Indian Takeaway (7 page)

The next morning I took my wheely bag and my desire to cook up towards the north-east, to Madras on the way to a small fishing town and a fisherman.

I
t was an easy car ride to the station from the luxurious elegance of the Taj Green Cove. I may have left behind Arzooman and his kitchen, but his words mixed with my father’s and reverberated around the inside of my quickly emptying head. What was I doing? I had a choice. I could simply take a train to an airport and write a book about gardening. Or I could knuckle down and embrace this journey of self-discovery. (So far all I had discovered about myself was that I had a lot of self-discovering to do.)

Trivandrum train station was possibly the quietest railway station I have ever visited in India; I am, however, not complaining. It was lunchtime; the sun beat unrelentingly, no doubt worn out from its day’s shining. All of the eight tracks in the station were full of dark-blue and sky-blue painted trains. Latent expectation filled the air. This felt like my first proper foray into India. The airports had been unreal nexuses into the country and the briefly snatched beauty of Cochin had a slight dreamlike quality about it. Trivandrum felt real.

I couldn’t come to India and not go to Madras. All my childhood I thought Madras was solely the description for a curry. Some chef somewhere had decided that naming a dish after Madras would be a good idea. It could so easily have been a chicken delhi, or king prawn bangalore, or lamb pondicherry.
But madras it was, so the name went down in culinary legend: the city that gave us a mild curry. And to be honest, the mild curry is about the most interesting thing about Madras. It would appear to be a quite unremarkable city, given its status as India’s fourth largest city. No one ever raves about how amazing Madras is; there are no stories relating great temples and amazing sights. It is the capital of Tamil Nadu, the state that stretches down the south-east coast of India, subsuming the tip above Sri Lanka. But while Madras holds no great intrigue for the traveller itself, it is a conduit to those ancient temples, stone carvings and spiritual experiences of India. This is the side of India the westerners sought. This was the India that seemed, inexplicably, to answer the questions that these travellers carried with them from thousands of miles away.

My plan was to venture to a small fishing town south of Madras, a place called Mamallapuram, or Mahabalipuram, to give it its proper Tamilian name. Mamallapuram is home to some of India’s most photographed monuments and is a town over-endowed with architectural and religious beauty. It is also a place that was devastated by the tsunami of 2004, the first disaster in modern Indian history when the nation of India refused external aid and attempted to repair itself. As a child the overwhelming images I saw of India on TV were of a nation bent and broken by famine, poverty and natural disaster. India seemed forever to be asking the rest of the world for help, for aid, for understanding. And one might have expected that such requests would have been made after the devastation of the tsunami, the shocks of which were felt on the east coast of India. But this time, India decided that it had the economic prosperity and infrastructural wherewithal to sort out its own problems. India politely refused the aid of the international community and set about saving its own people. Whether India
succeeded in its self-sufficiency is a moot point; the fact was that it felt able to make such a stand. This was modern India looking after itself. I wanted to see it for myself.

My train is the 12:30 Anatpuri Express from Trivandrum Central to Chennai (Madras). It may not be significant, but this train seems to be sporting livery of orange, white and green, the selfsame colours of the Indian flag. It looks clean and comfortable. Not so much the lap of luxury but certainly leaning comfortably into the shoulder of luxury. The train seems almost suspiciously quiet. I worry that perhaps there is information that has not been shared with me, some conspiracy
that has seen this train cancelled with all the passengers tiptoeing off, unseen, to board another, better, faster train to take them to Madras. Paranoid? Me?

On checking the itinerary list chalked on the side of one of the carriages I soon realise that this is the slow train to Madras; it will stop many times and bite off a fresh load of travellers. Rumour has it that we will arrive on the east coast of India sometime around 2 p.m. the following day: just over a day away. I make my way to carriage A1, seat 14, UB. UB stands for upper bunk. This is the sleeper train. I will be sleeping on this train. Hopefully. It will be the first time that I have travelled in an Indian sleeper train since my childhood.

When I was a boy, between 1977 and 1983 my dad brought his three sons to India every other summer. The first visit was whistlestop to say the least. We came for my uncle’s wedding. Time was of the essence. Much of that holiday was a blur. But what I do remember is the train journey.

It was 1979. My family were a family of meagre means. So when it came to flying we had little choice in terms of prospective airlines. In fact for ‘little’ choice read Hobson’s choice: Aeroflot. Even all these years on the name fills me with stomach-curdling dread. Aeroflot was the national airline of the then pre-Glasnost USSR. There are many words to describe the Aeroflot experience, but in my father’s context there was only one epithet worth concentrating on: cheap. And Aeroflot was cheap; substantially cheaper than all the competition, because of course, in Soviet Russia there was no competition.
We flew Aeroflot from London to Delhi, having first schlepped ourselves and our not insubstantial luggage down to London on the coach. That’s the other thing you need to bear in mind about travelling to India in the 1980s. India was a closed market, an epoch away from the vibrant free-market booming economy of today. You couldn’t get anything in India. So whenever a relative from ‘Velat’, the west as they call it in the Punjab, came visiting they were compelled to bring gifts, gifts to show how successful their lives had become since leaving India. (There is no irony in the fact that many Indians who left enjoy a marginally lower standard of living outside India than they might have enjoyed had they stayed.) I remember that we had packed our luggage full of chocolate to take to our cousins. My mum had also bought us loads of new clothes to wear. Fancy jumpers, smart trousers and kung fu-style pyjamas. I loved those pyjamas. I still do.

