The Julymol sails with a crew of between eight and ten, Mariadasan told us. ‘We sail for about twenty-four hours, to find our spot. Then we drop anchor and fish.’ The boat remains at sea for as many as twenty days at a time, by which time, Mariadasan admitted, the first day’s catch begins to smell somewhat rank. Then they set off for home, with fish worth about Rs 4 lakh in their holds.
On one trip in 2004, Mariadasan, who lived in Mumbai at the time, strayed into Pakistani waters. At the time, he was thirty-five, and he had two sons in school. ‘I didn’t even know if I’d ever see them again.’ Mariadasan and eight other fishermen were imprisoned in a Karachi jail, and fed almost exclusively on five rotis and three cups of tea a day. ‘We were beaten a little when we were first caught, but luckily, we’d just managed to radio out for help before they picked us up,’ he said. Ten months later, with some new wounds and scars, all nine were released. Mariadasan packed up and returned to Kerala—just in time for the Indian Ocean tsunami to hit the state’s coast that December.
That year, travelling down the coast of Tamil Nadu in the aftermath of the tsunami, I had seen something of its pitiless impact on fishing villages and harbours. ‘Was there much destruction here?’ I asked, already prepared to commiserate and condole with him and his inevitably woeful story. ‘Did many fishermen die?’
‘Oh no,’ Mariadasan replied. ‘It was the day after Christmas. Nobody here was at sea. We were all still sleeping off the previous day’s toddy hangover.’
In Kerala, where toddy is as much of a state passion as football or Communism, canvassing views about the relative merits of various toddies is a thankless venture. Every man will have an opinion, for starters, and he will not be stopped until he has expounded every facet of it, accompanied wherever possible by proof of a practical nature. The only vote that approaches anything resembling unanimity is about where in Kerala the best toddy is to be found. That would be in the Alappuzha district, which has long operated under the alias of Alleppey, drawing tourists to its backwaters as a siren would Ithacans. Alleppey is the toddy shop mother lode, where shops glint like nuggets every few metres.
The town of Alleppey is only a few hours away from Trivandrum by train, but that brief trip may as well have taken us into a different quadrant of the world altogether. Trivandrum was dusty and, even at 5 a.m. on a February morning, sticky and airless. Alleppey, at half past eight the same day, was fresh and cool, newly washed by rain, its waters and trees gleaming silver and gold. It was a perfect time to be outdoors. Purely in the interests of research, though, we were in a toddy shop cabana an hour later, by about 10 a.m.
There is a word to be said here about rooting out the best toddy shop in an unfamiliar town. We stumbled onto the most ideal method by chance—to commandeer an auto-rickshaw and solicit its driver’s guidance. The auto-rickshaw driver will be immediately so struck by appearance of people after his own heart—people, in other words, who will get out of an early morning train, exit the station, and ask for a toddy shop—that he may even forget to inflate his rate.
Our man steered us unhesitatingly to T. S. No. 86, calling it one of the most highly recommended toddy shops in Alleppey—thirty years old, plying four hundred customers with toddy every day. It sits off a narrow stretch of a highway, opposite paddy fields with water lilies growing out of their banks of water. Its nerve centre is a two-room affair of kitchen and pantry, and it has four or five cabanas in its yard. It would be too much to say you can’t miss it—you can very easily miss it, in fact. But you shouldn’t.
This shop’s prep kitchen consisted of a couple of tree stumps out back, near a small stream. Having ordered what I hoped was un-faux karimeen, I was shown the gills of the fish, still red, proof that it was fresh. Then our sous-chef peeled the fish like a potato, hacking off the scales with a knife, revealing flesh the colour of pale twilight. For the tougher scales on the top and the back of the fish, he used scissors. From a slit, he felt around with a couple of fingers and pulled out the innards, like a magician extracting streamers from his sleeve. The karimeen then moved into the kitchen, where on a ledge of stone, a wok full of coconut oil was already sitting on a stove. Next to it was a colander, bearing what I was told were turtle parts. On an open wood fire in another corner, a heavy pot of rice muttered quietly away to itself.
In this kitchen, I finally had a chance to see exactly how much spice went into toddy shop food. The most reliable measure seemed to simply be: A lot. In a little stainless steel bowl, our chef mixed red chilli powder, black pepper, garam masala, salt, turmeric and water, making a paste that was a dark, brooding vermilion. Into this went the karimeen, the paste worked into its slits with a finger; it marinated there for a while, and then slipped into its jacuzzi of coconut oil.
