I was in Delhi early in 2007, in the middle of a short work trip that involved copious travel, and found myself rather discombobulated in a mid-range hotel on a Sunday. I had to remind myself that I was in Delhi and that it was in fact a weekend. I decided to step out of my room into the faded colonial glory that is Connaught Place. Because it was Sunday, it was busy; very busy. Families laughing, lovers quarrelling, dogs barking; then dogs laughing, families quarrelling and lovers barking. Such is the temporal nature of life.
I happened upon a buzzing Cafe Coffee All Day and knew what I must do: drink a coffee for my wife. The place was jumping; a TV blaring noisy and average American MTV. It was mostly full of spoilt brat Delhi kids drinking overpriced coffee and swearing loudly in Americanised English. A few tourists inhabited the air-conditioned sanctuary. I took a table for two. The place filled up so that the sole remaining seat was opposite me. In walked this exceedingly chilled-out guy with long hair and shades; he asked if he could join me. We got chatting and I discovered that Jeremy, a Filipino American, was a devotee of the art of yoga. So devoted was he that he quit life in California as a paediatric cancer nurse and had set up a small yoga school in a place called Mysore. This was too serendipitous, too much of a coincidence. I had always wanted to visit Mysore; my father-in-law studied medicine there in the late fifties and it sounded like a part of India untouched by modernity, still traditional in many ways. It seemed to me that places like Mysore had managed to slip under the burgeoning tourist radar of India. Obviously Goa, Bombay and the like were well-known and well-travelled destinations, but I had thought very few westerners would venture to Mysore.
I was totally wrong. Jeremy told me that Mysore was a hotbed for yogic activity; there were white faces everywhere and numerous yoga centres and hippy hang-outs, including his own.
He seemed such an incongruous person to visit on my adventure through India, a Filipino American former paediatric cancer nurse who is now running a yoga school in the city my father-in-law studied medicine at. Incongruous though he may be, Jeremy also epitomises a contemporary take on that sixties and seventies adventure to India I’ve mentioned before; foreigners who came to India for self-discovery through yoga, spirituality and a pursuit of inner peace. Now it’s the spiritual component to the globalisation of India.
If Jeremy is on a quest to find himself he can aid me on my quest to find myself. How different is Jeremy’s experience of India from mine when you actually shake it down? He is a western child of an immigrant who has arrived in India to pursue his truth. Isn’t that exactly what I am, albeit an immigrant, one generation removed from India itself? If I can work out what he, as an American Filipino, is learning from India then perhaps I can apply that to my own experience. Cooking for Jeremy should be interesting; yogis are very funny about what they eat, although he has assured me that they are omnivores at his school. And most of the yoga practitioners I know all look like they could do with a decent meal. I intend to provide that, based around the delights of Lancashire and its hotpot. And maybe I will be able to touch my toes for the first time in a decade.
Here I am the next morning with yet another hot sweet coffee watching the beautiful golden light of Karnataka in the morning. There is a curious thing about the light in India. For some reason film never seems able to capture the sun’s resplendent haze as dawn breaks beautifully over the subcontinent. Beautifully lit coconut groves, shimmering with texture and contrast to the naked eye become just a bunch of coconut trees when committed to film. Or perhaps I am viewing India through my own personal rose-tinted filter?
The train chugs and rocks and creaks onward to an ever nearer Mysore. Not long now, not long. The train slowly wakens, the coffee vendors and the light combine to stir even the deepest of sleepers.
As I said, Mysore is a place I have always wanted to visit and I have heard many different stories about the place. Mysore is famous for two things: the production of sandalwood soap, the fragrance of which is unparalleled in the world of beauty products; and possibly the most beautiful Maharajah’s palace in all of India. The palace was completed nearly a hundred years ago and is said to be illuminated by no less than 5,000 lights – that’s when they are all working. The city was politically and culturally prominent in the fifteenth century when it was ruled by the Wadiyar kings on and off until Independence in 1947. They were great patrons of the arts and culture. But to my mind the single most appealing fact about Mysore is its unusually small population for an Indian city. It is said to be less than a million people.
