Indian Takeaway (28 page)

From the passenger seat of the Sumo I am but yards from the water supply. I have seen at least fifty men and boys fill buckets, wash rags, clean their faces and hands and feet, and generally ablute. Here is what I have seen:

These are all things I have seen. What I haven’t seen is a single other passenger wanting to share my Sumo to Srinagar.

The one thing I have on my hands is time; time to think. It is difficult to believe that I am less than a week away from the end of my odyssey. Kovalam seems like a lifetime away, the coconut warmth of the south of India. I laugh to myself as I think about how strange and faintly ridiculous I must have seemed asking to cook British food in a five-star hotel.

Then the move to the simplicity of Mamallapuram; the ridiculous to the sublime. Something profound happened to me as I watched the Indian Ocean crash against the beach on
India’s east coast. The time spent with Nagamuthu, son of Mani, made me realise that I am just a man; my search was as simple as it was complex. Mamallapuram started me thinking that I was not going to get answers, just some different questions. Mysore further fed the idea of a new set of questions and I continued to pose those questions to myself, all the way to the North.

I don’t think I could have planned the gamut of experiences that my third location gave me. Mysore and Jeremy: the contemporary soul-seeker, who came to find his own solace in India, and ultimately turned out to be the modern-day colonialist. Jeremy seemed to give so very little to India but felt free to take. But how different was I? What was I giving back? I wondered.

It was another leap from the yogic idyll of Mysore to the burgeoning modernity of Bangalore. Maybe the fact that I felt so comfortable in the globally welcoming city of Bangalore says more about the city than me. There is a new India that will welcome and work for all-comers. The question is what is the sense of Indianness that resides in this new India? There I found myself asking myself the same sort of question about my own Indianness.

Goa: biscuit-tin India, the clichés and stereotypes, the home of the hippy, the place where people go to find themselves. What had I found? It was there that I learnt that I was very, very British.

Bombay was an adventure as much for the gastric part of me as the spiritual. Delhi was full of the memories of my dad, of his life and his times. There I realised that maybe this journey was all about me trying to please him as his son, to show that I am worthy. Maybe.

And here I am, sitting and waiting to travel to Srinagar. And why? Because my dad wanted me to visit the Kashmir Valley.
The more I think about this quest for self-discovery, the more I realise that it has all been about my dad. That is no bad thing. He’s my dad. I am more than a little elated that this journey has become a homage to the most incredible man I have ever had the pleasure to know: Parduman Singh Kohli.

These thoughts rush through my head. I feel clarity and confusion in equal doses. And I am still waiting for fellow passengers to buy the remaining seats in my Sumo. Perhaps, like the answers to all the questions for which I am searching, these passengers will not arrive. It’s been an hour. I decide to give up waiting. It looks like I will be buying all the seats. I offer the driver the 2,100 rupees that his supply and demand economics requires of me. He smiles; it is a charming smile, the smile of deep satisfaction, of money earned.

Had I known that it would be both his first and last smile of the day, perhaps I would have taken a moment or two longer to enjoy its rarity.

We start a series of gradual inclines, followed by less gradual declines, as we wend our way through the trees and mountains of the Kashmir Valley. The road has been hewn out of the side of a mountain, a tiny lip of connectivity through an otherwise untenable and untravellable landscape. It feels like we are spinning on the groove of the mountain, neither halfway up nor halfway down. Our progress is clear since whenever I look back I see the last few kilometres of road we have covered; this gives me both a sense of progress and a sense of hopelessness, given the time it has taken to make these meagre miles.

The driving is interesting to say the least. I have become accustomed to Indian driving, which is based firmly on the karmic cycle and a deeply held belief in God. This fatalistic approach to road safety, since it is almost universally shared, results in a system of traffic management that, despite its
precariousness, does seem to work. It’s never dull driving in India. But this journey brings another set of challenges to those of us from the ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ school of lane discipline. This mountain road is barely wide enough to accommodate two opposing streams of traffic; that is when there is a road. For some of the journey there is no road at all; just rubble and the occasional stream. Despite its limitation the road carries a myriad of coaches, buses, trucks, cars, military vehicles and cows in both directions, each trying to overtake the other. Through a complex code of hand gestures, beeping horns and flashing headlights my driver overtakes in the face of oncoming juggernauts, swerving at the last moment as the blare of their horn cuts across and through us. At times we are but inches away from a metal on metal moment. All this two or three thousand feet above the valley on a badly made road with no protective barrier. I am never more than a metre from death. It feels like a video game, without the amazing graphics. Or an on/off switch.

My driver clearly knows how to pace an eight-hour conversation; he has chosen to take the ‘enigmatic silence’ approach for the first couple of hours, punctuated by the odd burp, spit or other venial bodily function. Some might mistake his singular lack of conversation for taciturnity, but I enjoy his willingness to allow our relationship to grow and unfold with time. And time is one thing we certainly have plenty of.

In the lower reaches of our ascent we pass numerous monkeys who gather by the side of the road. I’d forgotten about the monkeys. How could I?

My three cousins, Sonu, Jonu and Monu were roughly the same age as Raj, Sanj and me. Whilst I was regarded as the tricky troublemaker in my family, coincidentally so was Jonu. The extent of my tricky troublemaking was the infamous Victoria
Sponge Cake Theft incident that I have mentioned. That and some occasional rude language. Jonu’s tricky troublemaking was in an altogether trickier and more troublemaking league. Jonu stole a monkey. I laugh when I think about it. On the way home from school as an eight-year-old, my cousin Jonu showed up at his house in Srinagar with a baby monkey under his arm.

