Indian Takeaway (9 page)

After this brief tour and the ad hoc circus performance, all seems right and proper in the world. I ask the older female relative for directions to the Fisherman’s Colony. When Mamallapuram was hit by the tsunami and the seafront devastated, a lot of fishing families lost their livelihoods, which were fairly basic to begin with. The Colony took a year to rebuild. I have arranged to meet one such fisherman, Nagmuthu, son of Mani. He sounds like a character from either
The Lord of the Rings
or the
He-Man
cartoons that used to run on ITV on Saturday mornings.

I would like to say that I had found Nagamuthu, son of Mani, by writing a letter to a cousin’s friend who knew a man at the local newspaper who searched the local records and spoke to local people and found a likely candidate. But I actually found Nagamuthu’s email address via a website about the events surrounding the tsunami. Why him? Well, he seemed able to communicate in English and he was very happy to let me come and cook.

Greenwoods was telling the truth when it referred to itself as a ‘Beach Resort’. It’s barely minutes from the sands. On walking to the sea one soon realises how tourist driven Mamallapuram truly is. Trinket shops, cyber cafés, massage centres, guest houses – it’s an unending line of consumer-driven businesses. One of the little stalls sells but three types of produce: cigarettes, cold drinks and toilet paper: surely the distillation of the western tourist’s needs?

Soon I’m off the hot tarmac and have the sand between my toes. There are a handful of beach-fronted shacks and I have yet to see anything that looks like a fishermen’s colony.
Two boys play cricket on the beach; one is wearing what looks remarkably like an Arsenal football top. As I draw closer I realise that it is an Arsenal football top. As an Arsenal fan myself, I consider stopping and chatting to him about the fragility of our midfield last season, to ponder as to whether the back four is less well suited to the offensive component of the modern game and discuss at length the options for an ‘in-the-box’ striker; but I think better of it. Instead I ask him where I might find Nagamuthu, son of Mani. It would appear that I am standing right outside his shack, the Fisherman Restaurant. I should have guessed.

Mani’s shack is little more than a lean-to covered in bamboo. A new concrete wall raises the restaurant floor a couple of metres off the sand, and steps welcome you in. It is sweet, with half a dozen tables, each with a pretty coloured lightshade above. At the back is a small concrete building, the kitchen I’m guessing. There is an old man asleep on the floor and something stirs in a hammock slung between the two central supports of the empty restaurant. The stirring is Nagamuthu; the old man is Mani. Nagamuthu, son of Mani, is asleep in his hammock. There’s no way he’s going to overthrow Skeletor and win back the Enchanted Forest with mid-afternoon siestas. No way.

He greets me warmly as he rubs sleep out of his eyes. He is a short man, under five and a half feet with Dravidian dark skin. He is stocky and strong, with the sort of musculature that comes from repetitive hard work rather than a gym. He shows me around the kitchen, which is basic. Three steps deep and five paces across, it’s small; he has a two-ring burner and a single fridge. I’m now slightly panicking inside; what am I going to cook? Nagamuthu suggests we go to his nearby house to relax and chat. We walk up the hill behind the kitchen and the colony becomes apparent. Nagamuthu tells me that at the time
of tsunami, although they lost all their beach-front businesses, luckily their houses were protected. Had it not been for the beach-front shacks … His voice tails off into uncertainty.

Outside his house there’s a discarded fishing net and a motor boat engine. We enter his house.

There are times in one’s life when one realises how others live, the bounties that have been bestowed on us and the hardships afforded to others. For me, this is one of those times. Nagamuthu’s house is a single room, smaller than his kitchen at the shack. It has a mattress on the floor, a fan and a TV set. The walls have been painted a moss green, the colour now distressed and peeling with time. One room. That’s it. Real life. Prone on the floor in the midst of watching a Bollywood song and dance number is a woman I later find out to be Nagamuthu’s sister. She hurriedly collects herself and some clothes and vacates the room, killing the Bollywood soundtrack as she goes. Nagamuthu pulls up a stool for me to sit on while he sits cross-legged on the floor.

I ask him about his life. His father is a fisherman, his grandfather was a fisherman, as far back as he can remember or anyone else in his family can recall, the men would fish. He too is a fisherman, but less so these days. He devotes more time to cooking and running the Fisherman’s Restaurant. The tsunami hit the village hard. Mallamapuram always had a strong tourist sector. The beautiful carved temples saw to that. The fishermen had become used to a ready market for their catch, many opening shacks like Nagamuthu’s. On the day itself he recalls that he and his father and a few other fishermen had been out laying nets at 3 a.m. Their routine was to return to harvest the nets some four hours later. This they did. By 9 a.m. they were back on the beach. They saw the wave coming. There was obvious panic amongst the fishermen. They knew
this was neither a full moon nor a black moon. There could be no explanation for this tidal wave approaching …

For seven months they couldn’t fish. For that they were grateful; at least they had escaped with their lives while others still searched in vain for the bodies of loved ones. Although they were alive, one wonders about the quality of that life, relying as they did on charity handouts. The restaurant was destroyed. Sitting where I am now it is difficult to imagine the sense of fear that must have overcome those in the colony. India is a highly superstitious country; my own beloved mother has her superstitions that I will always carry with me, as if they were transmitted in the very milk she fed me. But here in this uncomplicated community, superstition is a way of life. Far fewer men now go to fish, which is in itself a good thing since stocks seem very low. Perhaps another by-product of the tsunami? In the old days, Nagamuthu tells me, regardless of the weather the fishermen would venture out, sometimes for days on end. They felt at one with the sea, attuned to its motion, a human extension of its watery being. Now they harbour suspicions. Should a stiff breeze escalate any further, many refuse to fish. Nagamuthu puts it beautifully. Pointing at his heart he suggests that that is where the tsunami now exists, within the fishermen themselves.

