I ask him about his life. His father is a fisherman, his grandfather was a fisherman, as far back as he can remember or anyone else in his family can recall, the men would fish. He too is a fisherman, but less so these days. He devotes more time to cooking and running the Fisherman’s Restaurant. The tsunami hit the village hard. Mallamapuram always had a strong tourist sector. The beautiful carved temples saw to that. The fishermen had become used to a ready market for their catch, many opening shacks like Nagamuthu’s. On the day itself he recalls that he and his father and a few other fishermen had been out laying nets at 3 a.m. Their routine was to return to harvest the nets some four hours later. This they did. By 9 a.m. they were back on the beach. They saw the wave coming. There was obvious panic amongst the fishermen. They knew this was neither a full moon nor a black moon. There could be no explanation for this tidal wave approaching …
For seven months they couldn’t fish. For that they were grateful; at least they had escaped with their lives while others still searched in vain for the bodies of loved ones. Although they were alive, one wonders about the quality of that life, relying as they did on charity handouts. The restaurant was destroyed. Sitting where I am now it is difficult to imagine the sense of fear that must have overcome those in the colony. India is a highly superstitious country; my own beloved mother has her superstitions that I will always carry with me, as if they were transmitted in the very milk she fed me. But here in this uncomplicated community, superstition is a way of life. Far fewer men now go to fish, which is in itself a good thing since stocks seem very low. Perhaps another by-product of the tsunami? In the old days, Nagamuthu tells me, regardless of the weather the fishermen would venture out, sometimes for days on end. They felt at one with the sea, attuned to its motion, a human extension of its watery being. Now they harbour suspicions. Should a stiff breeze escalate any further, many refuse to fish. Nagamuthu puts it beautifully. Pointing at his heart he suggests that that is where the tsunami now exists, within the fishermen themselves.
He offers me some lunch before taking me around the temples of Mamallapuram. Of course I accept; I love food. We wander back down to the restaurant. Sitting down at the table closest to the sea I take in the view, concentrating on the sounds of life around me rather than the hubbub of unanswered questions in my head. Mani, the father of Nagamuthu, sits at an adjacent table, noiseless. What thoughts is he pondering? I wonder, as he gazes out to a sea he has gazed out at for half a century. We are joined by the occasional crow whose ugly squawks make mango boy’s moaning seem like the sweetest of poetry. So clever are these birds that Mani needs only grab a nearby catapult in his gnarled hands and they are off, with cries of derision.
I am overcome with the complete sensory power of the ocean. The salty taste, the smell of seaweed, the cooling breeze on my skin, the sound of crashing waves and the sight of the metamorphosing seas as they turn from green to wake white and then retire to consider a similar change in a few moments’ time. Much as we pollute, abuse and use the seas, we have by no means got their measure. There is a certain self-confidence about the way in which the waves collide constantly into the land, a reminder that the seas control us, not we the seas.
My daydream digression is broken by a cornucopia of seafood. Nagamuthu has been busy in the kitchen: fish curry in a rich tomato and onion sauce tempered with curry leaves, mustard seeds and chilli, cooked to perfection; king prawns in a sweet tomato sauce, finished with a little lemon juice, succulent and fresh; and shrimps, fried in chilli, salt and pepper. All served with plain white rice. It’s absolutely delicious.
The only sort of non-Indian fish we had in Glasgow was battered and deep fried. I can only ever remember one occasion when the fish cooked in our house was breaded in the finger form. That was an utter disaster. There are some things that you will have probably realised by now and others that you will shortly learn. I am the way I am about food because:
1. My mum is an amazing cook of Indian food.
2. My dad has a deep desire to experiment and try new things (so long as they don’t contain vinegar or tamarind, both of which in his later years seem to bring him out in a coughing fit and generally allergic reaction).
There is no story more indicative of my father’s desire to experiment with food and try new things than his rather doomed adventure into the world of slow cooking. As most immigrants can testify, being a newcomer to a country more often than not requires a dual income, since each individual income earned is insubstantial. Yet my father was evangelical about his kids eating good, freshly cooked food every evening of the week. This presented obvious challenges when set within the fiscal context of both parents working. That is when my father’s discovery of the slow cooker seemed, for a week in the early 1980s at any rate, to revolutionise the world of food in our house.
