Indian Takeaway (5 page)

My waiter comes and I have a thirst on for beer. Cold beer. But this is India. Nothing is straightforward. They can’t serve beer until ‘later on’. ‘Later on’ is a phrase I am to hear lots of this evening, but more of that ‘later on’. Paul sidles over, his empty rucksack on his back and kindly offers to hunt down and bring back beers. I give him a hundred rupees and bid him a swift and safe return. Meanwhile the waiter comes to take my order. There is only one thing I would be eating in this part of India, a dish rarely seen outside the non-Christian south. Pork vindaloo. Given the 120 million Muslims in India, as a sign of secular respect pork is very rarely served in any region where there is a discernible Muslim presence. But the south is so heavily Christianised that this restriction does not apply. The waiter couldn’t be less enthralled by my order.

‘Ready later on,’ he says.

‘When?’ I enquire.

‘Twenty-five minutes,’ he proffers. ‘Pork still boiling.’ He fails to make eye contact.

Very precise, I think and with a reasonably accurate explanation for the delay. This must mean he knows what he is talking about. After all, I am here with time to kill. Twenty-five minutes would be a useful bridge to the next hour I have to spend before my fl ight to Trivandrum.

‘Fine,’ I say.

He glowers at me, as if somehow trying to summon an eloquent English language diatribe. Glower over, he skulks off. He would be back ‘later on’.

As I sit and wait I ponder my vindaloo. Vindaloo relates directly to India’s Portuguese heritage. As I’ve mentioned, it is said the Portuguese brought the chilli to India, and it is this very chilli that forms the basis of the vindaloo. The ‘vin’ prefix refers to vinegar and I suppose the ‘-daloo’ might be a version
of a translation pertaining to ‘of water’(I’m guessing that, though). What is so very interesting about the preparation of a Vindaloo is that unlike most other Indian curries, where the onions and spices are fried in tempered oil, the vindaloo grinds the chilli, vinegar and spices to form a paste or masala, which is then added to the fried or boiled meat. This paste reduces and cooks, cooks and reduces, and provides the most complex of astringent, chilli and spiced sauces. A true vindaloo is a million miles away from the unsubtle British version that is served in restaurants on a Friday night, only to be re-served to some pavement or toilet the following Saturday morning.

My Yorkshire hero Paul returns with a rucksack that now clinks with the music of beer. A big bottle of Kingfisher each, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper; not quite cold enough but hey, it is beer and it isn’t warm. The restaurant is not fully licensed so we are offered opaque coffee mugs to drink our beer out of: anything rather than betray the true nature of our beverage. My mug has images of American Football Stars on it, with the word ‘Stamina’ printed on the handle. Little do I realise the prophetic promise of my mug.

A further twenty-five minutes pass, over and above the initial negotiated twenty-five minutes. Still no pork vindaloo. The beer is warm now but thankfully almost finished. I look at the American Football mug. ‘Stamina’. I wish I had more. My surly moustachioed waiter shuffles back almost noiselessly to inform me that there is no pork vindaloo, because there is no pork. There has never been any pork. The restaurant is officially pork free. He has been lying to me, and so early in our relationship. He could have easily crossed the road to one of the many pork-abundant restaurants and passed the dish off as his own. But no. There is to be no spicy vinegar pig for me. I am too tired to
fight and his English is nowhere near robust enough for my multi-clausal reasoning and contingent arguing.

Instead I order squid in coconut. And a watery vegetable curry. It comes, I swear, I conquer. This is my first Indian meal in India. It doesn’t augur well for the journey ahead; it isn’t the most delicious of meals, but even so it makes me realise the vast chasm of flavour and taste that exists between our food in Britain and the food of India. If a palate is so very accustomed to spice-tingling sensations, sensations that occur even in the most average of curried squid dishes, it is difficult to promote the comforting warmth of mashed potato and stewed lamb. Sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter will inevitably seem bland when compared to a dish that requires eighteen spices and five flavourings. Even though my first meal on my quest has been a very average Indian meal, would this average meal be more flavourful than even the finest British food that I could conjure? It’s not rocket surgery to work it out. Even if I managed to pull off the finest shepherd’s pie ever to be created outside the western world, with the creamiest, richest mash atop the most delicately cooked and adequately seasoned lamb, replete in its own earthy and enriched sauce, I could still very easily fail. Miserably. I banish such thoughts and haul myself back to the airport. I have a plane to catch, some food to cook and myself to find. It’s time to start my journey in earnest. I have landed but I have not yet arrived.

Food is a massive part of my life. When I’m not cooking it, I’m eating it; and when I’m not eating it, I’m thinking about it. I plan my life around meals. I will schedule meetings in certain parts of London to enable me to slip into a specific café or
restaurant for a specific meal. I love food; and for its sins, food loves me. There is no one event, no one occurrence that I can look back on and use to explain the prominence of food in my life. When someone once asked me why I was so obsessed with food, I thought a moment, struggling to find a coherent answer. And then it dawned on me; it had only taken me thirty-eight years to realise that, as a child, the only aspect of being Indian which wider society seemed to celebrate was our food. To say Glasgow likes Indian food is inaccurate; it doesn’t like it, Glasgow loves it. And my experience of this love as a boy in Glasgow seemed to be true of life in every other British city. It’s bizarre when you think about the impact Indian food has had on British culture. The smallest town or village more often than not has a little Indian restaurant or take-away, often run by the only Indian family in the area. Even the racists who hated the fact that my parents’ generation had come to Britain still liked our food. It was the only aspect of being Indian that garnered any positivity.

