Indian Takeaway (33 page)

A hug and a handshake and then we are off on our way. It’s a two and a half hour drive across one of India’s most famous highways. The GT Road is not simply a road, it is an institution, a symbol of the Punjab itself. Songs have been sung about it, stories told about it. The Grand Trunk Road stretches across the state delivering and receiving produce and people all through the day and night.

Billu asks me where I want to stop on the way for tea. As if I would know. He tells me about a favourite place of my parents, Hari ka Pathan. There’s a little shack by the roadside that makes fresh fish pakoras; as you know, my mum loves fish pakoras. It seems no time at all since my mum-inspired Srinagar fishcooking adventure. We are halfway home and Billu suggests we stop there for a snack before heading home for dinner. My Billu Chacha can speak English but does so rarely. He prefers the precision, the poetry of his native tongue and talks to me in mellifluous Punjabi tones. The time passes quickly and we find ourselves in Hari ki Pathan. There is a clutch of shops, a few lights and lots of barking dogs.

The shack is nondescript, which, in my experience of Indian street food, augurs well for the quality of the fare. The recently painted hoarding informs us that the shop belongs to Nimmu and Sonu. I assume either Nimmu or Sonu is the white-turbaned man who welcomes us in. My
chacha
asks what
fish are available and Nimmu/Sonu takes us over to a large polystyrene box full of freshly caught fish on ice. There’s a large fish I don’t recognise and a couple of glistening silver catfish. My uncle looks at me; I look blankly back. Billu asks for the catfish.

Nimmu/Sonu instructs one of the gang of young kids hanging around to grab the catfish. The kids burst into life. A boy of about twelve sets the light under the
karahi
, heating the oil for the eventual frying. Another younger boy guts and heads the fish with no little expertise. A third boy opens our beers and another, a study in pre-teenage surliness, brings us glasses and napkins.

Inside the shack the walls are white and plain but are absolutely dominated by Pepsi branding which emblazons three of the four walls. In the great battle of the multinational colas in the late 1990s Coca-Cola lost; India is a Pepsi territory. The only wall clear of the drinks company’s red, white and blue logo is given over to a shrine (another sort of marketing, I suppose). A couple of Hindu gods sit by an image of the Sikh gurus; I have a deep admiration for that sort of religious bet-hedging.

Nimmu/Sonu grabs a couple of large scary-looking knives; these are like regulation cleavers except on the top side of the blade, at the furthest most point, the steel twists up and back round, hook-like. Perhaps this is for ease of hanging, or perhaps it is to enable the swift and successful gouging of an adversary’s eye in the final throes of bloody hand-to-hand combat …

Nimmu/Sonu starts sharpening the knives against each other, making the knives seem even scarier and creating a scary sound. I catch his eye. I’m even more scared. He smiles. I’m not sure that I want to smile back. Deftly he fillets the fish and divides the fillets up into bite-size pieces. A dip in gram
flour, salt and pepper followed by a few minutes in the hot oil. Served up on the ubiquitous steel plate with a half lemon slice and some chutney, a blend of mint, coriander and tamarind. It is absolutely divine. The fish has steamed beautifully within the thin batter and the spicy chutney compliments the succulent fish.

We sit and eat our second plate of deep-fried fish and drink our Thunderbolt Super Strong lager beer. It could be Friday night in Glasgow instead of Sunday night in Punjab. All we need is a fist fight and a glassing ….

The last hour or so back to Ferozepure is testing. Darkness hasn’t so much fallen as crashed, and the empty road presents unexpected hazards; an odd, lone pedestrian, a drunken motorcyclist and an abandoned cart. Thankfully none of these offer any more than a passing difficulty and we are soon in Greater Ferozepure. I have been travelling for weeks and feel ready for the welcome of home. Home: that word again. I can feel the end of my journey almost upon me. Almost.

M
y name is Hardeep Singh Kohli and I am the grandson of the late Harbans Singh Kohli. And I am home.

I am aware that when I refer to India as home it may seem a little contradictory, given my cast-iron British credentials and the well-documented love of my Scottishness. But within me somewhere still stirs the son of Punjabi soil. As we draw up to my grandfather’s house at 22 Moti Bazaar I belong nowhere but in this moment, in this place.

I find it difficult to be objective about Ferozepure. I have never properly lived here, spending a few summers as a child, followed by a handful of trips as an adult, yet this place means so much to me. I get excited if, on those rarest of occasions, I meet someone who comes from Ferozepure. I feel we are kith and kin, instantly bonded. I feel the same way when in the big smoke of London I meet someone from Glasgow. I even smile when I overhear the accent on the tube in London. But my history with Glasgow is
my
history with Glasgow. My history with Ferozepure stretches back for generations; it is a shared history. But when I talk about Ferozepure it still feels like home.