Coconut oil is a funny thing. Outside Kerala, it is known, thanks to the Parachute brand, as primarily a hair-care product, to be taken off the bathroom shelf on Sundays for a ritual oil bath. In Kerala, it is the frying medium of choice. The mind, of course, knows this vital difference, but as I discovered, the nose does not. When that karimeen hit its wok of oil, there was an overwhelming burst of smell, like an explosion in the Parachute factory. And somehow it smelled very familiar and yet very wrong, as if somebody had decided to make tea with Head & Shoulders or salad dressing out of Brylcreem.
Eyes streaming, I escaped the kitchen into the pantry next door, where, as fortune would have it, the toddy was just being brought in. In most shops, the toddy is stored in huge, black plastic cans that look suspiciously like former containers for kerosene. Here, the toddy was strained through three separate filters, to catch bits of husk and other impurities, caught in white plastic jugs and then decanted into old Kingfisher beer bottles. This toddy had been tapped just a couple of hours earlier, still so sweet that, when it was brought to our table, it managed to attract fruit flies out of nowhere. It was thicker and fizzier than at Trivandrum, backed by the unmistakable aftertaste of fresh coconut, and with only a sotto whisper of alcohol.
The karimeen arrived soon after, brown as toast, wrapped inside its greatcoat of masala, and dressed with black pepper and raw onions. It was a bony fish, but its meat was soft, picked apart by fingers almost as easily as cotton candy. This was magnificent eating—crisped masala, cut by the sweetness of the fish and the tartness of a squeeze of lemon. Mahesh Thampy, it turned out, was right. If this was real karimeen, the fish at the toddy shop in Trivandrum was a certain imposter.
The fish curry, on the other hand, was beginning to increasingly seem to me like an acquired taste. As at Trivandrum, it arrived in seething red attire, and more mystifyingly, it arrived cold—yesterday’s curry, with hunks of fresh-fried kaari fish slipped in. The kaari was dense and chewy, its flesh looking like boiled potato. I closed my eyes, dunked a piece of kappa into the curry, and concentrated on really tasting it—and I could still taste nothing but the aggressive rawness of the chilli powder.
When I opened my eyes, my Malayali friend across the table had his eyes shut as well. Then he opened them, looked at me, and said: ‘That was heaven. That tasted like my childhood.’
Our auto-rickshaw driver insisted that we try one more toddy shop nearby, where we stayed away from the toddy and just asked for any fish that was fresh from the backwaters. We got, first, a plate of fried chembelli, a small, inexpensive fish that tasted chewy and fibrous, like a better class of cardboard. Then we got a hideous looking fish called the beral. Deprived of its fins, the beral’s long, thick body looked almost snakelike, and its face was thuggish—definitely the sort of fish to avoid meeting in a dark, deserted bend of the river. But I had maligned the beral too soon. Its homely features concealed, if not a heart of gold, at least fresh, smooth meat and a crisp skin.
By lunchtime, we were in the poignant situation of already having eaten the equivalent of three lunches. It had grown suddenly warm, my friend’s head began to loll in sleep, and I was shuddering at the thought of meeting another masala-heavy product of the backwaters. All t
hree issues were simultaneously addressed by that marvellous mode of transport: The Backwaters Bus. The Backwaters Bus seems to have been created, in some part, as an exercise in voyeurism. With around eighty passengers on board, at Rs 10 a head, it ambles from Alleppey to Kottayam in four hours, through a maze of vegetation-clogged creeks that appear impossible to remember or navigate. But the only time it really slows down from its amble to a shuffle is in relatively open waters, apparently to give every passenger a view of the bizarre houseboats all around.
A toddy shop, off a highway near
Alleppey
The most basic houseboats were the most logically constructed ones—long, with a single cabin, and extensive deck space. One level up, the slightly larger houseboats warranted a raised sun deck of sorts, where a couple of lounge chairs could sit on either side of a table of drinks. So far, so good.
But then, in a single, befuddling leap, came the top-of-the-line houseboats—raised sun deck, extensive hardwood furniture, baroque cabinets, satellite dishes, and plasma TV sets. It was in one of these that I saw a group of four people, sitting with their backs to the water, watching a golf game on television. Behind me, from the commuters on my Backwaters Bus, there were titters at that surreal vision, and nudges to neighbours to look-look-look. In one stroke, the sightseers had become the sightseen.
