Jon Favreau’s engaging (if occasionally slow-moving) new film Chef – about a well-regarded restaurant chef who decides to go back to basics after getting a thumbs down from a leading food critic – reminded me of a quote from Alfred Hitchcock’s conversations with Francois Truffaut. In what can be read as a variant on the termite art-elephant art discussion, Hitchcock says of Ingrid Bergman:
You see, she only wanted to appear in masterpieces. How on earth can anyone know whether a picture is going to turn out to be a masterpiece or not? When she was pleased with a picture she’d just finished, she would think ‘What can I do after this one?’ Except for Joan of Arc, she could never conceive of anything that was grand enough; that’s very foolish!
The desire to do something big and, when that’s successful, to go on to something else even bigger is like the little boy who’s blowing up a balloon and all of a sudden it goes Boom right in his face […] In those days I used to tell Bergman, ‘Go out and play a secretary. It might turn out to be a big picture about a little secretary.’ But no! She’s got to play the greatest woman in history, Joan of Arc.
I’m not saying this is an exact analogy for what happens to Chef Carl Casper in Chef: for one thing, Carl’s troubles begin not because of his own decisions but because his boss Riva orders him to play it safe, to serve the restaurant “classics” when the Eminent Critic comes a-dining. (Is Riva a version of big-studio producers telling Ingrid she is now such a big star that she must only do “prestige projects”?) But we also see that Carl wants to do larger-than-life things. Though he is a likable guy, not the stereotype of an arrogant, snooty achiever, success is an albatross around his neck, and he doesn’t realise that he may have reached the top of a personal plateau. At this point in the film it’s hard to imagine him 
doing something as plebian as manning a food truck, serving Cuban sandwiches and yucca fries (the very definition of a basic lunch) to working-class people. But when backed against the wall, this is exactly what he does. It becomes a journey of self-discovery, as well as a chance to bond with the son whom he never spent much time with earlier, because he was too busy chasing his highbrow creative aspirations.
And Carl is presented to us as a creative person. He speaks the language of the frustrated, self-questioning artist (“I don’t know if I have anything to say”), he seeks approval obsessively, as in one tragic-comic scene where his friends are sampling one of his preparations and he repeatedly asks “Is it good?” The refrain becomes so pronounced, so desperate, and yet so self-contained that one realises no answer will be good enough for Carl. His friends might honestly think that what he has just served them is the best thing they have ever tasted, they might do everything in their powers to persuade him of this, but once the seed of self-doubt has been planted this man can no longer trust what the people around him say.
Which means there is only one way out for him. He must travel back into the past, into a less self-conscious time when he could enjoy what he was doing without worrying too much about fame or affirmation. (He must learn to become a termite artist again.) So Carl goes to Miami, the place where he got his start in the profession, where his son was born, where he and his ex-wife spent happier times, where he was presumably less stressed, more 
relaxed. And here he learns (or remembers) that even the lowly Cuban sandwich can, like anything else, be done indifferently or done brilliantly – it can be made with the passion, commitment and attention to detail that can catch the eye of even a highbrow food critic who spends most of his time around haute cuisine. What the “little secretary” in a big film is to Saint Joan in an average film, Carl’s lovingly created street food is to the assembly-line lava cake that brought him so much grief.
P.S. Chef isn’t “just” about food, or art – it is also about the scarier aspects of the connectedness of modern life; about being a public figure in a world of social media and constant opinion-generation, and how difficult it can be to maintain one’s composure and dignity in such a world. Twitter, selfies, instantly created and uploaded videos…these are all vital ingredients of this film, and the technology-unsavvy Carl bears the brunt of all of them at some point or the other. But the script doesn’t take the easy way out by only bemoaning the negative aspects of these things. They also become an empowering tool for the chef; by the end, they have helped him step out of his ivory tower and reach out to a new “audience”, much like authors forced into self-promotion in the internet age.
Sameer Sharma’s charming film Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana might be described as a love letter to life in rural Punjab (or a romanticised version of rural Punjab) but it begins in London with a montage of stereotypical images: the London Eye, Westminster Palace, a nightclub populated by gawking Asian men and white seductresses. Punjabi lads alternate between their own language, which they are clearly more comfortable with, and the facile slang they have learnt to speak (“It’s my dream, bro!”). Chinese men named Chang go “Beeyootiful” at the dancing girls. Then the cocky Omi Khurana (Kunal Kapoor) falls on the wrong side of a mean gangster, also of Punjabi origin, and is promptly packed back to India so he can collect the money to pay back a hefty loan.
All this happens in the first five minutes. Post-credits, the gloom of the nightclub – along with the edgy fusion music we were hearing all this while – gives way to the bright, sunny colours of the Punjab countryside, presented here as a vista of lovely fields, dotted with family-run dhabas. The visual change from the London sequence to the rural India one is startling, but what hasn’t yet changed is Omi’s watchful, knowing expression, his face permanently on the brink of a triumphant grin – it’s a pointer to the sort of life he has probably been leading all these years, surviving by his wits and smooth charm, sponging off the easily deceived.
This is clearly what he intends to do when he returns to the native village he had “escaped” 10 years earlier. Learning that his “daarji” (grandfather) is in hospital, he makes a perfunctory dismayed sound and the news-bearer is quick to assure him that the old man is alive and will be home soon; but we can tell that what really disturbs Omi is the realisation that this might make it more difficult for him to get the money he needs. He’s thinking of the “pound ka pedh” (tree of money) that is presumably growing here. But with no such pedh in sight, he finds himself staying on for longer than expected, and slowly becoming involved with the lives of the people he once knew, including Harman (Huma Qureshi), a resourceful doctor who is now engaged to his cousin Jeet. And he learns that his family is not so well off: the grandfather is now senile and the family dhaba had to be closed years ago.
This is of course a version of the prodigal-son story; in a way the whole film is a movement towards erasing Omi’s self-satisfied smile and teaching him about responsibility by reintegrating him into family and community life. And Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana sets out to do this with a determinedly feel-good tone and a highly idealised view of pastoral life. Once you accept this, it becomes difficult to nitpick too much about the film’s unwillingness to engage with the less savoury aspects of small-town existence. In Harman’s mindfulness about not letting Omi be seen too near her house when he drops her home late at night, one gets a sense of how the dictates of tradition might work even on an educated young woman leading a fairly “modern” and independent life. But showcasing such things is not the film's main purpose, and so they are glossed over.
What is constantly underlined is the merit in being rooted, being part of a benevolent family (and it is therefore a useful plot conceit that despite having survived reasonably well in London for a decade, Omi has absolutely no roots there – one gets no sense that he has left anything of value behind). Even a metrosexual young thug who travels to India to threaten Omi and remind him that time is running out then remarks that he will stay on for a while and head to his own village: “Bebe ki bahut yaad aa rahi hai.” (“I’m missing my mother.”) There are jovial nods to the uninhibited bonhomie of Punjabi families, as in a scene where a middle-aged woman blithely discusses men’s “kachcha” sizes and types, even as most of the household drones buzz around her. There are dialogues such as “Heat of the emotion mein keh diya” and sight gags like an agarbatti tray being waved in front of “Hunk” underwear packs in a shop; the flashbacks to past events in the village – including Omi’s youth – are in soft-focus, as if yearning for a more innocent time when the boy might yet have taken the “right” path.
