Introducing the Fish

Transcription

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Introducing the Fish
Nothing is so little fun as seeing the world all by yourself. Quixote had
his Sancho, Graham Greene had his aunt, and Phineas Fogg had his
Passepartout. So it is a matter of some regret for me to admit, in this very
first paragraph, that I have seldom had the pleasure of an interesting travelling
companion in my numerous expeditions inside and out of India. I have
missed the presence of someone thoughtful and acerbic, someone who could
match insight for insight, who was attentive to the foibles and madnesses
of foreign folk in their very foreign lands, someone with whom one could
together relish morsels of alien culture.
It is my pitiful good fortune that the person who comes closest to being
a travelling companion of sorts is the gentleman whom I have come to think
of as the Fish. We met first on a flight to the Middle East. He was in the
seat adjoining mine, offending everyone with his particular acrid brand of
cigarette. He was south Indian, like me, but differed in a key respect —
he cordially hated travelling. He had always found it much more pleasurable
to undertake imaginary journeys in which he could dictate and design
everything from the departure schedule to the destination.
XII
TRAVELS WITH THE FISH
We got talking when I began to get interested in the Arabic in-flight
announcements. Believe me, this is a thrill, especially for fellows like me
who have never heard any sort of Arabic before. At times, it sounds faintly
Gallic, especially the glottals, but mostly this helter-skelter language sounds
just like a record being played backwards. All announcements end with
‘Shukran!’, close enough to the Hindi shukriya for me to catch on that I
had been thanked for my attentiveness.
What puzzled me was the length of each announcement. The British
language statement might have been something simple like ‘Please fasten
your seat belt!’ The corresponding Arabic version would then hold forth
for about two minutes.
This continued all the way to London: interminable Arabic directives,
broken by pithy others in English, French and Hindi. I began to speculate
that Arabic might be an ‘atomic language’.
“I wonder if Arabic contains a large number of small words,” I remarked
to the passenger on my right. He looked up, immediately interested. “Thus,
where English would have a single word, say ‘disembark’, Arabic might have
ten or twenty words, each with its own fine shade of meaning, so that you
could construct the sense of ‘disembark’, so to speak, but with precision far
greater than English provides. It is, of course, at the cost of a certain brevity.”
He mulled this over and then shook his head, disagreeing. His theory
was that since Arabic was written right to left, it was probably spoken
backwards too. And that since many of their words contained dots which
could “easily be confused with fullstops”, it was probably difficult to figure
out where exactly a sentence ended. As a result, people tended to carry on
talking long after having said what they really needed to say.
We did not reach a clear resolution of this issue till several journeys later,
but it was the start of an odd sort of friendship. Back in Mumbai, where
he lived in a house that was more archive than domicile, we began meeting,
more off than on. I enjoyed his acute-angled mind and his wide-ranging
familiarity with utterly useless information. He told me that his friends called
him the Fish, for reasons he scarcely understood but had stopped contesting.
He had the most extraordinary collection of Condé Nast and National
Geographic and, of all things, Gourmet magazine. He fancied strange places
INTRODUCING THE FISH
XIII
and odd faces, but always from the comfort of his armchair. Thus, though
we have actually globe-trotted together few times, the Fish has been my
constant listening companion. Under his inquisition, my travels have taken
on new meanings, sometimes unintended ones.
Completely armed with bookish knowledge, the Fish feels free to challenge
reality with bibliography. A natural cynic and misanthrope, he always fears
the worst, suspects the unspeakable, and anticipates the dreadful. Talking
to him is an exercise in self-flagellation.
Yet he has served me the way the heron, perched on the buffalo’s back,
serves that beast. I have a tendency to imagine better holidays than I actually
had, with bluer skies than were, and more poignancy than was. Over time,
left to myself, I have no doubt I would not remember which parts really
happened and which parts I wished had. The Fish, like some useful creature
from lower down on the food chain, nit-picks and cleans my narrative with
his peevish questions and his oddball theories.
