The mechanics of toddy shop commerce, we discovered in Kozhikode, changed for no man, not even for a north Keralite. The karimeen curry—or as it was known in these parts, the erimeen curry—still came to the table as bellicose a red as in the south, still singeing the back of the mouth on its way down. The chembelli was still fried in the same masala, and it still tasted of cardboard. The coconut-heavy cooking of the outside world had been stopped and turned away on the threshold of the toddy shop kitchen. The food still left you gasping and sweating, the glasses of water—tinted pink, as always, by a purifying tree bark called Pathimukam—were still laughably inadequate, and I still found myself hollering hoarsely for toddy, for its milky sweetness to put the fire out.
My original rationalization for the sparser occurrence of toddy shops in this region had been the most obvious one: This was an area with a much higher concentration of Muslims than the south, and so consequently a higher concentration of firm teetotallers. But our guide, Madhu Madhavan, a young Kochi-based radio producer of great spirit and enterprise, was not so sure of our theory, so he undertook to interrogate the toddy shop proprietor about it.
‘Nonsense,’ our host said brusquely. ‘The Muslims drink just as much as the rest of us. More, probably.’
As our theory melted into puddles around our feet, the proprietor must have seen our stricken faces, looking like the last flat-earthers hearing about Magellan’s voyage of circumnavigation. More gently, he said: ‘Well, maybe they do it at home rather than out in public. But they all certainly drink, there’s no doubt about that.’
He transacted some business at his till, saw that we were still standing there, and said, by way of coded closure: ‘There are more toddy shops in the areas where the communists are in power.’
This made little sense to me, but standing outside the toddy shop, Madhu interpreted it for us. ‘He’s talking about the biggest caste in Kerala, the Iravas, who have traditionally been toddy tappers,’ he said. One of the proposed origins of the very word ‘Irava’ is the old Tamil word for toddy, ‘iizham,’ and some legend has it that the Iravas even brought the coconut palm from Sri Lanka to India.
In north Kerala, the Iravas have come to be known as the Thiyyas. ‘The Thiyyas occupy a slightly higher position in the caste hierarchy, and they think that toddy tapping as a profession is beneath them,’ Madhu said. There is, therefore, less tapping in the north; much of the toddy that is served near Kochi and Kozhikode is transported there from the districts of Alleppey or Palakkad. ‘And there’s a rule of thumb—a huge part of the Communist Party membership is made up of Iravas,’ Madhu said. Even a body like the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, a social reform organization working for the Irava community, steadily started, in the 1950s, to lose its members to the Communist movement, as Thomas Johnson Nossiter points out in his book Communism in Kerala. ‘So the Iravas tap the toddy, and where the Communists dominate, they get licenses easily and set up their shops,’ Madhu said. ‘I’ve heard of officials in Irava organizations in Alleppey who own chains of toddy shops there.’
As Madhu spoke, and even later as I was looking up the histories of the Iravas, of Communism in Kerala, and of toddy shops, my mind’s eye kept flicking back to that single whitewashed toddy shop outside Kottayam, that Wild West saloon transplanted out of its own space and time. It had looked so basic and peaceful, without a hint that it existed where it did because of statewide politicking and a centuries-old caste system. The confluence of politics, religion and society can wash over every single particle of life—even something as fundamental as the toddy shop, born out of the simplest of man’s desires: to get off the road, out of the sun, and get a drink.
5
On searching
for a once-lost
love
To attempt to write with enthusiasm about food, I have discovered, requires two great qualities: the ability to eat with a catholic, voluminous appetite, and the ability to eat out alone. The first is a purely physical constraint. A. J. Liebling, the emperor of gourmandizing writers, once pointed out that the average day presented, to the members of his tribe, only two opportunities for really extensive fieldwork: lunch and dinner. ‘They are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol,’ Liebling wrote. ‘They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road.’ (If his monumental waistline was not proof enough that Liebling practised what he preached, his accounts of his meals are; at one lunch, with a friend, he consumed a whole trout with butter, a Provencal meat stew, and a young, roasted guinea hen, with the appropriate wines and a bottle and a half of champagne. Then, presumably, there was dessert.)
