Indian Takeaway (32 page)

The thirty-minute flight from Srinagar to Jammu makes an utter mockery of my Hannibal-like ascent in the Sumo Jeep. The seat belt signs are extinguished and then illuminated again within minutes; we barely make it to 30,000 feet. We land without song and dance. I hail an auto rickshaw and cross town through traffic to the railway station, the same railway station I alighted at a few days before. I pass by the army of Sumos waiting to take luckless travellers on an eight-hour adventure. I pass the water supply where my yellow-robed, white-bearded, Adidas-clad holy man had prayed and shouted. I find myself with a couple of hours to kill before the train to Amritsar.

The first thing I notice is the warmth. The temperature is considerably higher than in Srinagar. Srinagar was cold in a way people generally do not associate with India. November sees temperature fluctuate between two or three Celsius and the low teens; it’s never warm. At night, temperatures stray below freezing. In Jammu the sun is out and mid-twenties warmth allows my bones to gradually thaw out. I wander up the hill from the Sumos, up towards the station itself, up past the coaches and the urinating men.

No matter where I go in the world, there will be few more scintillating sights, few more vibrant, few more mesmeric than a platform in an Indian railway station. There is always something to watch, always something to do, regardless of the time of day. As I drink a lovely sweet five rupee cup of tea I see hordes of men eating delicious-looking food. Inevitably I feel hungry. It is lunchtime. But eating at a train station would be reckless, almost as reckless as eating rajmah chawal in Peeda.

I sit down at the station canteen, a surprisingly light and airy room with a handful of tables lost in the vast space. A
motley crew of insolent men of varying ages mans the servery: no table service. I read the menu on a very retro seventies-style information board where each white plastic letter of each word of each dish is painstakingly pushed into the perforated plastic board. No doubt this is the task that has caused the men behind the counter to become so insolent. They needn’t have bothered with the information board since the first three dishes I ask for are not available. No muttar paneer; no aloo muttar and no aubergine. I then inherit their collective insolence and ask what they do have. There is a single answer: aloo channa. Chick pea and potato curry. Sounds good.

Eighteen rupees later I am handed a steel tray with six chapattis, a bowl of potatoes and chick peas, and dollops of the ubiquitous mango and chilli pickles. This was the comfort food of my childhood. But this dish before me is not quite the one I am used to. Not by some way. When I say it is a bowl of potato and chick pea curry, let me be clear. There is a lovely watery brown gravy with soft white potatoes and perhaps half a dozen chick peas secreting themselves within the dish. Food is all about balance. There needs to be the right amount of each component to make a dish work. The mash to mince ratio in shepherd’s pie; the pasta to sauce ratio in spaghetti bolognaise; the chick pea to potato ratio in aloo channa. Here there are simply not enough chick peas to justify their existence. It feels wrong, unbalanced. It reminds me of watching the fisherman in Bombay eating. So poor are they, they fill their plates with rice, a cheap and filling ingredient. Beside the rice they place the tiniest amount of flame-red prawn pickle. The bland rice and the fiery pickle combine to create a mouthful of flavour, but the pickle is not cheap, so they ration it tightly and have learnt to make the tiniest amount of pickle spread to the most amount of rice. I have often watched them eat and wondered
how they would react to being given more pickle. Would they enjoy the meal more? Or are the proportions they have grown up with, the tiniest dollop of pickle upon the plateful of rice, exactly right for them? All I can tell you is that my handful of chickpeas are by no means the right proportion for me. I feel cheated. Cheated and still hungry.

I return to the platform for my second cup of hot sweet tea. This is the beauty of Indian railway tea. It’s intense, like so much of India. There is nothing across this vast country that could ever be described as bland. Every experience, every sensory moment is intense, either in a good way or a bad way. From the beauty of the landscapes, to the sadness of the poverty, everything is heightened. Much like the tea. The tea at Indian railway stations comes in small cups. It is dark brown, very sweet and highly spiced. Any more than a small cup would be too much. But delicious though the tea is, it is still only tea, and there is a definite gap in my stomach, a gap that ought to have been filled by chick peas. I search the platform for sustenance and settle on the ubiquitous banana.

