Indian Takeaway

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Indian Takeaway Page 6

by Hardeep Singh Kohli


  Then, with an almost mechanical unwillingness, the train is moving again and the chai boys are replaced with equally shabbily uniformed train staff who hand out freshly laundered white sheets, pillows and grey, scratchy-looking blankets. This is the first stage of the metamorphosis of a day train into a sleeper, the entry into the white-sheeted world of night.

  Kerala has become Tamil Nadu much sooner than I had thought. I realise this because a message appears on my phone display with a beep, welcoming me to Tamil Nadu. If Kerala was verdant, then Tamil Nadu is no different. Even in the final embers of daylight I can see the coconut tree jungles that line either side of the railway tracks. The Tamilian sky seems a little angrier than the Keralan one. We cross a beautiful lagoon cut into the red clay earth; it’s almost like civilisation hasn’t happened as the deep, feral-red clay vies with the sparkling, azure-blue water for prominence.

  We stop just a few yards ahead at a small local train station, an afterthought of a place with no more than a hut and a tree suggesting a place to stop. There is the usual all-too-frantic coming and going, which in itself would not be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that those who want to come and those who want to go seem to want to do it at exactly the same time, which is the perfect recipe for pandemonium. Amongst those joining our happy band of travellers is an old, yellowed-eyed man with a matching yellow shirt that once was white. His skin has been sunkissed on a daily basis and is now so dark it is almost black. His thick, white hair makes his skin look darker still and he possesses the most vacant of expressions. He carries a shoulder bag, a suitcase and a large sack of mangoes. Quite why he has decided to transport mangoes manually no one knows. This is after all India; mangoes are in plentiful supply. He pauses a moment and looks blankly at me and the young family. He mutters something inaudible to himself and takes himself and his mangoes further down the carriage. There is an unspoken sense of relief shared between the young family and me. Although there is space for another passenger in our compartment, we would be all too happy to travel as we are and enjoy the extra space – space that would have been further compromised by a sackful of mangoes.

  Our relief is premature. We are joined by a short neat man with large glasses and a fulsome beard. At first I mistake him for one of our Muslim brethren and I quietly enjoy the multi-faith microcosm that this carriage represents: the Glaswegian Sikh, the Hindus and the Muslim. But he’s not a Muslim; the short, neat-bearded man starts talking and informs us that he is a Christian pastor. No sooner has he established his theological credentials than he has a laptop out, unremitting in his desire to save souls for Christ’s sake. I have to say the phrase ‘Christ’s sake’ sprang to mind quite often during this journey.

  The pastor has a kind face and matching eyes, but he does look tired. No doubt God’s work is never done and requires significant overtime. The contented quiet that I have happily shared with the Hindu family has now been hijacked. Within the next few minutes we have been told that he has just completed his fourth degree, adding to his PhD in Religion (no surprise there, then). He works for Church hospital groups, raising funds and helping with administration. He has been to Trivandrum for a seminar on clinical pastoral care and is now heading back to Chennai. He starts talking to the young family, which it soon transpires are no ordinary young family. The man is the heir to the Indian equivalent of John Lewis. His family owns eight massive stores all over India, stocking everything a middle-class Indian home could want. I joke with him that like a dentist has bad teeth, he probably has a broken toaster. I don’t think the British ubiquity of toasters is the same in India. He looks at me curiously, without laughing. Not only is he the heir to a multinational department market chain he also seems a little anti-religion, which makes for fun in a carriage shared by an evangelical Christian pastor with a laptop and four degrees.

  I feel it a good opportunity to explore the carriage. I extricate myself and wander. I see a family of short people who have set up a conveyor belt of sandwich-making. The father hands the mother a slice; she butters; the daughter jams and the younger son brings the slices together in sandwich form, and eats. Beyond them a skinny girl faces her mother, both sitting cross-legged. On their newspaper plates they feast on idli and chutney; nothing could be simpler, nothing could be more delicious. An idli is a steamed dumpling made from a paste of ground rice. The idli itself has no great flavour; it is light and airy, but it is a fabulous conduit for flavour, and when combined with a rich coconut, chilli chutney can elevate the eater to another place altogether.