But even a weak appetite can be cultivated and expanded, if not to Lieblingian proportions then at least to a point of modest adventurousness. The ability to dine out alone, however, seems to be like the ability to curl your tongue—either you have it or you don’t. Those who don’t have it tell me that it is just an insuperable mental block. I once heard of a software engineer, on deputation in the United States, who worked late hours and came back to his hotel well after room service had ceased room servicing. The coffee shop downstairs was open all night, but so reluctant was our friend to sit in a restaurant by himself and eat a sandwich that he simply skipped dinner. For the entire month.
Fortunately, I have always been made of tougher material; nothing would induce me to skip dinner. Often, in fact, when I’ve been travelling, I’ve actually preferred to eat alone, and not only because it enables a silent, more intimate communion with my food. A restaurant, particularly during a weekday afternoon, is like a finger on the pulse of a town. People come in with distinct agendas, even if the agenda is not to have one. They make business deals, argue over sports and politics, court each other, ignore each other, spend time with family, suffer the company of colleagues, or, like me, sit in a corner by themselves and watch it all over the top of a newspaper. And in the manner of a primitive cultural anthropologist, I lap it up in fascination, convinced that I am seeing the life of the town unfold in front of me. Maybe I am; or maybe I’m just seeing people eat lunch.
The only major disadvantage to eating in solitude, especially in a town that one doesn’t know very well, is figuring out where to eat. Asking in your hotel will only earn you a warm recommendation for the hotel’s own restaurants. Asking the wrong people—and it’s impossible to know who the wrong people are until you’ve eaten in the places they suggest—will lead you to the sort of food they think you want to eat, rather than the food they would themselves eat, which is also the food you really want to eat. On a vacation, of course, the joys of wandering around and of serendipitous discovery are all very well. But it must be most disheartening, for food writers as well as serious gourmands, to come away from a place only to discover that they had been sucked in by a succession of tourist-trap restaurants, all the while ignoring the authentic, wholly brilliant eatery just next door to their hotel.
This was the position I found myself in on my first afternoon in Mangalore. I had taken an overnight train from Cochin, waking just in time to see the pastels of morning wash over the serene beginnings of the Konkan Coast. The half-light conferred a magic upon otherwise ordinary sights. Sitting next to the window, I gawked at everything that passed by me—deserted sports fields; immaculate little station platforms; ordered brick houses painted in colours that would have looked garish in the city but that looked merely cheerful here; grove after grove of coconut trees; an occasional stream or backwater. And ever so suddenly, like a flash of benediction, a view of the open sea, separated from my train only by a thin ribbon of land.
Mangalore seemed sleepy when I got off the train, and it seemed sleepy when I left my hotel in search of lunch. I was to learn, over the course of my days there, that it was a town that seemed sleepy right through the week, as if just walking its rolling, undulating streets rocked its residents into drowsiness. Its restaurants displayed such a pleasing lack of business drive that they seemed almost anachronistic. One restau
rant that I spotted, called Hotel Kudla, had used the excuse of ongoing roadwork in the area to down shutters indefinitely—even though the restaurant’s front door remained perfectly accessible.
I walked around for half an hour, looking for a place to eat, before the February sun began to feel more uncomfortable than warm. My usual markers weren’t working in Mangalore. I tried to peek into restaurants to see if I could spot groups of locals, but every dining hall was uniformly empty. I pondered the names of the restaurants, trying to figure out whether they sounded generically touristy or specifically Mangalorean, but I got nowhere with that either. Finally, out of a desperate desire for shade, I ducked into a building, descended a flight of fire-escape stairs, and in the basement of the Hotel Dakshin, I ordered my first fish curry in Mangalore.