No sooner have I consumed the banana than the train arrives, the Muri Express; train number B102. I am in coach B looking for berth 20. I find myself thanking Rovi, again. He took it upon himself to personally sort out all my train bookings. Where would I be without him? Probably riding on the roof of the train …

In Britain a four-hour train journey is about as long a journey as I would be comfortable to undertake: the National Express train from Kings Cross to Edinburgh is four and half hours, and a lovely trip it is too when not hampered by rail works or ‘the wrong type of snow’. In India a four-hour train ride is a short journey. It is astonishing how quickly my mindset changes and I too view the four-hour journey from Jammu to Amritsar as
a brief encounter. The train will head from Amritsar to Delhi and onward to Tata Nagar.

Tata Nagar is one of those places you hear about often and you see it printed lots but never actually go to. It is dropped into conversation and alluded to; someone always has a distant relative in Tata Nagar, or knows someone who has been to Tata Nagar. But no one has actually been there themselves; it’s like Carnwadric. When I was boy Bishopbriggs was affectionately known as Spam Valley because all the 1960s Barratt Houses looked a bit like spam tins, lined up neatly in rows.

Bishopbriggs was just another place to grow up, if a little soulless. The only problem was that my school was on the Southside of town in Langside. A fee-paying Jesuit school: only the best for the children of immigrants. The two worlds of Bishopbriggs and Langside couldn’t have been more different. The sandstone supremacy of the Southside contrasted sharply with the matter-of-fact modernity of Bishopbriggs. And not only was there such a sharp conceptual distance between the places, there was also a very clear geographical distance. It was two bus rides from school to home, a journey I occasionally had to make solo when my elder brother was off sick. An eight-year-old boy travelling twelve miles across a city on his own: it would never happen today.

In the mornings Mum drove us to school. It was on the way home that buses became part of our lives. The first bus I took from my school in Langside into town was the 45; the legendary 45. The bus took me all the way through town and as far as Colston. Colston was remarkable insofar as it was the point where the city ended and the suburbs started: it was where the fares increased on buses and taxis. The buses that took us into town came from Carnwadric, a suburb in south Glasgow. If I took the bus the other way, towards Langside, I
took the 45 to Carnwadric. I lived in Glasgow up until the age of twenty-two. I still have very strong links with the city. My parents live there, my brother and his family live there, I work there and I still call it home. I have travelled the city, but have never in all these years ever been to Carnwadric or met anyone who comes from Carnwadric, or can conclusively prove that Carnwadric exists. Much like Tata Nagar.

The train from Jammu soon fills up. A family decamp in the berth next door, their luggage spilling around the corner. Their daughter, a sweet little girl sporting the Frenchest of bobs, fills her face with masala dosa, a lentil pancake filled with a delicious spiced potato mix. She uses the wide-topped Tupperware dish as a plate and scoops mouthfuls of the potato accompaniment with her already messy fingers. Full-mouthed, she talks incessantly, pausing only to refill herself. She can barely contain her excitement at the journey ahead. We have yet to set off and she has dispensed with her first course and is moving onto her next: samosa. Her legs swing involuntarily, inches above the carriage floor. She is happy. Food does that to you. As the train pulls away from Jammu the little girl tears into pudding.

I doze, I sleep, I sleep, I doze. The train rocks forward and back, backward and forward, in and out of progressively smaller stations, stopping, starting and stopping again. I have no idea how far we are from my destination but get the distinct feeling that we are late. We duly arrive at Amritsar, a massive station, sprawling in every direction.

I would like to be able to tell you how beautiful Amritsar is, how clean and well constructed is the spiritual home of the Sikhs. I would like to tell you that; but I can’t. Amritsar, forgive me, is a shit hole. It’s horrible. The Golden Temple (Darbar Sahib) is utterly beautiful, possibly the most peaceful

Notice on the train from Jammu to Amritsar

Ferozepure is about 120km from Amritsar. I would like to tell you that Ferozepure is a beautiful city, clean, well constructed, full of stylish architecture and cultural delights. But that would be an unequivocal lie. Ferozepure is also a shit hole. I have chosen to withhold this critical piece of information from you so far, reader, for fear that it may impact on my romantic journey home. But, as I near the place I call home in India, there’s no dressing it up or putting a town-planning spin on it. There is a medieval quality to the place: tall buildings, narrow alleyways, the dirt and detritus of life everywhere. As I say, it is a shit hole. But I love this shit hole. It was where my father and grandfather were born. It has given me my most vibrant memories of childhood, those few snatched weeks during summer and Christmas holidays.