Given this generally upbeat and nostalgic tone, there is never any danger of something really unpleasant happening to these people. The
Khurana family has a dysfunctional side and squabbles a bit, but you know that everyone is good at heart and that all loose ends will
ultimately be tied up – even if it means the ready acceptance of a widow
with a young child as their bahu, in lieu of a much more socially
desirable match. In one of the story’s sub-plots, we are initially led to expect that the dreamy-eyed, effeminate Jeet – reluctant to tie the knot – will turn out to be homosexual (something that might really have shaken this community up), but a very different revelation is made (in a wacky but also slightly cringe-inducing scene that toys with the notion that the gayest thing a red-blooded Punjabi man can do is to sing a Bangla love song). And the story ends on the rosy view that you can take a man out of Punjab and turn him into a gangster, but you can't take the colourful good-spiritedness of Punjab out of the man. All this adds up to an allegory about the all-conquering strength of family bonds and basic human decency. Even if you don't have complete faith in these things, you might well buy into the film's take on them.
****
Much of the pre-release publicity has centred on Luv Shuv being a “food film”; the dish mentioned in the title is the piece de resistance of daarji’s days as a leading dhaba-owner. As the narrative progresses, lovingly prepared home food becomes a metaphor for deepening relationships (as a corollary to this, consider an earlier line about the merits of communal flatulence: “Apnon ke saamne gas chhodne se pyaar badhta hai”) and the “lost” recipe of Chicken Khurana seems to stand for the loosening of ties in a world where youngsters are eager to get out and start anew somewhere else. During a brief montage, shot in the faux-documentary style of people speaking directly into the camera, Omi asks a number of people about their Chicken Khurana memories, and the variety of responses include one by a married couple whose “proposal” happened over the dish, and someone else who remarks that daarji used to put his own mitthaas (sweetness) into his cooking.
Omi and Harman (whose tentative relationship, very nicely
played and paced, balances out some of the cutesiness and tomfoolery) bond over food too, as she helps him negotiate the basics of cooking, including cutting onions and tomatoes. This may beg the question: how did he survive those 10 years in London? By munching on canapés in nightclubs? But why be churlish and dwell on such comparatively irrelevant plot details?
Heartbreaking news came to me as I stood at the Nirula’s counter earlier this afternoon, and its bearer was a man with a large grin on his face.
Nirula’s has discontinued its mutton sausage pizza.
“Why?” I asked, swaying on my feet. To expand the “Indian” menu, replied the grinner. (“Try our new keema-do-pyaaza pizza, it’s very good.”)
I suddenly feel very old. Just a few days ago I was reminiscing with an old school-friend, Nakul, over lunch (at the Chi Kitchen & Bar, incidentally – one of my favourite restaurants), and I told him that he was central to my first ever memory of a proper Nirula’s meal. A group of us were at the Chanakyapuri branch sometime in the early 80s at a birthday party when I heard Nakul telling the waiter:
“One cheese sausage pizza, please.”
Each syllable was clearly enunciated; even at age 7 he had a deep and powerful voice, seemingly tailor-made for elocution classes or annual school debates. Just as important, he spoke with the confidence of a kid who had eaten at Nirula’s many times before and knew exactly what he wanted to order.
It was my introduction to the idea that things like pizzas could exist outside of Archie comics – that they could be a part of my world too. So I ordered the same thing, trying my best to sound like a veteran, and within weeks the simple, chewy Nirula’s sausage pizza went from being something daunting and unfamiliar to being the best sort of comfort food. In later years it would become peripheral, as I got acquainted with more sophisticated pizzas at more sophisticated restaurants, but it was always just a phone call away. Even my London-based cousin, visiting last year, said it reminded him of his childhood, though he had never spent more than a couple of weeks in India as a child.
And now, it’s gone. Because Nirula’s is suddenly “Desilicious”.
I can be just as desi in my eating tastes as the next guy, but why was this necessary? What next, hot chocolate fudge with a kulfi base?
[Another food-related nostalgia rant here]
Spotted in Rishikesh this weekend, the Dr Burger restaurant:
Click to enlarge. In case you still can't read the text underneath the topmost "Dr Burger", it says "Be Happy if U Feel Hungry".
Actually, just seeing this banner was enough to make me feel happy. It's strange on so many levels, especially in a town that's all-vegetarian. Does this restaurant cater only to doctors? Or do you require a doctor's services after consuming their food? Or do they serve burgers with doctors inside them? If so, were the doctors vegetarian? Best of all is the random little penguin figure at the bottom. Is it the restaurant's logo? If so, why? If not, why is it there?
People go to Rishikesh seeking answers, but I only find more questions.
[More Rishikesh pictures - from three years ago - here. And some perplexing signboards from Mussoorie here.]
A plug for gunpowder...the restaurant, that is. It’s been a while since I’ve come across an eating joint that’s as aptly named as this delightful little place in Hauz Khas Village: the food explodes in your mouth, and I mean that in the best possible way (mirchi-intolerants, desist).
Gunpowder: The Peninsular Kitchen is fast developing an intense following among south Delhi’s cultural set – artists, publishers, authors. I heard about it from four different people in the space of two days (hat tips to Mary Therese Kurkalang of the German Book Office and Chiki Sarkar of Random House India) and one danger is that it may soon have more customers than it can handle (even though it isn't easy to find and you have to walk up three flights of stairs). Much like the Goan eatery Bernardo’s, which sadly moved from C R Park to Gurgaon a couple of years ago, Gunpowder is a small place, run by two people with a little help from friends and volunteers; already the owner Satish Warrier is requesting people to call up and make reservations before dropping in for dinner.
We’ve only been once so far (technically, twice: the first time we didn’t have cash, they didn’t have a card machine and there wasn’t an ATM close enough) but plan to go again very soon. We had pork in Coorg spices (a generous quantity - enough for two people with moderate appetites), the fluffiest Malabar parottas I’ve ever laid teeth on, and Andhra “meen” fish curry with steamed rice. It was all spectacularly hot and spectacularly good. The pepper chicken and beerkai mutton are next on my list, and their daal sounds promising too. The menu is small – and handwritten, in a register – but that isn’t a problem; we aren’t going to tire of this food anytime soon.
Check the Facebook page for details and updates (and dire warnings about lack of kitchen help).
A US-based friend was in town for a couple of weeks recently. Since such occasions are usually a pretext for us to nosedive into our shared past, we made a trip to the Defence Colony Nirula's where we had lost our pizza-and-burger virginity more than 20 years ago (having previously encountered these mythical items only in Archie comics). The food was as good as it had always been, but we were unprepared for how tidy the restaurant had become. The chairs and tables were gleaming, the floor wasn’t splattered with tomato sauce and crumbs, the service was fast and there was plenty of seating room even though it was a Saturday afternoon. Despite the comfort food, this sterile place seemed worlds removed from the favourite haunt of our childhood.
Anshul was disappointed. He'd come home after a long time expecting to see and experience things that reminded him of his school days. Instead people have been dragging him to see the new malls in Saket and Vasant Kunj – indistinguishable from their counterparts in American cities – and now even good old Nirula's had let him down. So I could understand his excitement when he finally had an experience that was uniquely, unquestionably Indian. "Dude!" he yelled into the phone one morning, "You'll never believe this. Do you know what the Delhi Police uses for breathalysers when they want to test drunken drivers?"
