Indian Takeaway (4 page)

I
n a little over eight hours I will be touching down on Indian soil; Bombay, gateway to India. But what makes this trip so very different to the numerous other trips I have taken to the subcontinent is that this is my first as a tourist. This thought unsettles me. It’s mealtime on the plane. Quite which meal it’s time for I’m not wholeheartedly sure, but trollies are furiously dispensing food all around me, the dimmed lights catching the crumpled foil that bestows little surprise on the eater. I happily take my eight-inch by four-inch meal, peel away the astonishingly hot foil to reveal roast chicken with potatoes and vegetables. Ironic or what? Here I am flying over to India to explore the country and myself and to cook British food, and I am about to tuck into a roast dinner. What am I thinking? Am I thinking at all? Why would Indians be the least bit interested in shepherd’s pie, toad in the hole, cock-a-leekie soup? And why would they be the least bit interested in me cooking it for them? Troubled though I am, never before has anxiety come in the way of this man and his belly. I devour my roast dinner wishing only for one thing: bread sauce.

Ten hours later and I find myself in another airport, shuffling in search of my connecting flight to Cochin. The plush grandeur of the new domestic departure terminal at Bombay airport is an oasis of calming marble, steel and glass, a world away from the
mayhem that exists but yards from the terminal entrance. The air-conditioned serenity, the gently ordered protocol of check-in couldn’t be more blatantly anti-Indian in its sensibility. Where are the betel nut-chewing fat men, their shirts stiff with days of perspiration as they attempt to wedge themselves between you and the ticketing counter? Where is the dried daal seller, chanting the words he has chanted a thousand times a day, rendering their meaning meaningless? Where is the teeming mass of humanity, struggling to fit its own circumstances?

The tannoy announcements beckon and lull and herd us travellers into some brave, new world of becalmed tranquillity. Our queues are orderly, our voices unraised as we wait patiently in our marble edifice to undergo security checks.

Although India has had a woman Prime Minister and beloved manifestations of the female form come in many of their polytheistic deities, one soon realises the sweet quaintness of Indian pre-feminist culture as one negotiates security. Women are siphoned off into a separate queue, off to a dedicated channel where they pass through the beeping security doorway into a small curtained area where the outline of their bodies is discreetly described by the handheld detecting machine. (Quite what it detects but harmless items, Ray Bans and the foil on chewing gum packets, one can only guess …) In fact, the women aren’t even
called
women. They’re ladies.

While the queue-less sari-clad ladies glide through their clandestine curtain check, we men (who outnumber our gender counterparts in this terminal by at least seven to one) shamble ignominiously to our communal and very public moment with security. There are several doorway security machines; once we pass through this initial check we are confronted by a uniformed guard with the handheld – beeping – detecting machine. At this point we are offered a small raised dais in
order that we may elevate ourselves for our body check. This may be to save the strained backs and injured vertebrae of the security staff. It could be, but it feels much more as though they simply want the rest of the terminal to have a good view of us, legs apart, arms outstretched, in a pre-star jump pose.

I await my star-jump moment. Ahead of me I see the drunk man. He sways upon his dais. It’s a minor victory that he managed to uplift his lanky six foot three physique up to what (for him) is a challenging height. He is further impeded by the fact that the overwhelming majority of his six foot three frame would appear to be almost exclusively legs, clad as they are in static-garnering beige-coloured slacks. (So long are his legs I wonder whether he holds some junior ministry amongst those with silly walks.) Baby giraffe-like he steadies himself, as if unused to the world. He places his feet together, arms outstretched, perhaps more in an attempt to steady himself rather than to facilitate this particular security check.

The drunk man empties his pockets, and the small change, tissues and detritus of drunkenness spill and crash into the small metal dish. Very deliberately he returns his arms to their outstretched position. The irony that he looks like a three year old pretending to be a plane is somewhat lost on him … The most cursory of checks reveals nothing remarkable. His boarding pass is stamped, in the best traditions of Indian bureaucracy, and he is invited to alight the dais, the queue behind him heaving noiselessly in anticipation.