I had come to Mangalore expecting to fall completely in love with its fish curry, but I lusted instead, for much of my time there, after another dish, before I rediscovered my original love on the very morning of my departure. I had eaten the signature curry only once before, years ago, and I remember being entranced by its silky gravy, smooth and deep orange and full of flavour—very much the opposite, in fact, of Kerala’s toddy shop meen curry, which was pungent and overwhelming, and which broke apart into its oil and non-oil layers upon standing for even a few seconds. To my palate, the Mangalore curry was the superior one, and I expected this to be a joyful reunion.
But it didn’t begin well, or perhaps my hopes were set too high. That first curry—turmeric-yellow from a certain angle, red from chilli powder from another—was watery and bland. In the middle of the dish, like an algae-covered rock jutting out of the sea, was a hump of bangda, or mackerel, glinting a silvery green under the light. Mackerel has a famously insistent taste, but this fish was shy and reclusive, as if it would have rather been at home with a good book. I hacked at it from various angles, but it remained dull and uncooperative.
A possible reason revealed itself when I was presented with the bill: Rs 10 for the curry, and another Rs 10 for the dosa I had ordered with it. What kind of fish curry—in this day and age, in a restaurant in a prosperous town—cost Rs 10? I feared the answer. I’d read too much about how quickly mackerel spoiled, and about the scombroid food poisoning that followed rapidly, with its retinue of symptoms: dizziness, rashes, nausea, blurred vision. For the first time in my life, I put down a 50 per cent tip, because I had no smaller notes or coins. My mind reeling, and already feeling faintly ill in my imagination, I left the Hotel Dakshin and walked a dejected kilometre or so. Then, deciding that perhaps another meal would work as some consolation, I entered an eatery called Nihals, sat down, and called weakly for the fish of the day.
More bangda curry arrived, with a serving of coarse red rice and a side of curried potato. But now things were looking up. The mackerel tasted fresher, although still not as distinctive as I expected it to be; its bath of gravy was smoother, speckled with mustard seeds and a whisper of ginger, but it still wasn’t as fierce as I wanted it. Recalling Liebling’s thesis of fieldwork opportunities, I ordered a bangda masala fry (garlic and coconut; crisped; skin blistered and peeling off like that of a banana; very good) and ate my way through this second lunch. When the bill came—Rs 42, which included Rs 30 for the fry—I began to understand and feel better about Mangalore’s prices. If anything, Hotel Dakshin had overcharged me.
Emerging into a mellower late afternoon sun, I wandered aimlessly down the road, turning into smaller alleys, and passing marketplaces that had yet to reopen for the day. But everywhere I went, I saw unfamiliar restaurants with worn signboards, each impassive in its appeal and yet taunting me with unknown promise. The best Mangalore fish curry in the world could have come out of any of those kitchens, but with my trial-and-error technique of random walkabout, I ran the very substantial risk of never finding it. At that juncture, and with a Hotel Dakshin behind me, the thought was too frightening to bear. Pulling out my cell phone, I began to call around for assistance.
Mangalore lies on a curve of land that descends from the Western Ghats to the sea, and it is deeply enamoured of its waters—the backwaters of the Netravati and Gurupura rivers, but also the coast, where waves wash up tiredly and rest a while before leaping on their return journey towards Arabia. In his book In An Antique Land, Amitav Ghosh describes the ‘great palm-fringed lagoon, lying tranquil under a quicksilver sky,’ joined to the ocean only by a narrow channel of water. Mangalore’s glorious stretches of sand were its first ports, inviting boats that could be beached safely. In the Middle Ages, to the Arabian traveller who had never left home before, it must have been an awesome sight: pristine sands, lavish vegetation, a rich entry into a vast new land.
On my way to Panambur Beach, Mahesh, my auto-rickshaw driver, happened to ask me where I was from.
‘Madras,’ I said. (I’ve never quite been able to call the city by its new name, even though it was renamed Chennai just one year after I began living there. I’ve often wondered at that inability. Either it is evidence of a buried conservative streak, or a liberal sense that scoffs at the inadequate rationale behind the change of the name. Or maybe it is simply the very flimsy conceit that a real, dyed-in-the-wool Madrasi would never call his city Chennai, and that I fancy my wool to be as dyed as they come.)