Consider, for example, how we finally settled the issue of why Arabic
takes so long to say simple things. After many trips west via the Middle East,
it became abundantly clear to me that Arabic is probably not a simple
language but quite the opposite, a meta-language. Generalities abound but
not specifics. Although oil-money has spurred lifestyles and technology in
a very short space of time, the language has not kept up. Thus, words like
‘seat-belt’ (and probably ‘seat’ and ‘belt’ as well) have no equivalents.
“Yes,” said the Fish, warming to the new thought. “The metaphor of
the desert does not provide for a seat-belt. The only seat in their language
is the dromedary camel’s back, and the only upright structure they might
ever have leaned against would probably be a date palm.”
Thus, saying something like “Please fasten your seat-belt” in Arabic
probably involves a complex exercise in laying down axioms first. For
example:
“There are near you two flat, long, sash-like ribbons, one of which passes
through a strange metal affair. It is no use trying to tear these ribbons loose
for they are themselves made of a decidedly non-natural — that is, synthetic
— substance such as you may never encounter in a desert. These ribbons,
which in the language of the white foreigner are called al belt, are fastened
XIV
to al seat, which is the name given to the flat, soft surface on which you
find yourself seated. In many ways, it may remind you of a dromedary’s back,
especially when the plane — that is, this steel bird that flies through the
sky at wondrous speeds — meets a few air pockets. Of course, a camel is
infinitely more comfortable to ride. The only difficulty is that a camel cannot
be air-conditioned. Anyhow, that is neither here nor there. This strange
thing that is called al seat-belt has to be fastened, and that too around the
waist. Al waist can easily be found just above…”
“Of course,” said the Fish, deciding it was time I stopped blathering,
“by this time, very probably, the steel bird that flies through the sky at
wondrous speeds has reached its destination.”
It has always been like this. The Fish has been my censor, making sure
that I never exceeded the mark, even if I sometimes missed.
The title of this book, Travels with the Fish, is a small reflection of the
fact that the Fish, thinking he could get something for nothing, insisted on
being billed as co-author, claiming that he had travelled farther, in his mind
and for free, than I had on frequent flyer passes. We argued to and fro,
but I tricked him at the last minute by inserting his dishonourable honorific
into the title itself, leaving the by-line entirely to me. However, he remains
an infiltrator into the narrative, prodding me into saying more than I am
comfortable with, and cackling in the background while I unwittingly skate
on the thin ice of international travel.
By the way, the recipes appended to each chapter neither represent a
fair sampling of the best that particular region has to offer, nor are a
considered gourmetic selection. They are, for the most part, simple enough
fare, of the sort that you might easily toss together in your own kitchen.
It just happens that these were the dishes that I ate during various travels,
and which, for reasons of simplicity, authenticity, honesty or style, stayed
in my memories. Like photographs of a vacation, they instantly recreate for
me some of the finest experiences of my life, and that is why they are in
this book.
“I am beginning to
understand what you really
did in Cairo,” said the Fish
to me. “You are clearly one
of that breed of lizards
whom I call forex fakirs.
They stay motionless,
waiting for the exchange
rate to turn favourable, and
then move in for the kill.”
A little cold
arksoos takes the
edge off the heat
Entering a pyramid
is no joke
The crafty brothers Hasan and Shabir
tried to sell me some paintings
My friend Omar
Ehlehw, the
Cairene taxi driver
E
G
Y
P
T
A Stroller in Cairo
“There are two kinds of lies,” said the Fish, rolling yet another cigarette.
“There are those which are delivered because of some situation that threatens
life and limb. You might call them unavoidable or essential lies. And there is
the other kind. The kind that you tell. Lying as a conversational strategy, because
you cannot think of what to say next.”
“But it’s not a lie,” I protested. “Ask any Egyptian.”
“There is no need,” said the Fish crisply. “If a man goes to one of the
earth’s most spectacular and evolved nations for the first time in his life,
spends nearly half a week there, and then cannot give a credible account
of how he passed his time, then I am afraid he deserves whatever he gets.”
It was the Fish’s theory that I could not have strolled around Cairo for
three days. “Fools stroll,” he said, spitting out both words. “Tourists are
men in a hurry. They take guided tours, they zip around in taxis —”
“Which I did,” I interrupted. “There was a fellow called —”
The Fish held up a Buddha-like finger. “We can do without such thirdworldly interruptions. I am waiting to hear that you did ten thousand things
in Cairo, and wanted to do ten thousand more, and ran out of time. You
4
say you saw the pyramids, ate some chicken, bought some paintings — and
mainly strolled about the streets. I detect something sinister in your story.”