Trying his very best to maintain all the dignity that a lunchtime drunk can muster, he tries manfully to retrieve his change, his tissues and his detritus from the small metal dish. The height of the dais further accentuates his already accentuated sway. Coin by coin, rupee by rupee, tissue by tissue he retrieves each item, steadying himself as he places each into his pocket
before attempting to replace the next. This is clearly going to take some time. The duty sergeant loses his patience, although given the taciturn look he had fixed on his face, this was no great loss. The sergeant grabs the dish and empties it into the surprised hand of our drunken friend. Miraculously all but one of the coins lodge themselves in his skinny-fingered hands. All but one.

As I walk through my own security check the last thing I see is the drunk man, his face a portrait of concentration, trying to collect his single, stray coin from the floor of the dais.

Cricklewood to Cochin. Welcome to India. There’s something very satisfying about starting a journey at the very tip of a country. Kovalam is an India I would have never visited had I not undertaken this journey. It couldn’t be less like the India I know. The heat is oppressive, even in the winter. The food is utterly different and the vistas are tropical. In a few weeks time I will have zigzagged my way, east then west and finally north to the other tip of the subcontinent, Kashmir and Srinagar, some two and half thousand miles away.

But I’m not quite there yet. It was all going so smoothly. Too smoothly. From north-west London to almost the southern tip of India. It’s that ‘almost’ that is so very crucial. What any sensible traveller would have done would have been to fly directly from Bombay to Trivandrum, an hour’s flight, but where’s the fun in that? Having taken a flight to Cochin, I thought that it would be a shortish cab ride from Cochin to Trivandrum (now called Thiruvananthapuram, at least by the Indian government; it’s just far too many syllables for me).

What I had failed to check in my haphazardly ‘creative’ way was the distance from Cochin to Kovalam: 260km. I am faced with a stark choice. A charmingly helpful gentleman at the pre-paid taxi desk tells me that a cab from Cochin to Kovalam
will cost me about fifty quid and take five hours. Now what you have to realise is that in the UK we have great motorways which means a 260km journey, approximately 150 miles, can be executed in two hours or so. In India however no such roads exist. If it was early morning I might consider the cab ride, given that daylight brings an enhanced degree of safety on the roads of India. The fact that it is just past three o’clock in the afternoon mitigates against a journey that would inevitably end under the canopy of a chaotic Indian evening.

Thankfully there is a flight to Kovalam – in seven hours’ time. It transpires that it will cost the princely sum of seven good British pounds. I have to wonder why the price of a fl ight is so cheap. In India, given the massive differential in exchange rates, there are two prices for everything: the Indian Price and the Tourist Price. I suspect that the small airline from which I have purchased my ticket has mistaken me for an Indian, a proper Indian rather than a British Indian interloper. And why wouldn’t they? This is the south. No one really speaks Hindi here; they speak Keralan. I have only just arrived in India and I am already being mistaken for an Indian. But I have a decision to make: fifty quid for a five-hour cab ride or a seven-hour wait for seven quid? The sevens have it.

With hours and hunger to kill, I realise I have more than enough time to travel into town, look around, eat and come back. I hail a cab for Port Cochin to a place called the Chinese Fishing Nest. Intriguing.

Once in the cab I realise that my decision to fly has been vindicated. The cab is older than me. In fact, older than me and the driver combined (which is saying nothing since he is but a boy). This boy at the wheel of an ancient white Ambassador has yet to be bothered by the complexity of a multi-blade Gillette razor; he is blissfully ignorant of a contour-hugging shave; he
has some years to go before truly appreciating ‘the best a man can get’. Having said that he has freakishly hairy arms. Hirsute arms and a baby-smooth face: my first close-quarter encounter with a man of Kerala.

The Ambassador spirits its way through the traffic. That’s the thing about a country as deeply spiritual and religious as India, there is a strong investment in fate. It is their constant daily beacon through this life, as it has been through past lives and future lives. This unstinting belief in the Kismet Code by extrapolation surpasses any requirement for other codes, particularly the Highway Code. They drive like nutters. They seem to believe, quite seriously, that if fate dictates your time is up, then your time is well and truly up. Bad driving per se will not attract death; only the eternally pre-written event of your death will lead to your death. This renders lane discipline meaningless.