My Billu
Chacha
loves Ferozepure. For him it is a paradise of sorts. Every street has a myriad of shops and kiosks; almost every third shop is food related, be it snacks and starters,
dhaba
-type
cafés or, beloved of Indians, the sweet shops. Food is a very large part of the retail experience in Ferozepure and wherever you look someone is about to eat, is in the throes of eating or has just finished eating. It’s certainly a vibrant city. And I suppose that’s why Billu loves it.

Our farmlands, an hour or so away from the city, border Pakistan. During the conflict of the 1990s, when India and Pakistan were effectively at war over the Line of Control in Kashmir, the Indian government requisitioned our farmlands and filled the ground full of mines in the hope that it would prevent any Pakistani advance into India. In best keeping with the incompetence of Indian bureaucracy the plans that specified where the mines were placed were ‘mislaid’. For years the land was untillable and unusable, remaining dormant while officialdom scratched around for the plans they couldn’t locate. Admittedly compensation was offered, but nothing happens quickly in India, nothing except incompetence. For a year my uncle and his family had to survive without income. This he was able to do thanks to the trust and support of local businessmen who were only too happy to defer payment to a later date. Maybe that’s why he loves this city.

‘Don’t you want to know why I’m here?’ I ask Billu, his handsome face a picture of peace.

‘No. You’re here. You’re home. That’s enough for me.’ He doesn’t mean what he says in any romantic way. He is the most matter-of-fact man I know. When he says that I am home, that is exactly where I am.

‘What do you need to do?’ he asks.

‘Buy some turbans,’ I reply. ‘And I need to cook.’

‘Fine.’

When Billu says things are fine they invariably are just that. Fine.

As we walk the bazaar and alleys Billu tells me that everything he wants is no more than 500 yards from his front door. This is easily verifiable since he has taken me 300 yards around the corner, past Heera Mundi, to buy some turbans. I love coming to Ferozepure to buy turbans. I love wearing turbans in Ferozepure. It is one of the few instances in life when I am not the only man wandering about with eight yards of pink fabric wrapped skilfully around his head. In Britain the younger Sikh population, what there is of it, tries hard not to draw attention to itself. They wear small sleek black turbans that almost belie the very nature of the turban itself. There is no pride in their turban-wearing. And who can blame them? It wasn’t easy growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s wearing a turban; and, for many, even contemporary Britain can be a little unforgiving of the turban. But here in the Sikh heartlands I am joined by tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of other turban-wearing Sikhs who embrace whole-heartedly and whole-headedly the panoply of possibility when it comes to turban colour.

There are four turban shops, each side by side. They have narrow fronts but stretch cavernously away from the dusty squalor of the road. They sell nothing but turbans, which for me is ideal. The shop I favour is no more than a metre and a half wide, more than half of which space is given over to the shelving and the counter which runs the entire length of the shop, perhaps five maybe even six metres in total. Behind the counter, floor to ceiling, are lengths of turban material. Every colour imaginable, and a few that have yet to be given names, grace the shelves behind the industrious workers. The narrow counter itself is six deep in a spectrum of fabrics, all of which have been unfurled and inspected, in the hope of a prospective purchase.

My style of turban is commonly known as the Jat style. There are myriad turban types and variations, but I like to
think the Jat style is the precursor to all others, given that the Jats are the farming class, the very roots of the Sikh religion: it all started with us. The Jat style is characterised by its size. It is not a turban for the faint-hearted. Yard wide fabric is purchased to the desired length, a precise art that can make or break the turban size itself. In my case it is eight and half yards exactly. Not eight and a quarter and certainly not eighteen inches short of nine yards. Exactly eight and a half yards. The fabric is then ‘doubled’, which involves cutting it in half to give two lengths of four and a quarter yards each. Still with me? These are then sewn together along their length giving a final turban material of two yards in width and four and a quarter yards in length. It’s a truly beautiful thing.

I have many, many turbans. I am often asked how many, a question to which I don’t have a definitive answer; I normally reply that I have at least eight pink turbans. One can surmise the extent of the remainder of my collection based on that statistic alone. Today I am after another subtly different pink turban, as well as a dramatic black, an interesting blue, an autumnal cream and one other colour yet to be decided. I ask for a particular shade of turban and an old bespectacled man with two-day-old stubble, and body odour to match, climbs an unsafe-looking ladder (one that vies with him in the age stakes). He unfurls, flag-like, each roll of material. In the past I have found the choice a little overwhelming, and I have found myself leaving with turbans that would look great on the head of a Punjabi farm hand 50km south of Amritsar but work significantly less well on Sauchiehall Street on a wet Wednesday afternoon when you’re looking for change to pay for parking.