The slow cooker was the perfect invention for any immigrant family. I remember the first day it arrived. Dad unpacked it and filled it full of pulses and onions and lamb and saffron and prunes. The excitement was palpable. We all saw this selection of raw ingredients enter the terracotta dish of the slow cooker but we could only imagine the flavours that would result. As dad set the machine to cook through the course of the day, he extolled the virtues of the process of gradual cooking, allowing time to pass as the juices from the meat mingled with the sun-sweetened prunes and the deep, earthy saffron, in amongst which the pulses were plumping and cooking. We left for school, our heads full of fanciful flavours and our hearts brimming with hope.
We returned that evening expecting the house to be permeated with the most exotic of aromas, the table heaving under the weight of Dad’s new slow-cooked feast. It would have been a feast indeed had he remembered to actually turn the thing on. It was as if time had stood still in that kitchen in Bishopbriggs.
These minor setbacks never held my father back. Knowing how adept my mum was in the kitchen he nevertheless continued his adventurous escapades into the world of food. No single incident combines my father’s sense of gay cuisinal abandon and my mother’s skill at cooking than the following story.
Every week my father would return home with produce from KRK. KRK was, for all Indian and Pakistani immigrants in Glasgow back when I was a boy, a lifeline of food and produce. KRK was the only place you could get spices and lentils, Indian style meat, fish, chicken and mangoes. I had not visited a traditional Scottish butcher until I was well into my twenties. If you couldn’t afford an airfare back to the subcontinent all you needed to do was pop down to KRK on Woodlands Road and buy a couple of mangoes and an eight-kilo bag of rice; it was the next best thing.
You couldn’t help but be curious about food in our house. My dad was forever coming home with random produce. I can have been no more than twelve years old but I was already gaining curiosity about food. I remember him on numerous occasions placing yet another bizarre-looking fruit on the counter at home.
‘Cook this, Kuldip,’ he would command.
‘What is it, Ji?’ asked Mum.
‘No idea,’ he would respond as he wandered off.
But my mother would invariably find a way of cooking it. And invariably it tasted delicious. In later life I realised how instinctively talented my mum is when it comes to food preparation. I have witnessed her smelling, sniffing, cutting and chewing the plethora of weird objects my dad has brought back from numerous visits to KRK. I sometimes think they see him coming and bring out their most freaky-looking vegetables and fruits, knowing that Mr Kohli with his indefatigable sense of adventure will purchase it and make his long-suffering wife find a way of cooking it.
This particular KRK trip was perhaps the most famous of all the KRK trips. Or the most doomed, depending on how you look at it. In amongst the uncontroversial staples of tinned tomatoes, moong daal, coriander and the like lurked a rather pungent paper bag. Triumphantly my father raised the bag and handed it to my mother. Somehow, lifting the bag reinforced the stench and we were all forced to take a step back. Mum asked what it was. Bo
mbay duck, Dad replied. It would appear they only had one in the shop and he’d snaffled it. Right then no one could quite work out why he had bothered, least of all my mother.
Let not the name confuse you. Bombay duck is no sort of duck at all. Oh no. It is a fish, and I doubt if it even comes from Bombay. It could be called Bhopal lamb or Dundee cake for all the relevance the name bestows on the produce. And the version he’d brought home was dried; dried and very stinky.
‘Apparently,’ my father related, ‘it’s quite the delicacy in South India.’
‘That’s great,’ my mother muttered. ‘But we live in north Glasgow.’
But, such was the patriarchal system she’d married into, Mum tugged her metaphorical forelock and put the deep fat fryer on the stove. Now, I’m not sure if she was going to fry the Bombay duck because that was how you were meant to cook it or if years of a Glaswegian culinary lifestyle had rubbed off on her to the extent that her default with all things fishy was to deep fry; but frying deep she was. We had to leave the kitchen to escape the smell of the dried fish. The lounge was no better as the acrid aroma permeated its way through the house.