  I return to my compartment hungry. As if by magic, Mr John Lewis offers me a local delicacy: battered and deep-fried plantain. He can’t be aware of this most beautiful, most circular of ironies that I, a boy from Glasgow, should find myself on a train in deepest, now darkest south India on a train eating something battered and deep fried. Alas, the plantain only serves to accentuate my hunger and I am more than a little relieved when the porter comes to take our food orders. There seem to be a number of dishes on offer, but I fail fully to comprehend the porter. Mr John Lewis steps in gallantly and translates for me. There appear to be three meals to choose from: a chapatti, a paratha meal or vegetable biryani. Embarrassed by my inability to understand the porter’s Hindi and fearful to ask for a more detailed explanation of what a ‘meal’ entails, I opt for the biryani. How can you go wrong with rice and vegetables?

  While we are waiting for the food to be served, the pastor, who has failed to say anything for a few minutes, rediscovers his calling and fires up his laptop. He decides to show Mr John Lewis an image he had stored on his computer. Having shared the image with him he spins his laptop round so I too can be privy to the visual feast. It is a photograph that the pastor has taken in Bangalore airport around one of the food kiosks in the departure lounge. The image shows a medium-sized rat nestled inside an otherwise exemplary glass-topped display of food; the rat is nibbling away at an aloo boondi, a spiced mashed potato ball, battered and deep fried. Obviously it’s the sort of dish loved by humans and rodents. Let me be clear: this food kiosk is not a shabby, side-of-the-road type of affair. It’s a beautifully clean, modern Indian food outlet. It would not look out of place in Heathrow airport, save for the rat.

  Quite why the pastor has the image on his laptop soon becomes apparent. He is on a crusade against big companies squeezing small businesses out of existence. And Mr John Lewis is big business personified. My holy friend tells me that this 30rupee boondi sells for a sixth of the price in a street stall, yet people feel that street stalls are less hygienic. They are willing to pay the 25-rupee difference in an airport, yet the food is no less unhygienic.

  It’s a valid point, but I still feel that having a screensaver of a rat eating an airport snack is more than a little weird. Mr John Lewis looks so angry he may explode at any moment with rage. He was not best pleased with the pastor prior to his rant on big business; he is decidedly less well disposed now.

  The awkward post-rat silence is broken by the food arriving. I appear to be the only diner. The pastor seems not to eat and the John Lewises have packed a lovely meal of parathas and chutney. My vegetable biryani is surprisingly bland: a massive helping of rice with carrots and peas and the very occasional guest appearance made by a floret of cauliflower. It is accompanied by a thimbleful of onion raita. Rice for Goliath, raita for David. But I eat, uncomplaining and grateful for the sustenance.

  Then it is time to lower bunks and make beds, all of which happens noiselessly and surprisingly efficiently on Indian trains. Passengers become automatons for those few minutes as sheets are spread, pillows placed and blankets unfurled. Individuals exchange places in the cramped space as if choreographed by some unseen director. At times it is almost balletic.

  It is a strange night. I drift in and out of a fitful sleep. The constant motion of the train lulls me off into a gentle sleep, then the infuriatingly frequent stops allow new blood on the train: loud, awake people who fill the lower bunks in other parts of the c
arriage before themselves drifting off to sleep.

  Having started my journey some twenty-three hours earlier we finally arrive in Chennai. No matter what the clocks in the station tell me, my body seems to refuse to accept that it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. More asleep than awake, I haul myself out of the train and make for the front of the station. I hope to catch a taxi the remaining 60km or so I need to travel to reach Mamallapuram. I find a decent-looking man outside the station, who ushers me excitedly towards the car park. My Hindi is terrible so I am blissfully unaware of the fact that my decent-looking man is not the owner of a taxi; he is an auto rickshaw driver. For the uninitiated, an auto rickshaw is a scooter around which is attached the paraphernalia of passenger transport. It’s like a small covered couch being pulled along by a 75cc engine. The sides are open adding a certain vibrancy to the journey. They are invariably black with yellow hoods and are best described as rats on wheels.