He had been driving home late the previous night when his car was stopped by a policeman who threw him a probing look, asked him to step outside and then handed him – okay, you're out of guesses – an empty paper cone, the interiors of which were slightly moistened. Whether the cone was a leftover from a chana jor garam stall or had been quickly fashioned on the spot is unclear, but Anshul was asked to exhale into it. "The whole thing was so bizarre," he said, "that I didn't even realise what was going on until the guy took a few deep sniffs from the cone himself, after I had breathed into it. That’s when I realised he was checking for alcoholic fumes."
The scientific efficacy of this method of breath-testing will probably never be determined, but Anshul was quite impressed when the policeman waved him on: apparently he had had a couple of small drinks earlier that evening but was confident – from previous experience in these matters – that he hadn't exceeded the legal limit permissible in the US. “It only proves once again that western technology is no match for homespun Indian wisdom,” he thought to himself patriotically, getting back into the car. But as he drove away he noticed a number of other cones lying about the road, and the policeman appeared to be swaying on his feet.
Despite many opportunities I’ve mostly shied away from doing food reviews, the chief reason being that I like to be able to simply enjoy a good meal without having to analyse or make mental notes about it (it’s bad enough that reading books and watching films is no longer as relaxed as it used to be). But recently I did a restaurant review for Time Out magazine. The place was the Spice Market, situated behind the Select mall in Saket; to reach it by car, you have to negotiate a rough and bumpy road alongside the Marriott hotel. It’s a homely restaurant that makes a spirited if obvious effort to live up to its name. Sacks of spices line its interiors, there are red chillies and coriander seeds (or convincing facsimiles of red chillies and coriander seeds) in the decorative glass bowls on the tables, and even the artwork and photos on the walls have a spice theme. There is a nouveau-Indian cuisine feel about the extensive menu, which includes pungent dishes from around the country.
For starters, we ordered the intriguingly named ganne ka kebab and the dal pakodi. The former turned out to be flavourful chicken seekhs wrapped around sugarcane sticks; it’s a nice idea, and if you’re willing to forgo mundane rules of etiquette and chew hard and noisily on a cane stick at a restaurant table, the warm juice nicely offsets the dryness of the meat. The dal pakodi – compact little balls filled with moong daal – passed muster, though they were a little too tough for my taste. We washed this down with rose lassi – rich, creamy, very sweet – and a pungent and invigorating strawberry cinnamon mojito, which my wife insisted was the highlight of the meal.
Next, we ordered a Parsi chicken biryani main course: I'm not sure there was anything notably Parsi about the preparation, but the dish was greatly enhanced by the accompanying Burani raita, which had a garlic base and a distinct, pleasing tinge of mustard. The big disappointment though was the boatman’s prawn curry, which is listed on the “chef’s special” page on the menu – it was an unremarkable onion-and-tomato curry, not too different from standard dhaba fare and soaked much too generously in oil. Definitely didn’t justify the price (Rs 625). Since we already had a rice dish at hand, we opted to have the curry with tandoori phulka, soft and warm like a homemade chapati.
The food had been more than filling, especially for a summer afternoon, but in journalistic interests we ploughed on. Our dessert choices were a very interesting blackcurrant phirni and a sampler that conveniently provided miniature versions of five items on the dessert menu, including a gulab jamun dunked in chocolate sauce and a mango shrikand. It was a decent way to wrap up the meal, even though we weren’t especially hungry at this point.
Spice Market tries hard and the service is polite, efficient and well-informed, but based on our experience I wouldn’t say the food is good value for money. However, one has to make allowances for the limitations of the food-review format (we visited anonymously and could only order a meal for two - couldn't sample a variety of dishes) and it probably isn’t fair to judge the place on a single visit. There’s a lot of variety on the menu - from Rajasthani laal maas to Goan fish curry to Bengali kosha mangsho - though this can also be indicative of trying to cater to too many different tastes and not doing full justice to any of them. On the whole, I’d say it’s a pleasant place to visit if you’re in the mood for appetizers and a couple of cool drinks rather than a full-fledged meal. Or if you’re looking to escape the hurly-burly of the Select mall, which has its giant behind turned disdainfully to the restaurant.
Meal for two (including a non-alcoholic drink, starter, main course and dessert each): Rs 3,000. 12 noon till midnight. Liquor license awaited. For reservations, call 9958453636.
[Some earlier food-related posts here, here and here]
It’s not often that I’m struck dumb in a restaurant, but this happened at the Smoke House Grill in Greater Kailash a few days go. We had been warned by food-journo colleagues that the place is basically a bar that makes a very half-hearted effort at serving meals, but we were meeting friends on a short time-frame and our preferred haunt in the complex (Mainland China) had a long waiting queue, so we plodded across to Smoke House instead.
There were four of us. Since we weren’t hugely keen on the appetizers, we decided to order two soups and split them. All went well up to the moment we were placing the order and the phrase “1 into 2” was used. At this, the waiter smiled sadly and shook his head.
“Sorry sir,” he said, “Our soup portion is too small and it cannot be divided further.”
Coming from a member of the serving staff at a high-profile restaurant, this was a startling proclamation, but we recovered our poise. “Never mind how small it is,” said my wife, “We’ll make do. Just bring it in two bowls.”
“Ma’am, no!” he replied, with greater conviction, and the overall demeanor of a man who has fought these battles before and emerged triumphant each time, “It is very, very small. We don’t have bowls that are small enough.”
After he left we sat about muttering at each other, marveling at this conundrum of the indivisible soup. He was probably exaggerating, we decided, or maybe he was in a bad mood and taking it out on us; or this was a management ploy to get diners to order extra dishes (if so, we had foiled it by sticking to our original order). At any rate, the portions couldn’t be THAT small – we figured we could still pass the bowls around the table. But then the soup arrived and it turned out that the waiter knew his beat.
It was served in one of the most impressively designed pieces of crockery I have seen. Imagine a largish dinner plate – 14 or so inches in diameter – with a tiny bit in the centre hollowed out to make a circular cavity that can accommodate around 40 ml of liquid. Into this hollow was poured the soup, very carefully, so that not a drop would spill out onto the rest of the plate. One of the soups was tomato and it must in fairness be said that it was aesthetically pleasing: a blob of orange surrounded by acres and acres of white plate – like a fried egg with an exceptionally small yolk. But they should have given us a complementary magnifying glass.
Providing a visual break was a tiny piece of maida floating despondently in the middle of the thin, translucent liquid. They called this a dimsum, but that’s a bit like calling Frodo Baggins the Great Khali. We suspect that the only reason the chefs allowed this food item to be pried from their grasp was that it would displace the volume of the liquid and raise the soup level, thus giving the impression that it was three spoonfuls instead of two.
“You didn’t have to bother with the big plate,” one of my friends called out, “You could have served the soup in a ladle instead.” The waiter simply grinned and walked away – it was obvious that this wasn't the first time he was hearing this joke.
But the restaurant did make amends for the small soup in the end – the bill was a large one.
P.S. While on food, a recommendation for Delhiites interested in Malaysian cuisine. There’s this very promising new place called Kayalan (website here) – it’s based in Neb Sarai in extreme south Delhi but it does home-delivery far and wide (even up to central Delhi as far as I know). I’ve tried their Nasi Goreng (which is a staple order for me at an Oriental restaurant), Otak Otak (steamed fish fillet in banana leaves) and marinated Pandan chicken, and all of it has been very good. Abhilasha, who ordered from there with her office crowd a few days ago (the ball-and-chain routine has a few side-advantages!), also recommends the Char Kway Teow, which is a stir-fried preparation of rice noodles with prawn or crab. You’ll find the details on the Menu section of the website.
