching at straws in an attempt to work out who I was.

But that wasn’t the sole reason for my dalliance with fags. I smoked because I thought it made me cool. It also meant I had things that people wanted, namely cigarettes. They would have to be nice to me if they wanted me to give them a cigarette and so I had instant friends. Smoking was my own private foolishness and I thought I was the only one who would suffer the consequences of my low-to-middle tar actions.

For some unknown reason, Rajiv Sinha took it upon himself to police my life. And his intervention led to my elder, stronger and draconian brother, Raj, laying into me. Raj managed to use the Sinha boy’s information to lever all sorts of ‘favours’ out of me, an abuse of privilege he spun out for many years.

To this day, I honestly and sincerely have no idea why he did it. But whilst many in Glasgow will have forgotten the miners’ strike, the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the second goal Holland scored against Scotland at the 1978 World Cup that put us out on goal difference, they will still remember Rajiv Sinha and his unwarranted sharing of information.

There is another point about the Sinhas that merits a digression. During our friendship Meatloaf released his debut album, the multi-platinum, rock-iconic
Bat Out of Hell
. No teenage Glaswegian boy’s house was complete without a copy of the album, each boy having his favourite track. John-Paul Glenday played his audio cassette version so often, he actually
managed to erase the entire recording. But the anthem that united us as an army of conceptual rock-album lovers was the title track itself. In the context of my life, the Judo-Christian notion of a mammal like a bat exiting the fire and brimstone of hell was secondary to the fact that Meatloaf sung: ‘like a sinner [Sinha] before the gates of heaven, I’ll come crawling on back to you’. Therefore, whilst others interpret the anthem as being about redemption and the concept of a life beyond the temporal, I just imagine Aloke Sinha, Rajiv’s brother and my great friend, before the gates of heaven on a silver Black Phantom bike.

My enmity with Rajiv developed over the years. We would sneer at each other, but I’d yet to find a way of exacting the correct calibre of revenge upon his Bollywood-loving body. In the words of John Milton, ‘They also serve, who only stand and wait.’ I stood. I waited. I was served.

When Rajiv was sixteen he ended up in hospital in Glasgow, seriously dehydrated after a mild bout of diarrhoea turned into a form of dysentery based on the fact that he refused to drink any liquids, thinking the liquids were causing his diarrhoea. Fuckwit.

It wasn’t even as if his system had been assailed by foreign bodies. He was at home in Bishopbriggs. From that day on, I’ve always been aware of the need to replace lost fl uids during an unforgiving attack. And on this train on this journey at this time I suddenly feel perhaps my vehemence towards Rajiv has been somewhat misplaced all these years. I should never have wished ill upon him; perhaps he would never have had diarrhoea, perhaps he would never have ended up with a mild form of dysentery, perhaps we would still be friends today and perhaps I wouldn’t be feeling moments from death. Perhaps.

I find myself between a rock and a hard place. For some reason there seems to be very little water for sale on the train, but there seem to be a lot of tea and coffee vendors. You may know the effect hot liquids like tea and coffee have on the bowel; the last thing my oversized Glaswegian Sikh bowels need is any further encouragement. That is my rock. My hard place is the fact that I can physically feel myself dehydrating; I have no choice. I drink a cup of tea or coffee, coffee or tea, from every vendor that passes by. By some fluke of Indian Railways bureaucracy, not only is my berth the bottom berth, thereby giving me easy access up and out without contorting my anal cavity in a way that may encourage rogue slippage, my seat is also almost adjacent to the toilet. From a prone position, I can be moaning, bent double on the western-style (!) toilet in less than eighteen seconds.

Most of the rest of the journey is a blur of tea, coffee and lavatory visits. I feel my body weight halve as night becomes morning, morning melds into afternoon and afternoon metamorphoses into the next evening. If I’m honest, I’m not altogether clear quite how I’m going to make it through the journey. But I do. I think we sometimes take for granted the resilience of our minds, the resilience of our bodies and the resilience of good quality Calvin Klein underwear. As the train pulls up in New Delhi station it is as if the entire experience has been a personal test visited upon my being; I start to feel better, almost instantly. Perhaps it’s because I know Rovi is waiting for me and I know he is taking me home.

Rovi meets me at the station. Who, you are wondering, is Rovi? Rovi is Wovi’s brother. Rovi and Wovi. Wovi and Rovi, sons of Manore Kapoor, my dad’s best friend from college.

Whenever we came to Delhi we stayed with the Kapoors. Our first visit to them was in 1979. I remember it vividly
because my dad had taken us three out for a drive and when we came home we saw Rovi and Wovi going through our suitcases. It was highly amusing to catch them red-handed rifling through our belongings. Highly amusing for us, if not for them. They knew they had been rumbled; they knew they were alibi-and explanation-free. We stood and watched as they replaced everything silently and left the room.

That trip was also the time I got to sample one of the delights of north Indian cooking. I was about ten years old and had just woken from a jetlag-induced slumber; my father was sitting at the table with the Kapoors tucking into what looked and smelled like a sumptuous lunch.

‘Come here, son.’ My father beckoned me over. I remember at the time there being smiles exchanged but hadn’t quite registered that they were at my expense.

‘Try this.’ He offered me a laden spoonful from a dish of curry that lay in front of him.

‘What is it, Dad?’ I was young; I was newly awake; I was hungry. I wasn’t refusing to eat it. I just wanted some idea of what I was about to eat.