They laugh in the face of oncoming traffic, coming on from every side and angle; people, elephants, carts, bicycles, oxen, buses, children, goats, cars, lorries and a white Ambassador taxi all exchange space in the potential explosion of metal on flesh. The one thing about north and central India is that the cow is sacred. In the hierarchy of Indian highway management the bigger you are, the more right of way you possess; unless you are a cow, in which case you trump even the largest of military vehicles. This however does not apply in the south. There are more Christians than Hindus here and so the sacredness of the cow does not apply. And while the pandemonium of the north and centre is bizarrely regulated and calmed by random bovine acts, there is not this freakish cow-based control on Keralan and Southern Indian traffic.

Having reignited my own belief in the Almighty, based on the age-old premise that an inability to beat the belief system is
reason to join the belief system, we weave and brake and hoot and horn and eventually make our way into Port Cochin.

The Chinese Fishing Nest turns out to be Nets. The vagaries of Indian–English road signs. But, Nets Shmets, I have come here to eat. Cochin is the centre of Kerala’s tourist trade, the gateway to the lush and verdant backwaters or, as I have planned, further south to the sea resort of Kovalam. Given its prominence on the Arabian Sea, Cochin has become a conduit for commerce throughout India and has a multi-faceted and somewhat chequered colonial history. The Portuguese first visited in the fifteen hundreds, closely followed by the Dutch and British. It boasts India’s first church and also a synagogue. Wandering around I discover a restaurant called Menora, with the image of a Menora, rather aptly, painted on its doorway. I rather excitedly enter assuming they would offer me fusion Indian–Jewish cuisine. But alas, it is but a ruse to pull tourists in. I leave empty of stomach. I wander around the small garden square by St Francis Church and up to the children’s park. Daytime is considering its position as evening suggests resignation, and families have gathered around the pretty park, the noise of the ice cream vendor’s generator sporadically punctuated with the laughter of children. Here I find a smart little terraced restaurant a hop, skip and a jump from the sea front.

There seem few more picturesque places to start such a journey as mine. India is a country of great and varied beauty; I suppose it’s a beauty I have always taken for granted and perhaps a beauty I have not always readily seen. Friends of mine, white friends, would come back from a few weeks or months in India and regale me with stories of stone-carved temples and white-sand beaches and mystic men with flowing beards. They would talk of the stunning natural beauty, the
wild jungles and amazing architecture. I didn’t recognise the India they spoke of. If they had chatted about the dusty street in the Punjab where my grandfather’s house was, or the utter pandemonium of trying to get to the Golden Temple on a Sunday to pray, or having to use squat toilets while enduring a bowel-thinningly bad dose of diarrhoea, then perhaps I could have engaged with them. It felt like the beautiful India, the mystical and magical India had always belonged to someone else. Until now. Now, at last I might be able to experience that place for myself.

I settle myself at a terrace table with a front-seat view of a descending Cochin dusk: magical and mystical. Unlike the restaurant’s staff who take ten minutes to be alerted of my presence as the lone customer in the place, and a further five to bestow a menu upon me. Soon after receiving the menu I am joined by another two diners, swelling the custom base to a modest three mouths. They are a couple from Sheffield called Sarah and Paul. They are three weeks into their month-long Indian escapade, which itself is a quarter of their four-month South-east Asian extravaganza. They have both finished their first degrees; she is returning to read Law – I try my best to dissuade her – Paul has completed a degree in marketing but isn’t sure what he wants to do. Irony of all ironies: the marketing department of a university doesn’t market a career in its own subject with any amount of success. I am glad of some British company, yet being with Paul and Sarah I feel like a tourist. Which I am. I’m struggling at this point to know quite how to feel or how to act. I always dislike British Indians who go to India and act like they’re white tourists, speaking English loudly and slowly. They seem to lack any empathy or indeed humility. I’m worried that I might come over like this. Yet, I realise that I am effectively a tourist; I’m from Glasgow.