Had an even better time in Bombay than I did last year – spent more time getting to know south Bombay really well, imagining how charming the place must have been like decades ago when my mom and her family lived there (more on the nostalgia angle in this post). After a few last-minute uncertainties, Abhilasha managed to come along too, which was good. We walked a lot – from the Radio Club, where we were staying, to the Colaba Causeway, to Kala Ghoda and around Churchgate. Visited the Haji Ali shrine too. Met old and new friends including Amit, Chandrahas, Sonia, Peter, Rahul, Soumik, Praba and Paromita.
The two panels I was on went off as well as could be expected, given my fear of these things, and the David Sassoon Library garden was a friendly setting. The first panel, on online writing, was enlivened by Time Out editor Naresh Fernandes’s snarky and ungenerous views about blogs, especially the ones that “amount merely to public diaries”. Naturally, this meant lots of tiresome generalisation. Naresh did sweetly admit that he liked a couple of blogs, including mine, but he made the all-too-easy mistake of referring to my blog as simply an extension of my journalism. Whereupon I pointed out that the posts that are extensions of the journalism are usually more indepth and more personally satisfying than the versions that appear in print (a reflection on the many limitations of mainstream media in India – inadequate word-counts for reviews, incompetent sub-editors, etc) and that I’m more proprietorial about them than most of the stuff I’ve written for official publication. Also, that I do write “personal diary posts” as well; wonder what he’ll think of this one, for instance!
Technically speaking, I was the “moderator” of the second panel, about banned books, but my task was made very easy by my fellow panelists. Manjula Padmanabhan, whose dark and subversive writings I’ve long admired (and who included me in this Suki comic strip a couple of years ago), wrote a short script that enabled us to begin things on a strong note. Devangshu Datta, Amit and Chandrahas managed the rest, with erudite views on a number of topics (including the availability of gay porn at the Ahmedabad railway station, which DD was surprisingly knowledgeable about).
Most importantly, food tourism happened. Here’s the list:
- Mahesh Lunch Home and the revolving restaurant Pearl of the Orient, repeated from last year. Discovered sumptuous crab claws at the latter (the name is misleading; the meat of the dish is what I assume to be the crustacean’s forearm or calf region, or maybe the biceps – though given the size of each chunk, it would have had to be the sumo-wrestling champion of crabs).
- At one point we were greedy enough to have a 12 PM brunch at Café Leopold (yes yes, the Shantaram one) on the Colaba Causeway, only an hour or so before meeting someone for lunch. Abhi had Akuri, the Parsi preparation of scrambled eggs, while I settled for something so boring that I’m embarrassed to mention it here.
- Mutton dhansak at one of the Kala Ghoda stalls. This was – ahem – at 7 PM, a couple of hours before a lavish dinner at a maasi’s house: home-made tandoori pomfret and around eight other superb dishes, including a versatile salad made by Dayal uncle, who is a true artist in the kitchen and will make us many fine meals in the future (and who is hopefully reading this post).
- Excellent beef steak-and-fried egg sandwich at Café Churchill. Perfectly done – none of the ingredients was excessive relative to the others – and just the right size. And the thing was priced at just Rs 110! In a Delhi café (say, The Big Chill), something of comparable quality would have been Rs 200 at the very least. (In general, food prices were to die for. I also can’t believe that it’s possible to take a cab a short distance and pay a fare of Rs 13. I’m assuming that all this talk about Mumbai being expensive to live in is entirely because of the rents.)
- The best fish-and-chips I’ve ever had – light, tender, not too strong – at the Cricket Club of India. With an outstanding Orange Nougat for dessert.
- But the pick of the foodie experiences was probably our lunchtime visit to the Irani café Britannia, which has been around since the mid-1920s and is among the few surviving Irani joints in the city. It’s a ramshackle sort of place to look at (the “High Class Restaurant” written in fading letters on an old and rusty signboard seemed ironical when we first saw it) and we were told it runs on the whimsies of its octogenarian owner – opening for only a few hours at lunchtime, staying closed on Sundays, and if two people show up early when they’ve booked a table for four, they might not be allowed to sit down until the others arrive. Despite this, it has a huge and loyal clientele, and the food made it easy to see why. We had two of the staple Irani dishes – Sali boti, which is mutton topped with lots of potato straws and best had with a warm, soft roti, and the berry pulao, both delicious. (Couldn’t figure out the provenance of the little berries sprinkled on the rice, but were told later that they are still specially imported from Iran.) I’m not a big fan of caramel custards, but experts in this field claim that the ones served here are incomparable.
Eighty-five-year-old Boman Kohinoor still takes every order himself, being nervous about entrusting this delicate task to anyone else, even the younger family members who also work here. It was fascinating to see him doing the rounds. When he took our orders, every sentence was preceded by a businesslike “Now!” or “Listen!” When we ordered the fizzy Pallonji raspberry drink instead of the fresh lime water he had suggested, he gave us a faux-suspicious look. “You guys Parsi or what?!” he croaked, “Parsi means raspberry.” After he was finished, he beamed round at us all, called us “good girls” and “good boys” (one of my uncles is over 60) and tottered off to the next table.
One last thing that has to be mentioned, because it was a motif of the trip and because I’m still shaking my head about it: this utterly bizarre rumour spread by shivering Mumbaiites that their city is in the throes of winter. They should have been in Delhi on the night of February 1 when my brother-in-law’s wedding ceremony was held outdoors and guests were dropping like Bedouin in Greenland. People, I accept that your city (the southern tip of it anyway) is the greatest in the world, but your definition of cold weather merits you the appellation “Wuss”. And no, this isn’t Delhi-chauvinism. The moment we stepped out of the plane at the Indira Gandhi airport, I commenced a sneezing fit that still hasn’t fully ended. These things can't be faked. (The idea that Mumbai had a meaningful winter this year will be debunked at greater length in a subsequent post.)
P.S. Turns out even sophisticated cities have unintentionally funny signboards. Like this one:
Scene: an outlet of a recently opened coffee chain in a plush new Noida mall. A cosy place, not more than 20x20 ft, with seven tables (only two of them occupied), all in full view of the counter. Behind the counter stand 5-6 people, which means there are more employees than customers at present, and everyone can clearly see everyone else. The staff seems indolent, uninterested, and resentful of their supervisor – an intense young man with a very short fuse, who frequently swears and sarcastically says things like, “MAY I KNOW what you are doing please?!!”. (No doubt he also has half an MBA degree and a perfunctory acquaintance with business management textbooks.) Abhilasha and I walk in, hoping for a quick coffee and sandwich before resuming our mall-tour.
At the counter
Jai: One cappuccino and a toasted cheese sandwich please.
(Short-fuse supervisor looks flintily at me through his spectacles, a psychotic love-child of Lord Emsworth’s secretary Rupert Baxter and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle)
J: Um, are you taking the order?
SFS: One moment please, sir! (Barks at subordinates, mutters under his breath. They look at him with sullen resentment. He stares back at them in a fixed way, like Robert De Niro about to go at a TV set with a baseball bat, then redirects his attention at me) Yes, okay, please be seated.
J: And can we get some water please?
SFS: Okay, okay, okay, okay, I’ll send it across.
Minutes pass and there's no water in sight. The wife and I are making gagging sounds, like slaves working on the Pyramids. I approach the counter and ask SFS if there’s a drinking fountain nearby.