My grandfather and my father bought their turbans from this shop, and to this day my
chacha
has his turban needs satisfied by the selfsame vendor. There’s something very comforting
about being part of history, no matter how small or significant that history may be. But for me, this modest little turban shop, this palace of life, this kiosk of colour, is a direct and tangible link between my Sikh past and my Scottish future. My turban is very much part of who I am. Growing up in Glasgow in the eighties and nineties, to be a fat kid with glasses and a turban was to invite ridicule and abuse. I suffered the slings and arrows of that outrageous warfare as I sought to find a place for myself in society. I had all sorts of identity crises. At one point I wanted to convert to Catholicism. Absurd I know, to move from a groovy, young guilt-free religion like Sikhism into the teeth of an ancient, guilt-laden religion full of self fl agellation and self-doubt.

It was a struggle to work out who I was in Glasgow. A real struggle. I was so very desperate to be accepted as Glaswegian, as Scottish. I was fed up of being asked where I came from and the questioner not being happy with my response of ‘Bishopbriggs’. I was a brown-skinned child: I couldn’t possibly come from Glasgow. Justifying yourself gets tiring.

Moving to London helped, since no one seems to come from London and therefore everyone is an outsider. This must be annoying for those increasingly few native Londoners who feel so marginalised within their city of birth. I may have been born in London but it means nothing to me; I never really lived there as a child. Neither have I ever lived in Ferozepure, but it feels very different.

Back at 22 Moti Bazaar I survey the colour choices of my turbans. I wonder how many turbans have similarly been
surveyed by my father and my grandfather. I wish my father were here. I have wished for him at various points on this quest. I would have loved to be with him in Kovalam as I looked out over the Arabian Sea. He would have enjoyed the sun setting over the beach at Mamallapuram. He would have marvelled at Bangalore. I could have done with his presence on the train from Bombay to Delhi. Delhi is always much more exciting with my dad around. And I have always wanted to go to the Kashmir Valley with him as an adult. But more than ever I wish he was in Ferozepure with me now, to see how this journey has changed me. I think he might be a little bit proud. He would never admit as much, but his eyes would give him away.

And I would like him to be here tonight when I cook my final meal. Of all the meals in my life I’ve looked forward to cooking and eating, I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to cooking and eating a meal more than this. To say I’ve waited a lifetime would seem appropriate. But perhaps it is more than one lifetime that I’ve waited. I think about the life of my father, I think about the life of my grandfather. Perhaps I’ve waited three lifetimes to eat this meal.

No one tells you how to feel about your ancestry. There’s no manual, no almanac that guides you through the complexity of belonging. Who decides where I belong? My parents? Well, if you ask my mum, she would probably regret that her sons have grown up without enough Indian and Punjabi culture. The fact that I am her only son who speaks anything like fluent Punjabi I know disappoints her. My father is a little more circumspect in his opinion. I am sure he feels a tad disappointed that we have not adopted more of our Punjabi roots, but he is a citizen of the world and he seems to have
embraced the fact that his kids have rooted so firmly in the land of their birth: Britain.

All these thoughts, and all the thoughts I have had on this quest are bouncing around inside my head. What could be more Punjabi than a Sikh man buying turbans in the Punjab? But this Sikh man has realised through his travels from south to north India that he is more British than he ever knew. If only the natives of Ferozepure could share the great irony of my situation: I grew up looking Indian in Glasgow, attempting to convince others that I was British, whilst working out who I really was; and here I am in my grandfather’s town, with turbans purchased from my grandfather’s turban maker, feeling very British on the inside and trying to come to terms with looking Indian on the outside, having worked out exactly what I am. From the initial, uncertain steps in Kovalam, through the tranquil self-realisation of Mamallapuram, the confusion of Mysore, the debacle of Bangalore, the clarity of Goa, the misadventure of Bombay, the triumph of Delhi and the conclusion of Srinagar. What a journey …

It is evening in my grandfather’s house. It would be an understatement to say that I am aware of a certain pressure as I prepare to cook goat curry, knowing that it is a tradition that has spanned decades in this house, in this family. In terms of my lineage, my father, my grandfather and I share a distinct trait: we all love to cook meat. My grandfather would only ever cook meat or chicken, and I have had to tutor myself in the ways of the vegetarian world, slightly against my better judgement. The residual notion that a meal without meat isn’t really a meal will stay with me until the day I die, probably a premature death brought on by the consumption of too much meat.

It’s quieter than usual in Ferozepure this evening. I stand in the tiny kitchen chopping onions and heating oil, waiting to taste my own goat curry. It seems right that having ventured to bring a little taste of Britain to all of India, I should finish with a flourish and enjoy a little bit of India in that place I call home. The aroma of Indian onions frying in Indian oil combined with Indian spices is the smell of India yet also the smell of growing up in Glasgow. For the first time in my life these are not two different places but the same unified space; and that space is within me. The only sound I can hear now is the sound of frying and the sound of my own heart beating within my chest. I can barely imagine my father standing in this kitchen, cooking the same dish, but I know he did; and I know that my grandfather did. Dinner is ready. All I have left to do is garnish with freshly chopped coriander and eat.