Ironically, despite this plethora of restaurants around us, we never ate out much as kids. We were the offspring of immigrants. The single biggest expense in my parents’ house was school fees. Still, to this day, I have absolutely no idea how my parents ran a house, fed us, clothed us, took us on holiday and paid the mortgage. And paid the school fees for three boys. Randeep, more commonly known as Raj, is my elder brother. My younger brother, Sanjeev – Sanj, Sniff, Yich, Barbecue Fingers – has a myriad of nicknames and a heart of gold. And I was the tricky second child; the difficult one. The prima donna. They have a phrase for it in Hindi:
‘beech wala’
. It translates as ‘the one stuck in the middle’. And I did feel very much stuck in the middle. I was not bestowed with the gifts and love that a first-born son enjoys in an Indian house; neither was I the
cute, good-natured baby, the son that they really wanted to be a daughter. I was the misunderstood, James Dean-like presence in the progeny. I was also, admittedly, a right pain in the arse. I was intransigent and eloquent. There’s nothing worse than a snotty child with the linguistic dexterity to give oxygen to his irrationality.

None of my failings, innumerable though they were, changed the fact that my parents would marshal their very limited financial resources and were able somehow to make them go a long way. Both my parents worked: my mum in the shop; my father long and irregular hours as a teacher in a List D school (the D stood for Delinquents). It was a glorified borstal. His days and evenings, weekends and public holidays were spent whiling the hours away with rapists, armed robbers and murderers, all of whom shared one single defining quality: they were under the age of eighteen.

And yet, even though we didn’t cuddle up in the lap of luxury I never felt that I went without. We had what we needed. And what we didn’t need, thanks to the fiendishly fiscally astute way my mother planned weekly meals, was anything more than one night of dining out a year. So that’s what we got. A little tandoori restaurant in Elmbank Street in the heart of Glasgow, the same street on which years later I would meet the woman who would become my wife. The name of the place escapes me. Glasgow in the seventies was only just starting its love affair with Indian food, a love affair that would blossom and burgeon into a full-blown, lifelong romance. And it all seemed to start at this anonymous little place just off Sauchiehall Street.

We would never have gone out to eat food that Mum could have made at home. That would have been pointless. Why pay over the odds for home food? But Mum didn’t have a tandoor and no matter how good her spicy yoghurt mix, no matter
how well she balanced the chilli and the lemon, no matter how infused her chicken became, it never ever tasted like it had come out of a clay oven.

So we went to this little place and gorged on tandoori food. I remember it being delicious and my father being very excited about it. I didn’t quite understand why he was so happy eating red chicken; it was only years later that I fully comprehended how much my dad missed the food of the Punjab, the food of his home. We ate there every year on my dad’s birthday for a few years until the place burnt down. Perhaps the victim of over-eager cooking.

Sauchiehall Street was very much in my mind as I arrived in Trivandrum late at night. It’s another twenty-minute cab ride from the airport to the hotel in Kovalam. The contents of my mind could not have jarred more dramatically with the scenery around me as I walked across the runway to the terminal building. I was entering the tropical heat of southern India with its palm trees and sand, while in my mind I saw the postcards of palm trees and sand behind the bar of that small restaurant in Elmbank Street. The plane had started its journey in Bangalore, a place I would be visiting at some point soon, and had stopped at Cochin to fill up with more passengers all heading for the final stop, Trivandrum. Even though night was upon us, the temperature was only one notch below oppressive. I wonder how one deals with such heat all day and all night long?

This was the beginning of my quest. Once my journey started, I would have to give myself over to the complete travelling experience. I would have to make do with whatever mode of transport, whatever accommodation and whatever
people were available. I realised that this was the last moment I had total control. I could parachute myself into deepest darkest India to test my culinary resolve in the most unforgiving of circumstances, the most intense of arenas: a small rural village a dirt-track away from western civilisation where ancient Indian cooking traditions have developed over millennia; a verdant cove of Indianness, untouched, unspoilt, unaccustomed to the strange vagaries of the western palate. I could have done that. Or I could have booked myself into a glorious five star Taj health and wellness spa. Guess what I did …

It seemed strange all those years later to be in the Taj Green Cove, a five-star hotel in India, when little of my childhood was spent anywhere but at home. And this hotel was a rather extreme version of opulence. Set in acres of tropical forest the accommodation was a series of chalets, nonchalantly scattered over the side of a small hill, overlooking the azure blue Arabian Sea below. This was one of those places where one forgets one is in India and is sure to have entered paradise. Perhaps this was the new India, the international globe-trotting hedonists’ India?

One of the main reasons I came to this hotel was because they offered a
Sadhya
meal, a ‘Big Feast’. Nothing too subtle in that translation. It originally offered sixty-four courses of vegetarian food, eight varieties of eight different curries. Sixty-four. And then a further eight desserts. Nice. Traditionally served on a banana leaf, dishes are served with almost mathematical precision, each area of the leaf having a designated curry type. One is meant to sit cross-legged on the floor to eat. As the maître d’ and head waiter and sommelier accompanied me to my table, I felt a little self-conscious at the thought of my oversized arse having to somehow negotiate its way floorward. Luckily the hotel had dispensed with that requirement of the
Sadhya
meal and I allowed the waiter to lay my crisp, white linen napkin across my lap. I appeared to be the only diner in the beautifully appointed dark-wood dining room. The smell of jasmine drifted on the air.