SFS (nostrils flaring magnificently) You mean they STILL haven’t given you water?! (Screams instructions at minions, spraying spittle all over the counter)
A few seconds later a sullen young employee approaches our table, bangs down a large jug of water with things floating on the surface, glares at us and leaves. Several more minutes pass and throughout this time we are in full view of the employees; they can clearly see that we’re waiting for our order, yet no one seems desirous of making cappuccino.
Abhilasha: Most of them aren’t even doing anything, just staring.
J: Ooh look, that one is sniffing at the coffee vociferously before serving it at that table – maybe they give out a free sample of nose-hair with each mug.
I approach the counter meekly, asking for food and drink.
SFS (eyes bulging, looking like he’s going to have a heart attack) Sir, what was your order again?
I remind him. He hollers at his staff who look back at him, contemptuously amused; stray words like “valued customer” and “respect” can be heard in the tirade, and SFS now resembles the Vodafone dog.
SFS (forcing a smile): Sir, please be seated, I will personally hand-deliver your order.
Which he does, five minutes later, along with an additional cup of cappuccino (“our compliments, sir, sorry for the delay”). He also forces two members of our staff to apologise to us by sticking his fingers in the backs of their necks.
Abhilasha: Aren’t you having your coffee?
J: No, they almost certainly spat in it. I would have.
Welcome to Customer Service (and Staff Management) 2007.
P.S. No, I'm not averse to naming names: it was Costa Coffee at the First India Place mall. But we went there once more and things had slightly improved. Less spittle on the counter this time.
[Warning: schizophrenic post, probably confused and varying in tone – which can happen if you’re meeting a friend for lunch and a chat but also end up writing it out as an interview for a newspaper, and then blogging it at even greater length. I first met Amitava Kumar in 2004 when his book Husband of a Fanatic was published. In the last couple of years we’ve corresponded regularly on email and through our blogs, and would have caught up anyway when he visited Delhi a few days ago for the launch of Home Products. But Business Standard’s “Lunch with BS” section provided the opportunity to mix work with pleasure. This is a longer, more casual version of the piece that appeared in the paper today.]
“Let’s go to Karim’s,” Amitava Kumar suggested in his email when we were fixing up this lunch. “One or two greasy parathas and an oily rogan josh will be the proper cure for my jet-lag.” Unfortunately, when the day comes, we need to find a place closer to the guesthouse where he’s staying, so we opt for the Gulati restaurant in Pandara Road – not as iconic as Karim’s but distinguished enough, and more likely to be quiet and have empty tables. Besides, we can always put in a special request for extra oil in the food.
On the way to the restaurant, he asks me to stop the car so he can take photographs of some faded posters of wanted criminals and terrorists on a nearby wall. “I’m working on something about arrests and entrapment,” he says, “and I’m interested in the language used to describe terrorists, and how we are expected to recognise them – after all the 9/11 hijackers were anonymous in appearance, they didn’t look like stereotypes.” (We joke about the descriptions on the posters. “Wears shirt and pant and carries China pistol,” says one helpfully. So if you’re a terrorist and in the Golf Links area, wear shorts. And don’t carry a China pistol.)
Settling into the cosy north Indian family atmosphere of Gulati, we order a non-veg kebab platter, some yellow daal, and a half-portion of tandoori chicken – the last in honour of a passage in the book that Amitava had mailed me a few days earlier. He draws my attention to the song playing in the background, “Aage bhi jaane na tu” from the classic Waqt. “Does it occur to you that this music is quintessentially for a restaurant like this, with its associations of a woman in a green sari, singing in a ballroom…”
An established essayist, writer of non-fiction and Professor of English at Vassar College, NY, Amitava is in India for the launch of his first novel, Home Products. He likes channelling his small-town Bihari side when he talks, throwing in a juicy colloquial cuss word, for instance, in the middle of a serious discussion on post-colonial theory. At other times he speaks with a careful, almost exaggerated politeness, and it’s fun to watch the contrast between these two sides; to anticipate the shifts in tone. I take out my tape recorder (because you can’t eat kakori kebabs with one hand and take notes with the other) and he comments on journos who have an aversion to taking notes – “Mere bache mere paas laut ke aayenge aur unki shakalen bilkul alag hongi.” (“My own children, the sentences I have spoken, will come back to me with new faces. They won’t look like me.”)
A while later, as I start to respond to something he said, he picks up the tape recorder and turns the recording side towards me. It’s a quick, matter-of-fact gesture but it bespeaks a meticulousness that reminds me of one of the things I admire most about his non-fiction: the attention to detail, the level of engagement with things around him. In his essays and books this often takes the form of nuanced commentaries on the writing process, and careful analyses of what other writers are trying to do.
In the preface to his celebrated literary memoir Bombay-London-New York, Amitava wrote: “This book bears witness to my struggle to become a writer.” Today he is a well-known literary figure but one gets the sense that the struggle to write, to understand how to write, is an ongoing process for him. This theme finds echo in Home Products, the story of a journalist, Binod, trying to write a film script about a murdered poet, but exploring a number of other stories in the process.
Recounting a line by James Baldwin (“Every writer has only one story to tell”), Amitava says, “I’m convinced now that the only story I have to tell is the story of how to find the words to put down on the page, or how to tell your own story – the story of how you came to be. My idea is that at the end of Home Products, the reader should find that the book Binod was trying to write is this very one, the one the reader is holding.”
[If this sounds confusing, read some of Amitava’s articles here, especially this one.]
Another striking feature of his writing, also reflected in his personality, is the natural, unforced humility. This is markedly different from the show-offish attempts at self-deprecation sometimes seen in other writers. Reading Amitava’s work I often get the impression that that famous quality, the Writer’s Ego, is entirely absent in him; one waits for cracks to appear in what is – surely has to be? – a façade of self-effacement, but it never happens.
For example, in one of his articles, he mentions contacting Rahul Bhattacharya, the talented young cricket writer and author of Pundits from Pakistan, and asking him to elaborate on something he had written. At 44, Amitava is nearly a couple of decades senior to Bhattacharya, and writers are famous for getting more guarded and less accessible as they grow older; it’s difficult to imagine many others of his age and stature openly showing such interest in the work of a much younger man.
Amitava makes no attempt to hide that he’s flattered when I mention this. “Tum aur tumhara pyaar!” he says before getting serious: “The humility, as you put it, may have come from my longtime admiration for George Orwell. I was very much influenced by his honesty and candour, and I wanted to be like that.” Relating the genesis of Home Products, he says he was impressed by a similar candour in the actor Manoj Bajpai. “He told me that he used to wet his bed as a child,” he says, “and that reminded me of Orwell, who was equally unflinching in his descriptions of his own weaknesses.”
In the book, the character of Neeraj Dubey, a small-town actor who makes it big, is based on Bajpai. What prompted Amitava to move away from his comfort zone and tell this story as fiction? “I started off wanting to do a non-fiction book about Bajpai, but then I realised that the guy has told me about wetting his bed but would he tell me if he had a relationship with his aunt? So one has to make that up. Because there are other rooms in the house, and only a fiction writer will enter those rooms.”
Besides, writing fiction carries its own sense of power. “It gave me a thrill,” he says, “to create a wedding night scene where the guy starts talking to his wife about her Geography marks. Making up a conversation like that was a huge delight, and I wish others the same.” The leap from non-fiction was interesting in other ways. “A non-fiction writer wants to explain everything, but the fiction writer must be more restrained. For a long time, I thought fiction meant that one needed to add dramatic details to what had already been collected through travel and research. What I learnt, however, is that writing fiction is more about taking things away and letting the silences stand.”