‘
Kalaa
… ’ he said, his loving use of Punjabi encouraging me to eat.

‘OK.’ He was my dad. I trusted him.

I guided a spoonful of the diced white substance, smothered in a rich brown sauce into my mouth. It felt a little strange but not altogether disgusting. But I distinctly remember registering the experience of a brand new texture in my mouth.

They all started laughing. Clearly I was missing a crucial piece of this cuisinal jigsaw.

‘Do you know what it is?’ asked my father, fighting back the tears.

I shook my head.

‘Goat’s brain curry,’ he said. ‘It’ll make you clever!’ he continued.

‘Goat’s brain curry,’ he repeated through tears of laughter.

I stood there chewing as they all laughed at the goat-braineating fat boy from Glasgow.

‘Clever like a goat?’ I asked, not previously aware that goats had been particularly celebrated in the animal kingdom for their searing wit and intelligence. This made them laugh even more. It was at this point in my life that I realised there was something of the accidental entertainer within me.

On the table beside the goat brain curry was a dish that I would walk over broken glass merely to inhale its aroma. It’s another north Indian speciality and in all my life I have never found a better version of this dish than Rovi’s mum’s; in many ways it’s worth the airfare to Delhi alone. We call it
bartha
; it might better be described to the non-Punjabi speaker as smoked aubergine curry. And it is truly, truly sublime. It is similar in preparation to babaganoush, the dish I prepared for Jeremy the yoga freak and his Svengali, Suresh, in Mysore. The aubergine is placed directly on the flame until the skin is charred black. The masala cooks simultaneously in a pot. Onions, cumin, chillies, tomatoes, turmeric and garlic sizzle away slowly until they form the spicy brown paste to which the de-skinned, mashed aubergine flesh is added and further cooked. Peas are often introduced to create a smoky, spicy, slightly sweet dish of perplexing deliciousness.

It had been my plan since I left London to ask Rovi’s mum to make
bartha
for me; I hadn’t tasted her
bartha
since that day in 1979 and had dreamt about it ever since.

I had asked Rovi to book me in to a wee, unassuming neighbourhood hotel. Delhi is full of them. As we pull up to the Crossroads Hotel I know that I’m in the right place. It’s a
sweet little place just off the main road, near the new Delhi Metro, a train system that seems to have revolutionised the city. The reception of Crossroads smells like any mid-rate Indian hotel should smell: of sandalwood and man sweat. The place is a homage to marble and velour and there seem to be flat screen plasma TVs everywhere, as well as shrines to various Hindu deities. Modern India in a nutshell. (Probably a betel nutshell.)

I check in thinking this will be the end of the night. I am wrong. It’s late but Rovi wants to take me on a midnight tour of the old city, a place called Jama Masjid in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi. I can’t say that I am that keen to travel around, given my nightmare journey with diarrhoea. Decent public toilets are not something one can ever bank on anywhere in India, not even in the capital city. But Rovi is a difficult guy to say no to.

Soon we find ourselves travelling though the Old City. It was built in Moghul times, a walled fortress of a place. The city was accessed via a number of gates, gates which are now themselves fenced off and protected as items of architectural interest. The walls have long since fallen but the demarcation between the bright, shiny, broad boulevards of New Delhi and the dark, dank alleyways, nooks and crannies of Old Delhi couldn’t be more apparent.

We pass the majestic Red Fort, the Moghul emperor’s seat from which the Chandni Chowk stretches out, the main market street of the Old City. We drive through the crowded streets, peopled almost exclusively by men. Each area contains a different market. There is a book market, a textile market and a vegetable market outside which stand trucks overladen with cauliflowers. Rovi is keen to take me to a place called Paratha ki Gully, the alley of parathas. For the uninitiated a paratha is
a delicious flaky bread indigenous to the north of India. It is made with flour and water and the dough is enriched with ghee or butter making the deliciously flaky bread a meal in itself. It can be served simply with yoghurt and pickles, or the paratha can be stuffed with any number of delicious fillings: potato, minced lamb, paneer, cauliflower, fenugreek, white radish, even egg. In the Punjab it is the staple breakfast dish, which probably explains why the life expectancy of Sikhs is lower than any other ethnic Indian grouping!

Paratha ki Gully is still vibrant after midnight. The alleyway itself is no wider than a couple of metres and there are stalls or shops lining the side of the road. This is a side of India kept only for the Indians. The businesses are closed but preparations are being made for the next day. A man absent-mindedly counts potatoes; two men sit cross-legged gossiping and laughing as they chop pumpkins; steel dishes clatter and clank as boys wash and clean them after another day’s cooking; a couple of men eye us suspiciously as they eat their daal and chapatti dinner.

We wander further down, our alley meeting another alley. Rovi explains that these alleys spider their way into the heart of the Old City, twisting and turning, tributaries of life. Two small boys, no older than seven, are earnestly scraping the bottom of a
halwa
pan.
Halwa
is a dessert traditionally made in these parts of carrot, ghee and your body weight in sugar. The rim of the pan is wider than the boys are tall.

It is curious to consider how, as much as Indian food has been taken to the very heart of British life, it is only the savoury dishes that have actually succeeded there. Indians have a very sweet tooth and we are renowned for our love of sweetmeats and puddings, but these are joys yet to be fully appreciated by the western palate … and dentist.