He offers me some lunch before taking me around the temples of Mamallapuram. Of course I accept; I love food. We wander back down to the restaurant. Sitting down at the table closest to the sea I take in the view, concentrating on the sounds of life around me rather than the hubbub of unanswered questions in my head. Mani, the father of Nagamuthu, sits at an adjacent table, noiseless. What thoughts is he pondering? I wonder, as he gazes out to a sea he has gazed out at for half a century. We are joined by the occasional crow whose ugly
squawks make mango boy’s moaning seem like the sweetest of poetry. So clever are these birds that Mani needs only grab a nearby catapult in his gnarled hands and they are off, with cries of derision.

I am overcome with the complete sensory power of the ocean. The salty taste, the smell of seaweed, the cooling breeze on my skin, the sound of crashing waves and the sight of the metamorphosing seas as they turn from green to wake white and then retire to consider a similar change in a few moments’ time. Much as we pollute, abuse and use the seas, we have by no means got their measure. There is a certain self-confidence about the way in which the waves collide constantly into the land, a reminder that the seas control us, not we the seas.

My daydream digression is broken by a cornucopia of seafood. Nagamuthu has been busy in the kitchen: fish curry in a rich tomato and onion sauce tempered with curry leaves, mustard seeds and chilli, cooked to perfection; king prawns in a sweet tomato sauce, finished with a little lemon juice, succulent and fresh; and shrimps, fried in chilli, salt and pepper. All served with plain white rice. It’s absolutely delicious.

The only sort of non-Indian fish we had in Glasgow was battered and deep fried. I can only ever remember one occasion when the fish cooked in our house was breaded in the finger form. That was an utter disaster. There are some things that you will have probably realised by now and others that you will shortly learn. I am the way I am about food because:

1. My mum is an amazing cook of Indian food.

2. My dad has a deep desire to experiment and try new things (so long as they don’t contain vinegar or tamarind, both
of which in his later years seem to bring him out in a coughing fit and generally allergic reaction).

There is no story more indicative of my father’s desire to experiment with food and try new things than his rather doomed adventure into the world of slow cooking. As most immigrants can testify, being a newcomer to a country more often than not requires a dual income, since each individual income earned is insubstantial. Yet my father was evangelical about his kids eating good, freshly cooked food every evening of the week. This presented obvious challenges when set within the fiscal context of both parents working. That is when my father’s discovery of the slow cooker seemed, for a week in the early 1980s at any rate, to revolutionise the world of food in our house.

The slow cooker was the perfect invention for any immigrant family. I remember the first day it arrived. Dad unpacked it and filled it full of pulses and onions and lamb and saffron and prunes. The excitement was palpable. We all saw this selection of raw ingredients enter the terracotta dish of the slow cooker but we could only imagine the flavours that would result. As dad set the machine to cook through the course of the day, he extolled the virtues of the process of gradual cooking, allowing time to pass as the juices from the meat mingled with the sun-sweetened prunes and the deep, earthy saffron, in amongst which the pulses were plumping and cooking. We left for school, our heads full of fanciful flavours and our hearts brimming with hope.

We returned that evening expecting the house to be permeated with the most exotic of aromas, the table heaving under the weight of Dad’s new slow-cooked feast. It would have been a feast indeed had he remembered to actually turn
the thing on. It was as if time had stood still in that kitchen in Bishopbriggs.

These minor setbacks never held my father back. Knowing how adept my mum was in the kitchen he nevertheless continued his adventurous escapades into the world of food. No single incident combines my father’s sense of gay cuisinal abandon and my mother’s skill at cooking than the following story.

Every week my father would return home with produce from KRK. KRK was, for all Indian and Pakistani immigrants in Glasgow back when I was a boy, a lifeline of food and produce. KRK was the only place you could get spices and lentils, Indian style meat, fish, chicken and mangoes. I had not visited a traditional Scottish butcher until I was well into my twenties. If you couldn’t afford an airfare back to the subcontinent all you needed to do was pop down to KRK on Woodlands Road and buy a couple of mangoes and an eight-kilo bag of rice; it was the next best thing.

You couldn’t help but be curious about food in our house. My dad was forever coming home with random produce. I can have been no more than twelve years old but I was already gaining curiosity about food. I remember him on numerous occasions placing yet another bizarre-looking fruit on the counter at home.

‘Cook this, Kuldip,’ he would command.

‘What is it, Ji?’ asked Mum.

‘No idea,’ he would respond as he wandered off.

But my mother would invariably find a way of cooking it. And invariably it tasted delicious. In later life I realised how instinctively talented my mum is when it comes to food preparation. I have witnessed her smelling, sniffing, cutting and chewing the plethora of weird objects my dad has brought back
from numerous visits to KRK. I sometimes think they see him coming and bring out their most freaky-looking vegetables and fruits, knowing that Mr Kohli with his indefatigable sense of adventure will purchase it and make his long-suffering wife find a way of cooking it.

This particular KRK trip was perhaps the most famous of all the KRK trips. Or the most doomed, depending on how you look at it. In amongst the uncontroversial staples of tinned tomatoes, moong daal, coriander and the like lurked a rather pungent paper bag. Triumphantly my father raised the bag and handed it to my mother. Somehow, lifting the bag reinforced the stench and we were all forced to take a step back. Mum asked what it was. Bombay duck, Dad replied. It would appear they only had one in the shop and he’d snaffled it. Right then no one could quite work out why he had bothered, least of all my mother.

Let not the name confuse you. Bombay duck is no sort of duck at all. Oh no. It is a fish, and I doubt if it even comes from Bombay. It could be called Bhopal lamb or Dundee cake for all the relevance the name bestows on the produce. And the version he’d brought home was dried; dried and very stinky.