Does he think of himself primarily as an academic, an essayist or a member of that much-discussed club, the Indian Writer in English? “I’m opposed to the IWE acronym,” he says, chewing on a mutton burrah. “Recently a friend told me that the language in my book seemed to melt away into Hindi. That felt good – I can’t really think of myself as an Indian writer in English.”
“Academics make a profession of knowing things and I don’t want to be the person who always knows. Everything doesn’t come accompanied with footnotes. Academia is about being politically correct – offending no one – but in a world full of offences it’s sometimes good to admit that you carry hate in your heart. My conscious choice in writing has been to admit incorrectness, to make space for faults.”
“So I guess I’m left with being an essayist – or just a writer! Have some burrah,” he adds, “it’s lovely.” And then a non-sequitur – “When you write your article you must include this sentence: ‘While I was praising Amitava Kumar, he exploited the situation and ate up all the kebabs’.”
As people stream in and the decibel levels in the restaurant rise, our talk becomes more general. We touch on his love for Indian food (“Nothing like a warm roti,” he says, “Do you know how to make rotis? Neither my wife nor I know – big disadvantage”), his hometown Patna (“it’s changing fast – Gurgaon isn’t the only megapolis in India!”) …and Salman Rushdie who, displeased by some of the things Amitava has written about him, refused to share the stage with him when he was invited to speak at Vassar College. (Amitava blogged about the incident here.)
Does he think of the Rushdie of today as more a P3 celebrity than a serious writer? “I do, yes,” says Amitava, “and that’s the short answer. The long answer is: he’s a very important figure for us (contemporary Indian authors working in English). Baap hai woh. Aur baap ko gaali dena buri baat hai.” A meaningful pause, and I can anticipate what’s coming next. “Lekin chutiya baap hai. Baap agar roz daaru peeke ghar aayega toh aap usko kitna respect denge?”
[I’m not translating the above into English. You get the spirit of the thing only in the original.]
After a hurriedly consumed fruit cream dessert, it’s time to go – Amitava’s book launch is in the evening and he’d like to grab some shut-eye before then. “When I was living in Delhi as a student,” he says, “I would walk across to Pragati Maidan to watch Shyam Benegal saab’s films. And now he’s going to be releasing my book!” You’d normally expect these words from a first-time author, a launch virgin, but coming from Amitava Kumar they don’t seem at all unnatural.
-------------
A few more quotes that I couldn’t fit in:
On his use of the first-person in essays about other people’s work
The “I” is linked with the “eye”, which is looking at the world. When one of my students comes into class and says he wants to write a story about a guy who goes to the moon and meets a dog and such-and-such happens, I said to him, ‘Whoa! How about coming down to earth and looking at the lives of people around you – there are so many fascinating stories there. Find out what happened to your mother when she was a waitress at that restaurant.’
On post-colonial studies
I have benefited from it, and I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me, but allow me (he says very deliberately), allow me to at least bark at the hand that feeds me. Post-colonial theory has analytical value – in terms of studying inequalities and so on – but it is also very narrow and not willing to change. In fact I tried to call it by a new name, “World Bank literature”. This could refer to the “literature” produced by the WB itself – the reports etc – which we could consider Literature! Or it could refer to the literature in the countries where the WB exists.
More on moving away from the political correctness of academia
If you’ve read my recent piece on rape – it’s a disturbing thought that a woman should run away with her rapist, and it’s awkward to even discuss such a thing. But these things happened during Partition – there were women who didn’t want to leave the promise of a new life.
At risk of falling into the usual Bombay-vs-Delhi generalisations, even the stray dogs in Bombay are better behaved than their counterparts in my city. They keep their eyes lowered, speak when spoken to and don’t stare uncouthly the way dogs and humans in Delhi constantly do. (It bears remembering that many of Delhi’s mongrels are half-breeds descended from the foxes that once roamed the jungles near the ruins of Mehrauli. When the city’s southward expansion began and the forests began to fall, these animals, knowing their time was up, decided to breed with the local dogs in order to pass on a genetic legacy. No doubt the feral gene is still active in the current generation.)
Anyway, zoological dissertations aside, I had a superb time. It was a mistake to keep the trip so short, but managed to pack in a lot into my two-and-a-half days there. A short list:
The nostalgia angle: I hadn’t been to Bombay in 20 years (used to go once or twice each year until I was 10) and the actual memories were dim and scattered, but I’ve always felt like I know the place – especially Churchgate, where my mum lived up to the age of 24. She still has an idealised picture of the city in her head – or at least the way south Bombay used to be in the 1960s and early 1970s – and I’ve heard lots of stories from her and my nani over the years: about idyllic evenings spent at the Cricket Club of India (CCI) and the Racecourse, long walks down Marine Drive, nightlong parties with film personalities and their families dropping by.
The uncle I stayed with, a family friend, has lived in the same house in Churchgate for 60 years. We were watching TV, a song from the Dev Anand film Hum Dono came on, and he recalled music director Jaidev composing the tune while sitting in the apartment below his, more than 45 years ago. Two buildings away is where my mother’s cousin and her family live, and one of the apartments in between is where mum grew up, the place she still thinks of as “home” despite having left it decades ago. I took photographs, walked a lot, including in the CCI ground where mum and her friends spent hundreds of their childhood evenings. Luckily many of the Kitab festival venues were in and around Churchgate, so traveling was quick and easy (not something one associates with Bombay). Much of this area is still so charming and old-world that for long stretches of time it was possible to forgot about the city’s staggering population density and its growing reputation as a huge urban slum.
Also drove along the Queen’s Necklace at midnight, went to Malabar Hill and past the Hanging Gardens.
Kitab was a mixed bag. A couple of good panel discussions, some boring ones. But had a fine time in the company of Amit, Chandrahas, Manish, Saket, PrufrockTwo and Aditya, and also met the usual suspects from the lit-circle over cocktails and canapés at the Taj Palace hotel (from where I walked along the waterfront to the Radio Club, where relatives were waiting for me for dinner) and at Good Earth. (More notes on the festival soon.)
Food
Had an excellent lunch with eM at Café Churchill in Colaba: a beef steak with lots of mushrooms, consumed beneath a large, indistinct portrait of Sir Winston looking very much like a goodly chunk of ham himself. The steak was so big I could barely finish it (not something that often happens when I eat out and eat good). Good value for money, and it was such a pleasure to see a menu with B-E-E-F clearly spelt out on it, instead of a shifty-eyed waiter coming up to you and whispering “you want my tender loin, sir?”.
Other outstanding meals included:
– Crab butter pepper garlic, prawn gassi and appams at Mahesh Lunch Home.
– Nasi Goreng rice (with chicken, shrimps and a tender fried egg on top) at the Japengo Café. The dishes were very aesthetically arranged, which really sets up the foodie mood (of course they have to be well made too – but that’s a given in most Bombay restaurants).
– A large, eclectic Chinese lunch at the Pearl of the Orient, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Ambassador Hotel (from where I saw several splendid views of the city, including the CCI with the Brabourne Stadium just beneath us).
– Delectable ham sandwiches, some very heady rum cake and poha (not all at once) at the home of the uncle I was staying with.