  I love travelling in auto ricks. You feel much more part of the city, hearing and seeing everything at first hand rather than from the back seat of a cab. Besides which, right now I have little choice, since there would appear to be a dearth of cabs around. I agree a price of 500 rupees with the driver. That would seem to be the only thing we agree, since I’m not altogether sure he knows exactly where we are going. It’s not till much later on this 60km journey that I fully understand the implications of what I have agreed to.

  We stop to check the destination with the local English speaker. This is a bizarre three-way conversation between me (who is speaking English), the rickshaw driver (who is speaking Tamil), and the local English speaker (who speaks both). The driver then refuels and checks the air in the tyres. ‘Long journey,’ he says to me and almost smiles. Long journey. I should have realised then …

  If you are unused to travelling by auto rickshaw, then a short journey around a city can be quite hair-raising and a tad bruise-worthy. I am not new to the auto rick experience, yet what I hadn’t fully taken into account was the fact that Mamallapuram is not just 60km away. It’s 60km down a broken, pot-hole-infested, sometimes non-existent road that would seem like an arduous quest even in a luxurious four-wheel drive.

  I am bumped and thumped and thrown around the whining little auto rickshaw for the best part of two long hours. My already tired body soon aches with the unrelenting physical assault of the journey.

  Seven things I saw on my two-hour auto rickshaw journey

  The shell of a white car with no seats or upholstery driven

  by a boy sitting on a yellow plastic bucket.

  A fully grown man going off to work with a Spiderman

  lunchbox.

  A mother with three children on a scooter.

  A bolting cow narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a

  packed minibus.

  About eleven beautifully turned out and uniformed school

  kids in one auto rickshaw.

  Two children dressed as clowns.

  Three sari-clad ladies making themselves wet with a

  sprinkler, as if attempting to realise a Bollywood cliché

  just for me …

  When I eventually get to Mamallapuram I am shattered. I set off from Kovalam nineteen hours ago. I feel defeated. This defeat is compounded by the auto rickshaw driver reneging on the deal we had struck when leaving Chennai. The 500 rupees we had agreed on has now escalated to 700 rupees. I refuse point blank to be blackmailed and after much haggling I pay him 650 rupees. As I walk away from his wronged rebukes I realise that I have saved myself a massive sixty pence. I try to convince myself that it isn’t about the money: who can put a price on principle?

  I check into Greenwoods Beach Resort and fall face first and fully clothed into bed. Which is a mistake because the mattress is the typically hard Indian type: great for your back, not so good for your face. But I sleep.

  Three hours later the afternoon has become evening. I am woken by the sound of an errant child, bemoaning his lot in a language I guess to be Tamil. A day ago I was coddled in the five-star luxury of the Taj, and here I find myself in an altogether different world. A basic room with a (hard-mattressed) double bed, a dresser, an Igo TV set with an Onida remote control (which doesn’t work), a small bathroom, no toilet paper, no soap. The only wall adornment is a row of four rust-coloured pegs; there used to be five. There is an AC unit, the noisiest AC unit I have ever experienced and of course it would have to be right over the head of the bed. But the room, such as it is, is clean and comfortable and it’s home for the next few days. It has been more than twenty-four hours since I last felt clean. I need to feel clean. I wash the day’s journey away with the only water that is available: dirty, cold water and I step out to examine the rest of the ‘resort’ that fatigue had blinded me to on my arrival.

  Greenwoods is actually a very charming place. An old rambling house, it is built around a beautiful central garden, tended to and loved by the family that run the guest house. The garden is full of trees and flowers and plants and in the very centre of this fecundity sits a multi-coloured shrine to Lord Ganesh, the elephant god. It’s low season so there seems to be more family that guests.

  There is a terrace all the way around the first fl oor, looking in and down on the garden. The errant child is attempting to cajole an older female relative into coming and seeing something high up in a tree. She refuses to move. The child disappears out of view and returns with a long cane at the end of which is a home-fashioned wire hoop. The cane is perhaps three times longer than the grubby-faced boy, but when has endeavour ever stopped a four year old? He lifts the stick up into a mango tree and after a series of sharp, awkward movements, his bounty is released. A large green mango falls to earth. Enormous actually.