It would have been only too easy, I thought, for the residents of this gorgeous district to resent intruders, to be reluctant to share their gold-dappled green waters with anybody else, much less with eyesore houseboats and plasma TVs. But I sensed that nowhere in Alleppey, and it wasn’t just the dry logic of capitalism, of how tourism had improved everybody’s standard of living. Instead, it tended more towards the sort of benevolent tolerance with which grandparents regard grandchildren with wayward minds. As the Backwaters Bus cleared the open waters and entered a tributary on the other side, a few people exchanged amused smiles, shook their heads in mock wonder, and returned to their newspapers for the rest of the ride.
Later that evening, at Kottayam, our palates rebelled furiously, wanting something other than fish fried in coconut oil. It was a notable meal, if only to observe, in the interests of science, what we ordered instead. My friend, the Malayali, ordered beef fried in coconut oil. And I? I ordered curd and rice—soothing white, free of belligerent masala and pools of silvery grease and shards of bone and the arresting taste of fish. It was heaven. It tasted like my childhood.
The quintessential toddy shop in Kerala is still a male bastion—unsurprisingly, in a state that its residents say is still a deeply conservative one. ‘Just yesterday afternoon,’ Mahesh Thampy had told me, ‘I saw three local women standing at a pushcart, eating a few dosas off paper plates. And people stared incessantly, very unused to even that simple sight.’
But in the last few years, two elevating things have happened. The toddy shop, long a part of authentic Kerala, has now become a part of Authentic Kerala, the tourist-brochure version of the state, and female visitors will not be denied their right to sit in cabanas and order toddy and karimeen. Also, the subculture of toddy shop food has begun to be celebrated, and the food desired not merely as incendiary accompaniment to liquor but in its own right. Enter, then, the toddy parlour. Even its nomenclature is such a far cry from that of the toddy shop that it deserves commentary. The toddy ‘shop’ indicates the most basic of transactions, where money changes hands, a product is sold, and the customer heads for the exit. With toddy, the process is only slightly less rapid. Few of the paddy field workers, itinerant cyclists or other local drinkers wish to actually tarry in a toddy shop longer than it takes to knock back a few glasses, so that the alcohol can hot up the blood faster and cheaper. The toddy ‘parlour,’ on the other hand, carries the weight of both etymology and custom. The word ‘parlour’ comes from the French ‘parler,’ to talk, and a room thus dubbed becomes an open invitation to shoot the breeze. But the genteelness and almost Victorian delicacy we have come to associate with a parlour sits amiss with the grime and the focussed alcoholism of the toddy shop.
The two most famous specimens of these toddy parlours, known as far away as Cochin and Trivandrum, sit on the road from Kottayam to Pallom, barely a kilometre from each other, and are bitter rivals in court to boot. The original, Kariumpumkala, started life as a genuine toddy shop in 1958, and although it became known for its superior food, it held on to those roots. But in 2001, when the Kerala government suspended all toddy shop licenses in a brave, and vain, attempt to discourage drinking, Kariumpumkala won through that awful year solely on the strength of its food. When the licenses were restored, one year later, Kariumpumkala didn’t even try to apply for one; it had found its new direction.
Kariumpumkala today is a slightly ghastly brick-and-mortar structure, painted in shades of green and pink. Its top two storeys are air-conditioned, every floor is tiled, and the tabletops are made of granite. Over the billing counter is a shelf full of trophies that Kariumpumkala has won in something called the Philips Food Fest. But most heartbreaking of all is a perverse remembrance of times past—a sign that says ‘Smoking, alcohols strictly prohibited’.
Kariumpumkala’s present owner would talk of none of this. He was obsessed, instead, with his legal battle with Karimpinkala, the upstart establishment down the road that, he claimed, had stolen and only slightly modified his restaurant’s name. ‘That isn’t the real one,’ he said repeatedly. But Karimpinkala still serves toddy, and Kariumpumkala does not. That little edge makes all the difference in the sweeps to win Kerala’s hearts and minds.