Basic rule of cooking no. 1: A thing that smells before you cook it rarely smells better after you cook it. It’s self-evident. The heat accentuates the smell. Fair enough? Good.
Our house stank for months after my mum cooked that bloody Bombay duck. And I mean months. The curtains, the sofa, the carpets; no doubt even we had more than a faint whiff of the duck from Bombay about us. It was really bad. Much as I am prone to the occasional comedy hyperbole, really and truly we were constantly reminded of that fateful afternoon well into the next calendar year. To top it all, the Bombay duck didn’t even taste nice. It was rank.
Basic rule of cooking no. 2: A thing that smells foul generally tastes foul. The single and notable exception is the Malaysian fruit durian. My favourite cousin in the whole world, Teji, loves durian. He admits it smells of a teenager smeared in rancid seal oil, but if you can get beyond that, the white flesh is sweet and unctuous.
Bombay duck-gate aside, my experiences with homemade fish dishes were generally positive. Fish curry was one of the first Indian dishes I ever learnt to cook. There’s no great tradition of seafood in Punjabi households. There is of course Amritsari fish, but I have never seen that anywhere beyond a west of Scotland Indian restaurant. But what I am about to share with you is a dish borne out of economic necessity, a dish behind which is the story of a work ethic and of running a family on a limited budget. The story of Glenryck mackerel fillets in tomato sauce.
Glenryck mackerel fillets in tomato sauce did exactly what it said on the tin. They were precooked fillets of mackerel in a tomato sauce; and they were made by a company called Glenryck. Per se they were nothing special. But when my mum made her special masala and then added the fillets, the mackerel was somehow elevated to another place altogether, to a taste nirvana. I loved watching my mum cook. To this day I doubt there is anything that woman cannot rustle up. Show her how to pan fry foie gras once, and she will improve the recipe and manage to feed eight more mouths from the same helping.
I loved watching my mum cook because I loved eating. And it’s the only time she never told me to do my homework. For this dish she would slice onions, which was unusual because she almost invariably diced for every other curry. A fine dice allowed the onions to fry away to nothing and form the curry sauce. But, in this case, the slice made a feature of the onions. She would temper the oil with whole cumin, waiting till they stopped popping in the hot oil; she would then add her other whole spices: cardamom, cinnamon, bay and whole peppercorns. A little turmeric, a pinch of salt and a touch of paprika. A finely chopped chilli joined the pot and then the moment of truth: I would get to open the tin of mackerel. Always Glenryck, always fillets, always a tomato sauce. They would be poured into the pot and once the fish had heated through, dinner was served. Mackerel curry on a bed of white rice. I seem to remember that by the age of twelve I was cooking it myself. My mum always told me to experiment, to try more of one spice and less of another and work out how it tasted. If you ever asked her for a recipe she would be at a loss. She had no idea what she was doing until she was doing it. And every time it was delicious.
Life seems to have turned full circle; the first curry I learnt to cook was fish in an onion and tomato sauce and here I am, thousands of miles from Glasgow, hundreds of meals later, decades forward in time, and I am eating fish curry in a tomato and onion sauce on a bed of white rice as I watch the waves of the Indian Ocean crash against the sun-beaten sands.
Dusk is descending. It is time to prepare dinner. I thought fishcakes would be the thing to do, given the preponderance of them in the area. I always think of fishcakes as very Scottish. I suppose anything in breadcrumbs that is fried has an innate sense of Scottishness about it. Fishcakes with a parsley sauce. Smoked haddock fishcakes. Salmon fishcakes. Fishcakes are great.
Nagamuthu seems nonplussed by the idea, but I have to push on and open his mind to the new possibilities of food. Having said that, he caters for an international tourist crowd, so he’s not exactly limited in his applications of seafood. Mani, the father of Nagamuthu, is at the sink in the kitchen, cleaning fish and prawns in preparation for our culinary adventure. A lone couple sit outside, not eating, just drinking a little sweet lemon and soda. That can’t provide much of an income in the low season.