And the unusually uncrowded Mysore is lovely; at least the Mysore I am seeing. Jeremy emailed me his address and through the gift of text messaging has sent me directions that I somehow have managed to convey to the rickshaw wallah. We leave the smart train station heading off to the nearby suburb of Gokalam. As we travel down leafy wide streets canopied by over-arching trees splattered with brilliant red blossom, I enjoy the gentle calm to this cool beautiful morning. The sky is big and has a welcoming tranquillity about it. The morning breeze augurs well for a temperate day ahead. I shan’t miss the oppressive heat of Kovalam and Mamallapuram.
Cooking for Jeremy gives me a unique chance to pull together a variety of elements from new India. The yogic tradition that stretches back to my own childhood is an obvious and delightful coincidence; the fact that foreigners are still coming to India four decades on in a desire to engage with eastern mysticism is fascinating to me. Combine this with the status of Mysore as an ancient Indian city, steeped in culture and tradition, and, finally, with my father-in-law’s links with the place, it gives me an overall sense of warmth.
I arrive at what my rickshaw driver assures me is Gokalam. I am tired but pleasantly surprised by the prettiness of Mysore. Jeremy meets me outside the small Ganesh shrine in his street, an easy landmark for rickshaw drivers and beggars. At this point I realise that Jeremy is only one conversation better acquainted to me than those numerous rickshaw drivers and beggars. I barely know the man, yet have entrusted myself to him for the next few days. I’m sure I don’t let my panic show. The centre occupies the second and third floor of Durga Mansions in a picturesque suburb of Mysore. The kitchen, where I will later be cooking, and the bedrooms are on the second fl oor and the yoga room and training area are up on the third with Jeremy’s and Suresh’s rooms.
Jeremy takes me up to the third floor immediately and offers to show me a few loosening moves. My timing is far from perfect since Jeremy has a meditation class with Suresh, his guru, and so we have limited time. I’m hardly complaining. I have just arrived and haven’t yet visited the toilet. There is a very real chance that this body-bending behaviour may well cause me some ‘natural’ embarrassment. I am bent and pulled and pushed and breathed and I try hard to look like I know what I am doing whilst hoping against hope that my rectal gas will remain rectal. This yoga lark is bloody hard work. There seems a beautifully visual irony as the brown-skinned Indian man (me) struggles to follow the yogic shapes of the loose-limbed yellow-skinned Filipino American man (Jeremy). Whilst at the time all my efforts were focused on remaining upright and non-flatulent, with hindsight perhaps that moment said as much about modern India as my journey of self-discovery. Maybe.
Suddenly the enigmatic Suresh appears, as if out of the ether, noiselessly joining us. He also has long hair tied back. He has dark, brooding eyes and an honest, open face. When he smiles he shows kindness. He seems like a lovely bloke. And he has a Mexican bandit moustache. So that’s the tableau: a slightly overweight, hairy Sikh bloke, a good-looking, buff Filipino American and a Svengali-looking Indian dude with a great moustache. All we need now is a buxom girl trying to learn yoga whose clothes keep falling off and we have the makings of a really bad porn movie.
Suresh intimates that it is time for their meditation class. Jeremy has been learning from Suresh for almost eighteen months. His training should be complete in another two and a half years. They kindly let me sit in on the meditation.
We ente
r the yoga room. A Bhudda sits contently in the corner, an iPod sits contently in its iDock. This juxtaposition should have given the game away immediately. Suresh and Jeremy sit down in a very strategic way, tucking certain parts of their left legs in and under certain other parts of their right legs. I soon realise that nothing yogis do is ever anything other than completely thought through. They plan to meditate for seventy-five minutes. Seventy-five minutes. I have never done anything that involves sitting still in one place for seventy-five minutes. And sitting in one place while watching two other blokes breathing and sitting still in one place, is not about to become the first way I spend seventy-five minutes sitting still. Thankfully Jeremy says that I can leave whenever I get bored. But what is the patience protocol in the world of meditation? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? I know I can’t sit on the hard concrete floor for an hour and a quarter, not with what my arse has been through on the trip thus far. I resolve that it would be rude to leave any sooner than thirty-five minutes in, and that I should wait for an arbitrary number somewhere between thirty-five and forty, so as I don’t seem too keen to exit.