  The green-fruited prize assuages his Tamilian moans, and he and his younger sister now work out how best to cut the bugger. The joys of childhood.

  After this brief tour and the ad hoc circus performance, all seems right and proper in the world. I ask the older female relative for directions to the Fisherman’s Colony. When Mamallapuram was hit by the tsunami and the seafront devastated, a lot of fishing families lost their livelihoods, which were fairly basic to begin with. The Colony took a year to rebuild. I have arranged to meet one such fisherman, Nagmuthu, son of Mani. He sounds like a character from either The Lord of the Rings or the He-Man cartoons that used to run on ITV on Saturday mornings.

  I would like to say that I had found Nagamuthu, son of Mani, by writing a letter to a cousin’s friend who knew a man at the local newspaper who searched the local records and spoke to local people and found a likely candidate. But I actually found Nagamuthu’s email address via a website about the events surrounding the tsunami. Why him? Well, he seemed able to communicate in English and he was very happy to let me come and cook.

  Greenwoods was telling the truth when it referred to itself as a ‘Beach Resort’. It’s barely minutes from the sands. On walking to the sea one soon realises how tourist driven Mamallapuram truly is. Trinket shops, cyber cafés, massage centres, guest houses – it’s an unending line of consumer-driven businesses. One of the little stalls sells but three types of produce: cigarettes, cold drinks and toilet paper: surely the distillation of the western tourist’s needs?

  Soon I’m off the hot tarmac and have the sand between my toes. There are a handful of beach-fronted shacks and I have yet to see anything that looks like a fishermen’s colony. Two boys play cricket on the beach; one is wearing what looks remarkably like an Arsenal football top. As I draw closer I realise that it is an Arsenal football top. As an Arsenal fan myself, I consider stopping and chatting to him about the fragility of our midfield last season, to ponder as to whether the back four is less well suited to the offensive component of the modern game and discuss at length the options for an ‘in-the-box’ striker; but I think better of it. Instead I ask him where I might find Nagamuthu, son of Mani. It would appear that I am standing right outside his shack, the Fisherman Restaurant. I should hav
e guessed.

  Mani’s shack is little more than a lean-to covered in bamboo. A new concrete wall raises the restaurant floor a couple of metres off the sand, and steps welcome you in. It is sweet, with half a dozen tables, each with a pretty coloured lightshade above. At the back is a small concrete building, the kitchen I’m guessing. There is an old man asleep on the floor and something stirs in a hammock slung between the two central supports of the empty restaurant. The stirring is Nagamuthu; the old man is Mani. Nagamuthu, son of Mani, is asleep in his hammock. There’s no way he’s going to overthrow Skeletor and win back the Enchanted Forest with mid-afternoon siestas. No way.

  He greets me warmly as he rubs sleep out of his eyes. He is a short man, under five and a half feet with Dravidian dark skin. He is stocky and strong, with the sort of musculature that comes from repetitive hard work rather than a gym. He shows me around the kitchen, which is basic. Three steps deep and five paces across, it’s small; he has a two-ring burner and a single fridge. I’m now slightly panicking inside; what am I going to cook? Nagamuthu suggests we go to his nearby house to relax and chat. We walk up the hill behind the kitchen and the colony becomes apparent. Nagamuthu tells me that at the time of tsunami, although they lost all their beach-front businesses, luckily their houses were protected. Had it not been for the beach-front shacks … His voice tails off into uncertainty.

  Outside his house there’s a discarded fishing net and a motor boat engine. We enter his house.

  There are times in one’s life when one realises how others live, the bounties that have been bestowed on us and the hardships afforded to others. For me, this is one of those times. Nagamuthu’s house is a single room, smaller than his kitchen at the shack. It has a mattress on the floor, a fan and a TV set. The walls have been painted a moss green, the colour now distressed and peeling with time. One room. That’s it. Real life. Prone on the floor in the midst of watching a Bollywood song and dance number is a woman I later find out to be Nagamuthu’s sister. She hurriedly collects herself and some clothes and vacates the room, killing the Bollywood soundtrack as she goes. Nagamuthu pulls up a stool for me to sit on while he sits cross-legged on the floor.

 

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