Sidenote: eating out with people who are genuine foodies is a delightfully intense experience. From several minutes before you even reach the restaurant, you’re discussing the food, anticipating the aroma of each dish. Then you sit at the table, study the menu lovingly, talk about past meals, exchange notes, place the order and continue to talk food. No one even thinks of making the conversation more general. And then the dishes arrives and a monk-like silence prevails for the next several minutes, punctuated only by the cracking of prawn shells.
So excellent trip overall. But in a subsequent post I will deal with the thesis that nostalgia mustn’t be carried too far. Never doing the Rajdhani thing again, which I had romantically imagined would be a train journey into the past. Nothing of the sort: it was besmirched by the presence of small satanic children and their fondly indulgent parents. (More on that soon, in a post titled “So you didn’t use a condom, now at least practise berth control”.)
[A shortened version of this appears in today’s Business Standard. It’s my second interview with Kiran Desai in a little over a year, though this was in the "Lunch with..." format]
Kiran Desai is on a tight schedule – she's leaving for a four-city tour the next day – so we economise on time by going to good old Chopsticks in the Siri Fort Complex, a stone's throw from the Penguin India office. "This place is an old favourite, isn't it," says the Booker Prize winner; she spent some of her childhood years in the capital and remembers a time when "Indian Chinese" was all the rage and sweet corn chicken soup a staple for diners, years before the food revolution began.
There's a buffet on, which suits us – what we want is a quick, functional meal. After lading our plates with hakka noodles, Hunan lamb sauce, garlic fish and other delectable things I'm too lazy to make a note of, we return to our table. "I eat just about everything," she says, "I was very happy at the big literary festival in Sri Lanka recently, the food was great: spicy coconut sambhar, amazing seafood, jackfruit." She would have liked to attend the cooking classes held in the Diggi Palace during the Jaipur Heritage Festival last month, but there was no time.
Kiran was one of the two major draws (along with Salman Rushdie) at the three-day literary fest in Jaipur, and though she was warm and gregarious during her session – a conversation with NDTV's Barkha Dutt – she never quite gave the impression of being comfortable with the high media presence. This could be an offshoot of her long seclusion while working on The Inheritance of Loss: for most of the seven years she spent on the book, she was cooped up in her mother, author Anita Desai's home just outside of New York.
"All that time," she says, "I was simply writing. I wasn't part of the literary party scene; my mother's life is not remotely connected to any of that, which has probably been good for me." When you walk into a literary party in New York, she says, it almost feels like you're in the banking field. "There's this carefully constructed hierarchy, you have to know about publishers and editors and different sets of relationships. And gossip flows both ways. Journalists and critics talk about writers, but the writers discuss them too – who wrote what, etc – and then you come to these events and realise that everyone knows everyone. It's strange."
Having interviewed Kiran before, I'm struck again by how friendly and unaffected she is; one has to strain for a glimpse of the writer who struggled over her manuscript for years and had a frustrating time trying to get it published. "It wasn't an easy book to classify," she says, "and it was incredibly hard to find anyone to edit it." Compared to her debut novel, the enjoyable but very lightweight Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, The Inheritance of Loss is a complex work. Though centred on three people – an irascible old judge, his 17-year-old granddaughter Sai and the household cook – living together in an ancient house in Kalimpong in the 1980s, the novel moves in time and space to tell stories about different types of immigrant experiences: from the judge's youth in Cambridge decades earlier to the present-day travails of the cook's son in the US.
The original draft ran close to 1,500 pages, but in its published form the book is just over 300 pages long. This meant the jettisoning of various characters and subplots...and a few lengthy cuisine descriptions in restaurant scenes. "I had a long meditation on why pasta has to take so many forms when it tastes the same," she laughs. "I must think a lot about food! Anyway, all that had to go."
Given that there is so much anticipation around the "Big Books" – the 800- and 900-pagers variously referred to as the Literary Epic of the Year or the Great Indian Novel (or, less politely in private, the Doorstop) – does she regret having cut her manuscript so much? "I had one really bad year when nothing seemed to work," she explains, "and in that mood I chopped ruthlessly. My mother thinks The Inheritance of Loss should have been longer. Salman [Rushdie], on the other hand, advises me to write many short books instead of one big one – because you get paid the same amount!"
The epic novels (one thinks of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram in recent years) tend to be written by male authors. A case for gender discrimination? "It is seen as a girlie thing to write small, slender, poetic books and leave the Big Issues to the guys," Kiran agrees, "But what's that phrase used by James Wood to describe sprawling works – 'hysterical realism'? I like that. It takes away the macho-ness of the whole thing!"
"When you're writing a book with so many different strands and characters, there's always an argument for extending it in all directions. But you also have to know when to stop."
What practical difference did winning the Booker make? "Well, really just that I know I can write! Also, the book is selling much more than before. Also, more pirated copies than before!" The publicity wasn't all good though. She was on the receiving end of protests from Kalimpong, directed at her depiction of the town and its people, especially the Nepalese majority. There were even rumours about book-burning. It's typical of Kiran that she bursts out laughing. "Did they really burn books?" she asks. "I spoke to my aunt [who lives in Kalimpong] and she kept telling me, nothing is happening here."
She was surprised by the controversy, however. "I thought my portrayal was sympathetic," she says. "But when you write about a certain group of people, the old argument immediately surfaces: do you have an obligation to portray someone in a heroic way? Of course you doesn't. It really comes down to free speech in the end – if you believe in that, you have to accept things. I mean, I get loads of criticism all the time and I could just as easily be offended by that."
And almost immediately, she lightens the conversation by joking about a letter she got from a Kalimpong tailor's shop mentioned in the book: "You said our stripes are horizontal instead of vertical!"
By this time we're onto a quick dessert and the talk is going in all directions. We discuss the growing tendency in the Indian media to treat young authors as page-3 celebrities ("in NY too you'll regularly see authors in gossip columns. A writer friend of mine was moving from one apartment to another, and even that found its way into the papers"); the need for better children's literature in India ("we all grew up with British writers – there was no one with iconic status who was writing about Indian children. Except R K Narayan, who provided the sweet vision of being Indian"); and the funny, sometimes sinister, letters and emails she gets. There was one – and here she cracks up as she mimicks a possibly deranged letter-writer – that simply went, "Dear… ma'am...I wonder what…will be your...inheritance ... OF LOSS!!!!"
I think I noticed a couple of the diners staring at Kiran a while earlier. Authors, even the high-profile ones, don't usually get mobbed by adoring fans, but she was all over TV channels following the Booker win; does she get recognised in public? "There was this incident a couple of days ago," she says, "I was out walking and someone came and caught hold of me and shouted 'Congratulations!' It was quite scary." And then she giggles, as if amused by the thought that such a private endeavour – working on a book, all alone, for years on end – could lead to her becoming public property.
Happiest moment of the Dubai trip: when two vegetarian fellow travellers came within inches of ordering a veal dish (considering previous incidents such as the turbine/turban one, they had probably confused the word with “vegetable”, or thought it was shorthand). I made sure to watch their faces when the waiter explained what veal was, it felt nice. Then, clucking solicitously whenever they happened to catch my eye, I listened to their loud tirades about the “dirty eats” available outside India. Then I ordered a beef steak with pepper sauce.
Sorry if that sounds callous, and of course one doesn’t expect vegetarians (or orthodox Hindus) to try beef/veal just because they are in a foreign country – but by that point in the trip I was so fed up of these people (for other reasons too, not just their attitude towards food) that I sought malicious pleasure in anything that discomfited them. Some of the fussiness and boorishness on display was beyond belief. One keeps hearing horror stories about the insularity of travelling Indians, but this was the first time I was seeing it at such close quarters.