At any rate, I said: ‘Madras.’
‘Ah, Madras,’ Mahesh said, and drove peaceably along for another half kilometre. Then: ‘I’ve been there once, you know.’
By this time, I had been away from home for over two weeks, and I was beginning to miss it. I would have grabbed at any opportunity to talk about Madras.
‘Oh? When was this?’
‘Seven years ago,’ he replied. Just a few hours before he arrived in the city, Mahesh explained, the chief minister at the time, J. Jayalalithaa, had arrested the opposition leader, M. Karunanidhi, in a dramatic nocturnal operation. Consequently, Karunanidhi’s party had organized a city-wide protest strike, and buses and local trains weren’t running. ‘The strike was beginning just as I got off the train,’ Mahesh said. ‘I had to finally take an auto-rickshaw all the way to my destination, Padi. It cost me Rs 120.’ After a minute, delightfully oblivious of all irony, he said: ‘These auto drivers always fleece you.’
Panambur Beach is a dozen kilometres north of Mangalore, just past a giant port that ships out, among other things, iron ore from the Kudremukh mines. A beach festival had concluded the previous day, and all its paraphernalia—balloon-shooting stalls, food stations, rusty little carousel rides, banners—still stood, unmanned and desolate in the setting sun, like a graveyard of amusement. To one side was a giant billboard that morbidly advertised the number of swimmers who had died at Panambur each year, thereby cautioning visitors to stay on the sands. It seemed to deter nobody; the beach was filled with swimmers towelling off, or still dripping, or emerging from the surf laughing and playfully flicking water at each other.
Mangalore’s open shoreline has been, in a way, the making of its particularly complex strain of cuisine. Already it is jostled, on either side, by two prominent cooking schools—the Malayali, to its south, and the Konkan, to its north. Then there is the food of its indigenous Bunt community and of the newly converted Christians who fled the Goan Inquisition when it began, in 1560, to suspect them of relapsing into their old faiths. Arab traders, settling in Mangalore as well as further down the Malabar Coast, brought their own culinary preferences—what has come to be called Moplah cuisine, with its meat-intensive biryanis and curries.
Which of these distinctive worlds of cooking is responsible for the rawa fry, I am not entirely sure. In all probability, they melded together like genetically superior parents and produced this stunner of a dish. When I was lured away from my search for the perfect fish curry, it was the rawa fry that seduced me—more often than not a ladyfish, or kane, coated with a patina of spice and a sheath of grainy semolina, and then fried into a golden-brown, crunchy segment of heaven.
I ate my first rawa fry at Mesha, an e
atery commended highly, in my interrogations of Mangalorean friends, for its food that tasted of home. Appropriately then, Mesha resides in a small, old house near the New Chitra Theatre, so unobtrusive that, in the dark, feeling a little like Theseus in his labyrinth, I wandered down multiple wrong lanes before chancing accidentally upon the right one. In a string of unlit houses, Mesha’s tiny windows were the only ones resplendent with light. In the living room, floored with red oxide and roofed with fat rafters, there were two big tables and a narrow wooden bench that reminded me of school; just beyond was another room with another table and then the kitchen, clearly in my line of sight. I was the only customer there. Mesha’s staff had taken strategic positions of lethargy around the living room, all watching a cricket match with Kannada commentary on a diminutive television—a match that was so evidently of the grassroots, sub-junior variety that I was surprised it was even being televised.
The cricket can’t have been very gripping, because when I began to ask questions about my food, Mesha’s waiters clustered around me to provide helpful, but sometimes contradictory, answers. In a few seconds, they reached a consensus that the chutney accompanying the rawa fry was made of tomato and a little tamarind, but the debate raged longer over how the fish was prepared. One section of the house argued that the layer of spice contained a little egg and flour to bind it to the fish, while the other maintained that there was no egg or flour, and that it was just an ordinary mixture of spices.
Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast Page 9