So there we were, our flesh and bone far outweighed by our luggage full of gifts, alighting a plane in Delhi, having spent the entire journey not being able to communicate with the Russian-speaking stewardesses; the only phrase my father knew in Russian sounded like: ‘caca familia?’ which appeared to mean: ‘what is your name?’ A conversation opener no doubt, but rather useless when the stewardesses wore name tags.

That year my dad, Raj, Sanjeev and I – Mum stayed at home to run the shop – landed in Delhi a few days before Christmas and headed straight for a taxi to catch a train to the city of Ferozepure in the heart of Punjab. The Shatabdi Express would ghost us through the night and deliver us home. Home. There’s that word again. My father’s home; my grandfather’s home. As kids we had rarely travelled on trains; in fact prior to that sleeper journey in India, I have no previous recollection of ever having travelled on a train. Not that any other train journey
could have prepared me for the Shatabdi. The Shatabdi Express is my dad’s favourite train in all the world, a train lodged in my father’s folklore, a train that carries the Punjabi masses home from the capital to their families in the towns, villages and farms. The Shatabdi Express is the locomotive equivalent of a Sikh: proud, fierce and a little lumbering. The exterior livery of these seemingly massive trains was navy blue with a sky-blue stripe across the lower third. The sky-blue colour motif continued within the interior of the trains: sky-blue vinyl seats, sky-blue floor, sky-blue curtains. We had entered a sky-blue world. The carriages were laid out in two sections. Along one side of the train two benches faced each other, the other side of the gangway had two single seats face on. This was the daytime arrangement. At night the sky-blue world became even more sky blue as the seats morphed into bunks. The eight seated travellers soon became eight supine travellers.

There I was, a ten-year-old boy, more excited than excitement itself at the notion of an all-night train journey, a journey that involved a secret fold-down sky-blue bed. The four of us filled our section of the train with anticipation, as it trundled us along to my grandfather’s house in my grandfather’s town of Ferozepure.

For us it was the most amazing adventure. Even adults find train journeys in India exhilarating. Imagine how my brothers and I felt.

We were jet-lagged and found ourselves, almost by default, in a sleeper carriage at New Delhi train station, having fought our way though the hordes. I could see my dad trying his best to contain his excitement. He hadn’t been back in India for over ten years; since he had left his father had passed away. And now he was going home. I remember vividly being transfixed by the country that slipped by the grated window. I clung on,
pulling myself closer in the descending gloom, trying to see more than the light would let me. And later trying in vain to sleep. The noise of people alighting and boarding; men selling snacks; babies crying; friends laughing; old women gossiping. And then morning came, a hazy, grey morning, a morning somewhat unsure of its own credentials. A mist lay upon Ferozepure as we unloaded our luggage from the train, only to reload it on the back of an ox-drawn carriage.

This was the India I first knowingly laid eyes on; a very real India, an unpretentious India. And I think I fell in love with it without even knowing.

Twenty-eight years later I sit alone in an almost identical train compartment, missing my father and missing my brothers. I am joined by a sweet young family. The good-looking young husband stretches his feet across the benches as his wife reclines with someone I assume is her younger sibling; the younger sibling sitting cross-legged atop the bench provides a makeshift pillow for her older, more amply endowed sister. The children sit and play on the top bunks of the adjoining compartment.

At 16.21, nine minutes
before
its designated time of departure, the Anatpuri Express reluctantly pulls out of Trivandrum train station. Fifteen minutes later we have stopped for no good reason. But this is India; you never need a good reason for anything. You rarely need a reason at all. The hiatus is filled with an army of shabbily uniformed, pungent young boys singing their wares, offering tea, coffee, snacks and sweets.

Then, with an almost mechanical unwillingness, the train is moving again and the chai boys are replaced with equally shabbily uniformed train staff who hand out freshly laundered white sheets, pillows and grey, scratchy-looking blankets. This is the first stage of the metamorphosis of a day train into a sleeper, the entry into the white-sheeted world of night.

Kerala has become Tamil Nadu much sooner than I had thought. I realise this because a message appears on my phone display with a beep, welcoming me to Tamil Nadu. If Kerala was verdant, then Tamil Nadu is no different. Even in the final embers of daylight I can see the coconut tree jungles that line either side of the railway tracks. The Tamilian sky seems a little angrier than the Keralan one. We cross a beautiful lagoon cut into the red clay earth; it’s almost like civilisation hasn’t happened as the deep, feral-red clay vies with the sparkling, azure-blue water for prominence.

We stop just a few yards ahead at a small local train station, an afterthought of a place with no more than a hut and a tree suggesting a place to stop. There is the usual all-too-frantic coming and going, which in itself would not be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that those who want to come and those who want to go seem to want to do it at exactly the same time, which is the perfect recipe for pandemonium. Amongst those joining our happy band of travellers is an old, yellowed-eyed man with a matching yellow shirt that once was white. His skin has been sunkissed on a daily basis and is now so dark it is almost black. His thick, white hair makes his skin look darker still and he possesses the most vacant of expressions. He carries a shoulder bag, a suitcase and a large sack of mangoes. Quite why he has decided to transport mangoes manually no one knows. This is after all India; mangoes are in plentiful supply. He pauses a moment and looks blankly at me and the young family. He mutters something inaudible to himself and takes himself and his mangoes further down the carriage. There is an unspoken sense of relief shared between the young family and me. Although there is space for another passenger in our compartment, we would be all too happy to travel as we are
and enjoy the extra space – space that would have been further compromised by a sackful of mangoes.