They unfurl the curtains and a gloom descends on the already gloomy evening. A small candle is lit before a deity, offering the only real light in the room. The yogic two sit cross-legged, right foot on left thigh, left foot under right thigh. Impressive, and they haven’t even started the breathing bit. Suresh takes his mobile out and sets the alarm for the end of the session. I love the collision of worlds; the meditative wonder of yoga and the harsh electronic alarm of a Sony Ericksson mobile phone. In many ways, all that is India is contained in this very room: the spiritual heritage that Suresh, a Karnatakan villager, represents; the contemporary fascination that the ‘civilised’ west has with the subcontinent, epitomised by Jeremy’s presence; and me: the bastard child of east and west, the chronicler of the contemporary.
Suresh starts a gentle chant, a monotone that is strangely hypnotic. This continues for ten minutes or so. It is both calming and reassuring. Then, in a ritual complex in its simplicity, they each inhale gradually through a single nostril, seizing more air with each nasal inhalation. The third inhalation is the final. They then hold their breaths, and with open hands resting on knees, they count. They then exhale through the other nostril, in three controlled bursts. They repeat the same for the other nostril. It’s slightly mesmeric, the sounds of air passing through the nose, the very deliberate movement of the hand to the opposite nostril to block it. Every so often, no doubt in a pattern clearer to the more well-trained eye, they perform a series of alternate nasal clearances, by which I mean the most definite clearing of nasal cavities. Then the process begins all over again. I am enchanted for nearly three quarters of an hour. The dull city sounds ever more distant with every inhalation, its random, unstructured noise falling into sharp relief against the tranquillity of hypnotic human breath. It’s truly beautiful. But I really need to break wind, so I leave …
I wander about the rooms, generally trying to get a sense of the place. There are all the usual curios and accoutrements to spirituality lying around: Ganesh statues, Hanuman wall hangings, incense sticks, a pack of playing cards and some poker chips. A pack of playing cards and some poker chips? Surely some mistake. As I shuffle the cards and riffle the chips, Jeremy, fresh from his breathing and breath-holding, appears from around the corner.
‘Do you play?’ he asks.
‘I found them lying over there, by the incense.’
I wonder why I sound so guilty. Of course I play cards. I don’t know any Indian kid that doesn’t play cards. All the best card games I ever learnt I learnt in India and played with my cousins. Back home in Glasgow some of the most fun nights were when my mum and dad had invited friends round. The smoked-glass topped coffee table was pushed to one side and they all sat cross-legged on the floor, a white sheet beneath them, whiskies by the men, tea by the ladies and they all gambled the night way. They played three-card brag, or Flash as they called it. I remember vividly one evening begging my dad to let me play; I was only thirteen but he succumbed, especially after the insistence of Dr Jugal.
‘Let the boy play. He will be sorely beaten, and then he will learn not to ask to play with the adults.’ Jugal smiled a sinister smile, pretending to the rest of the room that he was joking.
As I collected up the twenty-eight pounds of my winnings some time later that same evening, Jugal was no longer smiling.
‘Do you play?’ asks Jeremy, again.
‘Yeah. Poker.’ I reply. ‘Hold Em.’
His face breaks into a smile. ‘Great,’ he exclaims. ‘I love Hold Em. No one to play with here. Shuffle up and deal.’
So I do.
I would never have thought a spiritually obsessed yogi like Jeremy would be a card player, let alone a poker player. It just doesn’t seem right. I love the game and play often; but not like him. He wants to travel the world and play in tournaments. He reckons he’s got what it takes to be a winner. I don’t tell him that I have played in Vegas and everyone thinks they have got what it takes to be a winner. I’m not sure he wants to hear that. Jeremy reckons that through his yoga he is somehow enabled to look deep into the soul of his opponents and tell what hand they have, or whether they are bluffing or trapping. I’m not sure he can, and after I relieve him of his first one hundred rupees, I think my instincts may be right. He insists we play another hundred-rupee game. I’m not sure I want to alienate my host: I can’t say no, yet I don’t want to take more rupees off him.