As a parent this is clearly a challenging situation. A monkey has been stolen. Yet it is a baby monkey. It cannot simply be left to fend for itself. Quite how Jonu managed to extricate the monkey from its family group remains unclear to this day. My aunt, Minder, was at a loss. She felt obliged to allow the money to stay in the house. All seemed fine for a while. The baby monkey was cute and adorable and after a few hours even Minder found herself endeared to the newborn primate, feeding it milk from an old baby bottle. Everything was hunkydory.

Or it was, until the rest of the monkeys got wind of the fact that the baby was missing; it only took them a day and a half to notice. Somehow they managed to trace the baby monkey back to my aunt’s house. They gathered in some sort of parliament of protest around the complex; bear in mind that my uncle, Colonel Pritam Singh, was one of the more senior Indian Army officers in the state. He had an armed guard who was also rather freaked out by what seemed like a Bollywood remake of
Planet of the Apes
. Then, all of a sudden, as if in a rehearsed manoeuvre, the monkeys started banging on the roof and the doors and the window, screeching and wailing in a cacophonous bid to save their child.

This may sound funny now, but one can imagine how alarming it must have been at the time. The baby monkey was as alarmed as Jonu and the family. It clung onto Jonu for dear life. There was no way it was letting go. Catch 22: how were my
aunt and uncle going to return the baby monkey when the baby monkey seemed to want to do anything but be returned?

Day became night and the monkeys would not abate. After much deliberating and planning, Minder hit upon a genius idea. They fed the baby monkey paracetamol which made it drowsy and eventually made it sleep. They then placed the slumbering primate carefully in the porch, hurriedly retreating behind the wire screen. The baby monkey was snatched back and the screeching and wailing stopped almost instantly. The hordes of monkeys were gone in a moment, melting into the night.

Suffice to say that as we drive along I am content to only look at these monkeys that line the route.

Signs on the road from Jammu to Srinagar

I’m looking forward to Srinagar. I have arranged to stay on a houseboat on Dal Lake. This was dad’s idea. He and my mum, accompanied by Manore Uncle and his wife, spent a few days there a couple of years ago. They had a great time, by all accounts. I am meant to be staying on the same boat they stayed in. Before leaving Britain this detail seemed just that, a detail. Now, given my epiphany that my entire quest is
actually about my dad, the fact that I will be on the selfsame houseboat he was on brings a whole new significance. I really am following in his footsteps.

I am left to work out what I will cook and who I will be cooking for when I get to Srinagar. There seem to be no obvious candidates to feed and no particular dish to cook. I’m running out of ideas having cooked some of my best dishes earlier on my journey. Perhaps I could cook for the Sumo drivers? I look at the face of my driver and quickly disabuse myself of that notion. But I realise that I do need to make some arrangement with Mr Chatty for lunch.

After a little negotiation, the strong silent driver and I have agreed that we should stop to eat halfway through our eight hour journey, which at this rate would be about two o’clock. I am hugely excited about stopping to eat. One of the strongest food memories of my entire life is from the first time I made this journey. It is a meal that has stayed with me for nearly three decades. And the irony is that I never actually tasted it! As a twelve year old I remember seeing locals tucking in to plates of rice, topped with curried kidney beans smothered with a ladleful of clarified butter or ghee. This dish is known as rajmah chawal. I can see it as vividly now as I did nearly thirty years ago; a small, basic concrete shack teetering on the edge of the road, a sheer drop of a few thousand feet below, serving plate after plate of rajmah chawal to lots of happy diners. We three boys were forbidden from partaking of the food since our tender, westernised stomachs would be sure to react badly to the local standards of hygiene. Instead we ate crisps. I suppose that is what made the event so memorable for me. Falling in love with the sight, the sound, the smell, the very story of this food; everything but the actual taste.

No doubt in the decades that have followed I have elevated that meal of rajmah chawal to an altogether more ethereal place in the panoply of great foods. Of course I have had many bowls of rajmah since, from my sister-in-law Surjit’s (which, like all her cooking, is truly delicious), to that available at the famous Khyber restaurant in Bombay. Each has been tasty in its own way, but none has been close to the rajmah perfection of that roadside shack on the way to Srinagar.

So it is with boyhood excitement and intestinal trepidation that I count the minutes down to lunchtime. We arrive at a place called Peeda a little before two o’clock. I cast my eye and my mind over the place, trying to match it to my memory; perhaps the place has changed in the intervening decades; besides how reliable could the memory of a twelve-year-old boy be? But my memory is surprisingly intact; this could only be that selfsame place, teetering precariously a few thousand feet above oblivion. Now, I would like to say that my certainty is based on something romantic: the same, now considerably older, man serving the rajmah chawal who catches my eye and recognises me after nearly three decades; or perhaps I find the tree into which I had carved my initials, knowing somehow preternaturally that I would one day return and actually try the food. Neither of these are the case. The reality is that one of my abiding memories of the place is the fact that it had no toilets, and when I had to relieve myself as a boy my father sent me around the side where I pissed down into the valley a few thousand feet below. How often are you allowed to piss thousands of feet down a valley as a child, with parental blessing?