I get down to peeling and boiling the potatoes. Nagamuthu says I am his guest and that I should sit and instruct him as to what needs doing. I succumb at first, but it seems unfair and not quite in keeping with my journey that I have him sous for me. I let him peel one potato. He then has to rush out and get more lemons for the sweet lemon soda couple. I peel the other potato and both are chopped and put in the water. Ideally they should be left with skins on to keep the moisture out of the potato. I rifle through his herb selection. Mint, coriander and the ubiquitous curry leaf. I’m tempted by the curry leaf but am also aware that it is a big flavour, akin to adding sage: it has a tendency to overpower a dish if not offset by similarly strong flavours; strong flavours I wish to eschew in favour of sweet seafood and fluffy potato. I opt for some mint and coriander; the mint isn’t too minty and the coriander is equally mild. I can’t resist chucking a chilli in. When in India …
I chop them up fine with a small onion. I might soften the onion at home, just to take the fierce edge off it, but the onions here have a certain sweetness and the bite will be a familiar flavour for Nagamuthu, son of Mani. Nagamuthu returns and he asks me how I would like the seafood prepared. I notice that there are some crabs sitting on the table, looking spare and useless. They are in fact spider crabs; small and delicious but next to impossible to remove the flesh from. But they might be lovely to eat alongside the prawn fishcakes. The prawns are huge and juicy. And there is also a fish called a coconut fish. It’s a scale-free, shiny-skinned fish that, like the crabs and the prawns, was in the Indian Ocean some hours ago. So fresh. The flesh is a cross between mackerel (coincidentally) and grey mullet. It’s firm and looks like it should taste good. I decide that we will have prawn and coconut fish fishcakes. I’ll boil the crabs and they can act as a garnish. Decadent or what?
Mani fillets the fish beautifully, effortlessly, instinctively. As he shells the prawns and cracks the crabs I realise that these wizened, tired hands have been filleting, shelling and cracking for over half a century. He could do it in his sleep. He hands me the prepared seafood. I cut the prawns and fish up into the requisite chunks. I’m sweating so much. It’s eight o’clock in the evening and it’s still in the thirties. The potatoes are done. I combine the chilli, herbs and onion mixture with the mashed, salted potatoes. I throw the fish in. I ask Nagamuthu what he uses for breadcrumbs. He produces two bags of sweet rusks, the sort of thing my dad loves to dip in his tea and chew on. I crush a few up and add them to the mixture. He crushes a few more as I start forming the patties. Egg dip followed by the smashed rusks. Onto a pan of oil. I t
hrow together the tomato and mango salad and before you know it Nagamuthu and I are sitting at a table with our fish and prawn cakes in front of us.
I think he likes it because all I can hear is the sea crashing against the beach as he chews on the last crab claw.
Tonight seems like a million miles away from Kovalam and my crisis of confidence with my chicken stuffed with pesto. I want to phone my dad and remind him of the Bombay duck story and the incident with the slow cooker; I want to hear him laugh. I want my mum to roll her eyes the way she does, a half smile on her face letting me know that she loves my dad in her most Indian of ways. I feel that they are with me on this journey. With Arzooman in Kovalam I had no idea who I was and how I felt. On paper you would think that Arzooman and I would have a great deal in common. He is a middle-class Indian, skilled in English having travelled the world. We conversed fluently about food and shared a few jokes. But here I am with a man with whom I have very little intersection, a man whose life could not be more different to mine. Yet we sit in happy silence. What binds us is the fact that we are men. Ordinary men. And as ordinary men we sit and crack on crab bones and let the darkness envelope us.
I had found some genuine solace in Mamallapuram in the most unexpected of places. Nagamuthu, son of Mani, seemed happy to accept me for who I was. He accepted my food for what it was, although it wasn’t perhaps the most authentically British of dishes. On the golden beach in front of his shack I felt at once at home, at home within myself. But I had barely started my journey. To make sense of Nagamuthu and my Mamallapuram experience I needed to move on, to experience more. If I had given up after my chicken breast and Indian pesto incident with Arzooman, I would never have experienced the idyllic contentment of Mamallapuram. It was only the sense of impending failure that I had felt at the Green Cove that made the sense of accomplishment here so much more worthwhile. Similarly I would have to move on from this experience and test myself further.
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