I feel I ought to qualify my rather damning description of Ferozepure. Ferozepure used to be a great city, almost princely. Hundreds of years ago the great River Sutlej ran through its heart, bringing with it all the prosperity and trade rivers bring.
Moti Bazaar translates as ‘Pearl Market’ and twenty yards from our front door on the left, under the arch just past the sweet shop is Heera Mundi, ‘Diamond Market’. Ferozepure was clearly the place to be in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. In the times of the Raj Ferozepure was similarly of great prominence and significance, lying as it did in the heart of the river supply of the state. It had the largest canal headworks in the north of India. This proved invaluable in the irrigation of crops and the Punjab is still to this day the most agricultural of all Indian states, providing the majority of fruit, vegetables and wheat to the rest of the nation, not to mention hydro-electricity from its many powerful rivers.
*
Can you tell I’m proud?

It is into Ferozepure that I am now heading. Despite the numerous bus and coach services, my uncle has insisted on driving the two and a half hours to pick me up. But that’s Billu for you; all six foot five inches of him. Barinder Singh Kohli, known to all and sundry as Billu, or in my case Billu Chachaji.

In the Punjabi family system, which is patriarchal, each relative on your father’s side is given a distinct name to describe where they fit in the family hierarchy. The extended family system is driven by hierarchy and status; there’s a certain feudal quality to it which is perhaps why the concept is struggling to survive in these more ‘egalitarian’ times. (It’s worth noting that since women are deemed to have left their family to join their husband’s family upon marriage, all your father’s sisters are
Pooas
, regardless of age and status.)
Chachas
are the younger brothers of your father;
thaias
are older brothers of your father. Since my dad is the eldest I am
thaia
-poor but
chacha
-rich. I have the farmer Billu in
Ferozepure and the renegade Channi in Los Angeles, the ex-army officer who bought the American dream but forgot to keep the receipt. They are my
chachas
and I, for my sins, am their
pathija
. The
chacha/pathija
axis is regarded as an historically close relationship in Punjabi culture. This may be explained by the fact that in olden times when families were much larger, perhaps ten or twelve siblings, children of the older brothers found themselves much closer in age to their parents’ younger brothers. Whatever the social reasoning my Billu Chacha and I are very close.

The Sikhs have long been regarded as a martial race, having been borne out of the need to protect the peace-loving, cow-worshipping, karma-accepting Hindu majority from the all-conquering, architecture-loving, Islam-promoting Moghul armies that spread through Persia into the north of India. In their wake they converted a plethora of new Muslims, often with the use of their quirkily curved swords. There is one crucial difference between Hindus and Muslims: you can become a Muslim in your own lifetime; one simple act of conversion, a belief and love of the Koran and a long moustache-less beard and you are well on your way to Islamic salvation. This is a benefit not enjoyed by the Hindus. They believe in the whole circle of life thing,
dharma
. You are in a cycle of existence that cannot be broken, your behaviour in your last life affects your status in the next and so on. Therefore you cannot become a Hindu: hence the lack of evangelical Hindus with tambourines and guitars.

Billu is a fine example of a warrior Sikh. Not only is he almost six foot five, he is long-limbed, broad-shouldered and charismatically handsome. Add to that his lugubrious voice, his intensely brown eyes and his love of stirring rhetoric and you have a potential military leader on your hands; he’s almost
Shakespearian. He has lived his life entirely in Ferozepure, running our land and maintaining the family house. While his sisters married and left for Canada, Malaysia and the UK and his brothers got educated or joined the army, Billu was a constant in an ever-changing world. And while he may not be formally educated, there is little he doesn’t know. His knowledge of world affairs, politics and life are self-taught, and consequently his opinions are refreshing in their candour.