Indian Takeaway (10 page)

‘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 throw 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.

It was like leaving our flat on the Great Western Road. When my family first moved to Glasgow we shared a flat with my maternal great-uncle. The flat was in Glasgow Street. Ironic really that the new immigrants lived in Glasgow Street. We eventually bought a place on the Great Western Road, in a red sandstone tenement block. The Great Western Road is not so much a street as an infrastructural institution. It stretches aorta-like from the heart of the city heading westward through Kelvinbridge and into Hillhead. Metamorphosing, changing and developing, the road reaches out all the way to Anniesland Cross. It is Glasgow’s straightest and longest road. My parents bought a rundown little two bedroom flat above a fabric shop, aptly called Fab Fabrics. 605 Great Western Road was the first property that my parents owned in Glasgow and it was the most amazing flat in the world to grow up in. It was on the first floor of a four-storey close and out back we had a crappy little communal, dark and considerably scary garden. At the back of the garden was a giant Victorian bird cage, for no apparent reason. This flat, this garden and these streets were the most exciting playground a child could hope for. Tenements were best described by Billy Connolly as vertical villages. That is exactly how they felt.

But of course the aspirations of immigrants meant that a flat in a block was not nearly enough. My father wanted a house; a house was a statement of success, it showed that the immigrant had made it. A house had an upstairs and a downstairs, it had no communal parts. And it had its own garden. So, having settled in the idyll of Hillhead, at the tender age of six I found myself dislocated to the heart of Spam Valley, Bishopbriggs. There is a distinct lack of charm in a 1960s Wimpey house. I remember a real sense of loss for our old tenement block in the heart of the West End of Glasgow.

The first flat I ever bought as an adult was a tenement fl at in the heart of the West End of Glasgow. It was kind of karmic. And this same sense of karmic completion gave me the feeling that my brief episode of calm with Nagamuthu, the very sound of the Indian Ocean crashing quietly on the sandy beach would make some sense and grow in significance only after I had left.

I knew that something significant within me had altered. I was, as yet, unable to quantify or clarify what exactly it was. Like the sense of anticlimax I felt leaving 605 Great Western Road, arriving at Bishopbriggs made sense of it, and every house or flat I have lived in since has made sense of the experience that preceded it. I was sure that the knowledge I had garnered from Mamallapuram and Nagamuthu would unfold from within me, as my journey itself unfolded further.