Subtly I bring up the subject of money. How does he make a living here? He tells me that he charges each student board and lodging for their stay at the school. He already has savings from the States and those are more than enough to live off. The money from students he intends to use to buy his way into poker tournaments. He is planning a trip to Barcelona in a few months. This is very strange. I never expected to be playing poker in India, least of all with a yoga freak. I take his next hundred rupees off him and suggest I start planning for dinner. I can tell he is awaiting the next opportunity to win his money back. I will let him try, but after I have cooked; at least then if he throws me out I will have achieved my goal.
This cooking adventure has disaster written all over it. When I’d checked with him, Jeremy had said it would be fine to cook meat. After I’ve lightened his wallet of 200 fine Indian rupees, I ask him where I can source my ingredients. I have planned it all out: Lancashire hotpot. Mutton (you rarely get lamb in India), potatoes, carrots, onions – all readily available. A big, bubbling pot of tender meat and buttery soft vegetables that warm the very soul, much like yoga itself. I could easily concoct a stock in the afternoon with some roasted bones and herbs. It was all going to be a very beautiful food-type thing.
Then the bombshell drops.
‘We can’t have meat,’ he says, rather sheepishly.
‘No meat. OK.’ I try and look hopeful. Lancashire hotpot with chicken might work.
‘And no chicken,’ he continues, as if he had read my mind, a feat he never once managed to achieve during poker. It’s going from bad to worse.
‘Let me just check. No meat and no chicken?’ I ask.
‘No meat, no chicken,’ he confirms.
‘Why?’ I implore.
‘The cook is funny about meat and chicken in the kitchen. She’d rather you cooked vegetarian.’
‘I can’t really cook vegetarian.’
Jeremy is lovely and couldn’t have been more apologetic. I try hard not to panic. Remember, I love vegetables. I adore them. I am not to be mistaken for my elder brother, Raj. Vegetables are great whenever they are accompanied by meat or chicken. However a meal containing only vegetables is like a broken pencil; utterly pointless. What is the focus of a plate of food if there is no symphony of flesh in the centre? British food is all about meat and two veg, not veg and two veg (which would be three veg, if the rules of simple arithmetic were to be followed). I would even be prepared to allow fish or shellfish to take pride of place i
n the centre of a platter. But nut roast? Or caulifl ower bake? Or aubergine surprise? No. Thank you, but no. They are not complete and fulfilling meals. It is with this food-based philosophy in mind that I have never really perfected or indeed bothered my overweight Glaswegian arse when it comes to the cooking of vegetarian food. Life is too short. (Although my doctor suggests it would be considerably longer if I entertained the notion of a vegetarian diet from time to time.)
I’m humped, as we say back home on the Byres Road. Failure had to come at some point; I’m sanguine enough about that. But so early, when it all looked so promising? And to cap it all I feel dirty; deep-down dirty. Twenty-four hours ago I was charging up and down the platform at Chennai station looking for a non-existent train seat; I spent a sleepless night on that selfsame train; followed by the better part of a day bending my unsupple body and watching men breathe. I feel in need of some commune with warm, cleansing water. Surely every yogi would approve of such a desire? I excuse myself and head for a bath.
In Britain there is only one type of bath. You fill the tub with water and take a bath. Uncontroversially straightforward. In our family we call this a ‘fish bath’, so named by my Aunty Pavittar, my dad’s younger sister. I assume, though have never had it verified by Pavittar, that a fish bath is so called because it is the sort of bath a fish might enjoy, allowing them to swim in the open waters of a full tub. But this form of bathing, whilst wholly uncontroversial to the British psyche, is a complete anathema to the Indian way of being. A shower they could understand. But a fish bath? Indians do not understand how cleanliness is achieved by lolling around for hours in a pool of your own dirt. We advocate a different approach to the art of bathing; this we call the ‘bucket bath’. Let me explain.
Indian Takeaway Page 9