Personally I’m very experimental with food. When I became a feature journalist a few years ago, the restaurant revolution in Delhi was just beginning, we suddenly had access to authentic Lebanese and Italian and Thai and Chinese and continental food outside of 5-star hotels, my job provided a pretext to try new things, and I relished it. And when travelling abroad, as a matter of policy I try as many different dishes as possible – especially the stuff there’s little hope of getting in Delhi. (There was one notable aberration in Glasgow a couple of years ago when, after eight straight days of eating dry continental meals, I developed a near-frenzied craving for spicy daal/curry and hot naan and rushed to the town centre to find an Indian restaurant. Old habits diet hard.)
This doesn’t mean I expect everyone else to be adventurous in their eating habits. The fact is, most people (certainly most Indians) simply don’t like to step outside the comfort zone when it comes to food, and this is understandable to an extent, even if you don’t account for the many religious taboos. If, up to a certain age, you’ve been weaned on a particular cuisine/cooking style, it’s very difficult to break the mould. And if you aren’t professionally associated with food (as a consultant, say, or as a food writer) and if you haven’t travelled much, there’s little opportunity (or reason) to expand your culinary horizons.
But there are degrees and degrees of insularity, and when it reaches the point where you’ve completely closed your mind to any sort of new experience, and in the process made a spectacle of yourself and inconvenienced others…well, that’s problematic.
One example from this trip: just moments after announcing that he’s a hardcore non-vegetarian and extremely hungry, a chap pushed away a plate of pan-fried chicken breast because the dish was “too unfamiliar”. He dismissively ordered the waiters to take the plate away and then gave them (and our tourist guide) sidelong glares as if it were their fault. And we’re not talking oysters or scallops or octopuses or even shrimps or prawns. We’re talking pan-fried chicken breast, which is just about the least exotic non-Indian item you can find on a menu.
“Frankly speaking,” the chap then said, in the tone often employed by people who use that phrase (and “to be honest” and others such) as if they are about to bestow a hitherto undisclosed Indubitable Truth on the world, “nothing can compare with our Indian food. Even people who come to India for the first time from other countries forget about their own food after tasting our home-made cooking.” Our tour guide, to whom these words were being addressed, looked dubious but nodded politely and said he hoped to visit India soon. I wonder if he ever will now.
P.S.: “Our Indian food” was quite the sweeping generalisation coming from these people. Going by the rest of their conversations, they knew very little about the parts of India that are located outside north-west Delhi. (“Bihari people are known as very intayleegent, isn’t it?” one of them said, referring to a Mr Bose he was acquainted with.) And maybe, just maybe, I’m over-analysing and reading too much into eating habits, but I can’t help wondering about the connection between insularity of this sort and narrow-mindedness in other spheres. Fodder for future posts perhaps...
Update: should have mentioned this earlier. Dubai does of course have plenty of eating options for Indians who want to stick with comfort food - in fact there were a couple of highly regarded (and inexpensive) vegetarian Indian restaurants just a stone's throw from our hotel. But our junket-happy journos, for all their complaining, would never actually have gone to one of those places. It would have meant spending their own money (outside meals weren't included in our package) and that would have been a fate worse than starving to death.
Many moons ago, Swati sent this tag my way. I’ve been lazy in replying, partly because I developed a complex after reading her intense food-descriptions. (At such times I regret not having worked on the foodie beat – phrases like “dumplings stuffed with condiments” and suchlike would then have come as naturally to me as eating does.)
But here’s my trifling attempt. Not a comprehensive list because I’ll probably think of something else as soon as I’ve posted this. So heartfelt apologies to the many food dishes that have given me joy over the years, and which I’ve ungratefully overlooked here. Also not sticking to the original meme, just naming some favourite dishes, and a lot of this is restaurant-specific:
- Nasi goreng rice at Chilli Seasson restaurant: with chicken and shrimp. Feels very spicy when you’re actually eating it but leaves no nasty after-effects, just a feeling of well-being and – two hours later – a yearning for more. Incredible how a dish with such a pungent flavour can be so easily digested.
- The steamed fish cakes at the above restaurant: the most flavourful fish dish I’ve ever had.
- The methi aloo made at my grandparents’ place: both ingredients have a slightly burnt quality, the brown skin on the potato is still largely intact, and it’s dry and wrinkled. Doesn’t sound great I know (and probably not the traditional way to make it), but good food is better eaten than read about.
- Tandoori chicken with naan: a staple, preferably ordered from Madhuban but will pass muster almost anywhere else.
- Maa ke haathon se bana khatti daal: give me this with rice and any potato dish (preferably beans-aloo) and I won’t complain about there being no non-veg – at least not for the next eight hours.
(Note: separate post exclusively on home-food to be written soon.)
- Slice of Italy pizzas: especially the Trio-on-Trio (smoked salami, onions, minced lamb and jalapeno peppers). Prefer these pizzas to the ones at Domino’s and Pizza Hut by a long way – the secret’s in the sauce.
Used to love their calzones too (the ones with ham-and-mushroom filling) but that was in the old days, when they were made with soft, doughy bread. Now they are just over-sized samosas.
- Rava masala dosa with lots of sambar: preferably from Sagar. (By now you might have cottoned on to the fact that I’m a potato-person.)
- Kai Yudd Sai (at last, a chance to be exotic!) at Bangkok Degree One: a great Thai omelette containing minced chicken. The question of whether the chicken or the egg came first may remain unanswered, but they both disappear equally fast when I’m having this dish.
- Prawn pepper butter garlic at Swagath: contains, as you may have guessed, prawn, pepper, butter and garlic. Unbeatable combination, best had with a spoon, straight out of the bowl.
- Hot Chocolate Fudge from Nirula’s: especially in winter and with, needless to say, extra fudge. People often wonder why it’s so pleasurable to eat ice-cream in winter. The way I see it is, if it’s a milk-based product it’s a heat-producing one regardless of its external temperature. Most of my best ice-cream memories are winter ones.
Also…
Favourite foods that I’ve had only once
- a brilliant, succulent shepherd’s pie with ale at a quaint pub in the village of Lacock during my Britain tour last year. It was treasured all the more because it came after days of sampling and being disappointed by various dishes that made up “staple English cuisine”.
- a Cullen Skink soup near St Andrew’s, Scotland, during the same tour. Fish soup (though it’s better to call it broth, a word more indicative of richness) with bread on the side. In the largest single-person bowl I’ve ever seen (at least I think it was a single-person bowl), but no trouble finishing it.
- a piping hot, mixed thenthup (a variant on thupka, the Tibetan noodle soup), with everything in it - flour, egg, many different meats and vegetables – consumed one cold, cold night in a monastery during my visit to Bir. Come to think of it, most of my trips in the last few years have been to very cold places – so warm foods are high on this list of one-offs.
And…
My guilty little food secret
Most of my non-veg friends instantly turn into Pavlov’s pups when they see a shammi or galouti, but I’ve never been able to understand the appeal of minced kababs. There’s no texture, and the idea of meat and masalas being randomly mish-mashed together feels strange. In this post, K tells the story of the galouti’s provenance – apparently it was an improvised recipe for an old king who had lost all his teeth. Well, I say leave such “delicacies” to the toothless, I’ll take my meat chewy any day. Nothing beats a good, juicy seekh kabab. Or a pepper steak, preferably bee.. – er, tenderloin.