In the leafy parking lot of Karimpinkala, a ‘Toddy Shop And A/c Family Restaurant’, we found Maruti Swift cars and gleaming SUVs, and cabanas that were closer in size to mid-level dorm rooms. We sat under fans, on plastic chairs that skidded on the tiled floors, and drummed our fingers on a glass-topped table. We were handed a menu, laminated in clear plastic. Apart from the ‘Sweet and cold coconut toddy’, we could have ordered Diet Coke, Fanta, the enigmatic ‘Soda B & S’, or ice cream. We could even have asked for that most pan-Indian of dishes, Gobi Manchurian. As we sat staring a little disbelievingly at that menu, another SUV pulled up outside. A family dismounted—parents, little children, and even a grandmother—and stormed into one of the other cabanas. We were, most definitely, not in Kansas any more.
Karimpinkala’s toddy, served in small earthen jugs, was thick, faintly stale, and tasted of sediment. But its star turn came in the form of its karimeen polichchathu—fish that was steamed in its marinade rather than fried, wrapped in a banana leaf, and served under a canopy of curry leaves, onions and red pepper flakes. And so I finally managed to grasp the flavour of the pearl spot itself—a tart, citrusy tang, but warmed with the heat of spice, as delicious as a mildly sunny sky.
Jijin, our auto-rickshaw driver for the day, had by now cottoned on to our routine, and when we left Karimpinkala, he said: ‘But you should also try mundhiri kallu’—literally, raisin toddy—‘because that’s a specialty here.’ Between the months of November and March, Jijin explained, toddy-shop owners slipped raisins into the evening toddy and served it the next morning, when the raisins had drunk their fill and fattened into triple their size. ‘Although these days,’ he said, as he started to scour the sides of the road leading to Kumarakom, ‘people get cheap and just add grape juice to give it the same flavour.’
We found no mundhiri kallu at our first stop, a whitewashed toddy shop set back so far from the road on its dusty little plot that it looked like a Last Chance Saloon in the American West. By this time, it was noon, and hot outdoors, but the shop was dark and cool inside. The day’s toddy had lost some of its sweetness by then, and it was bubbling energetically as it fermented. We still managed a few glasses each, Jijin included—which may well have explained his subsequent, intemperate willingness to let us have a go at driving his auto-rickshaw in turns to the next toddy shop.
In our cool, dark shack-cabana, we ordered a couple of bottles of mundhiri kallu, which turned ou
t to be a pale pink concoction, reminiscent of Pepto-Bismol. At the bottom of the bottles were thick layers of white sediment, and the swollen corpses of raisins bobbed in the toddy. It tasted, to my mind, just the same as regular toddy, although the raisins served as occasional happy surprises, bursting with a concentrated blast of sweetness.
‘In the villages, the sediment is very important,’ Jijin said. ‘They add water to it and then mix it into the batter for appams, to make the appams soft.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘So people come to the toddy shops and take this sediment away. In the cities, of course, they just buy yeast.’ Jijin paused here and mulled. ‘Yeast works too.’
There was a further comfortable silence. Then Jijin, expounding further on the sediment, said: ‘They make a type of vinegar from it as well.’
‘How?’ I asked.
It was the wrong question to pose. Jijin lapsed into deep thought, emerging only after many minutes to drink more mundhiri kallu. I drank more mundhiri kallu as well. At some later point, the three of us may or may not have sworn to each other to never forget this moment, and that we were all brothers, man, whatever our differences, we were all brothers, well, in a manner of speaking, and that it was important not to lose this—this, you know, this connection—never lose that, man. And then we tripped our way back towards the auto-rickshaw, and Jijin drove us to Kumarakom and bundled us onto the bus to Kochi.
Accepted wisdom has it that only in the south of Kerala is the food so fiery, because of its insistence on wading into the chilli and kokum. In the north, curries are tempered with more coconut or coconut milk, taking the sharp edges off the spices. I was curious to see how that principle worked in toddy shops in the north, around Kochi or Kozhikode, but first we had to find some. If Alleppey was the mother lode and the area around Trivandrum was a vein of dubious quality, north Kerala resembled an abandoned shaft, mined clean of all ore. In Kochi, we found one toddy shop purely by accident—in the Jewish Quarter near Fort Cochin, an open-fronted establishment that was very obviously a tourist hook but that nonetheless served some good toddy. Driving out of Kozhikode, we had to look for forty minutes before we found a toddy shop. In that time, in Alleppey, we would have found ten.
Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast Page 8