The truth was that my destination was Israel, not Egypt, but in 1991,
the Israeli airline El Al had not yet started flights out of India. The only
way to reach Jerusalem was by a connecting flight via Cairo. And it seemed
illogical not to spend at least a couple of days in the only other country in
the world that could count its culture back 5,000 years.
Which was exactly what I did.
Arriving in Egypt
In which the author, reaching Cairo, searches for
Omar, but instead discovers an old hotel, an old
bookshop, and something called Form D
My disastrous encounter with Egypt can probably be divided into the preOmar and the post-Omar epochs. Omar the Bashful, direct in the line of
descent from Elhelw the Intriguing, about whom little or nothing is known
except that he lived in the shadow of the Sphinx, is a taxi-driver in downtown
Cairo. His name, along with rosy recommendations, was given to me by a
friend in Mumbai. “Omar will open Cairo out for you like a book,” she told
me. “Just go to Shepheard’s Hotel by the Nile, where Omar’s uncle has a
bookshop, and leave a message for Omar. He will get in touch.”
The Egypt Air plane that carried me to Egypt was called the Nefertiti, after
the legendary queen. I had a window seat, and was able to look out upon
billowing cumulus clouds as my mind flew ahead to a land that God created
and then Cecil B de Mille re-created in cinemascope. Slowly, I hatched an
itinerary and day-plan for how best to spend my three days in Cairo.
Strolling, by the way, was an important part of my scheme for conserving
the thousand or so dollars that I carried to see me through Egypt, Israel
and later, Chicago. By strolling, I expected not only to save large amounts
in bus and taxi fares, but also avoid the harmful stresses imposed by crosslingual communication with bus conductors and their ilk. Indeed, there was
a heroic fatalism about deciding to see only as much of a city as you could
cover on foot. If the museum was too far from the hotel, then so much the
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
5
worse for the museum. If the pyramids were too distant for a stroller, sorry,
luck of the draw. I liked the existential ring of this plan.
I stepped out of the Nefertiti into dry, hot Egyptian air — where a blueshirted officer presented me with Form D. If you want the precise moment
when my downfall began, it was probably this.
Form D is a poorly printed scrap of Tourism Ministry paper which seeks
to know whether you have anything to declare, such as a video camera,
computer, jewellery or cash. I had a point-and-click camera, quite basic and
quite battered; I doubted if any Customs Officer would find it either
attractive or dutiable. As for declaring my dollars, after a moment’s thought
I concluded that as I had only travellers’ cheques, not cash, the question
did not apply to me.
“I have nothing to declare,” I declared to one of the blue shirts. “Should
I still fill out this Form D?”
“Nothing? You are sure?” he asked merrily, as though he knew of
something that had slipped my mind. “In that case, you are free to go.”
I would not realise until it was too late that Form D was the first step
in a carefully plotted, multi-stage, entirely legal interception of my dollars.
It mattered not a whit if I withheld information at the airport or anywhere
else for that matter; they would head me off at the border later. I collected
my luggage from baggage claim and then set out towards the hot, dusty
horizon where Cairo and its Windsor Hotel awaited me.
The Windsor Hotel was a characterful fin de siècle establishment housed
in a frayed building with cool rooms and clean linen. I had chosen it because
I’d heard that the room rates magically dropped by 25 per cent if you carried
a copy of Let’s Go Egypt. The hotel’s spacious rooms, with vaulted ceilings
and antique brocaded furniture, had not seen the sun for many decades,
but were well-preserved, the flaws diligently patched over. In the times of
the Ottoman empire, the place had served as a bath for the ruling Khedives.
The Russian engineers who flew down to help build the Aswan Dam had
also been housed here. In the revolution of 1952, the building was entirely
burnt down because it housed the British Officers’ Club. The rebuilt structure
was temporarily an annexe to the Shepheard’s Hotel, well-loved hang-out
of the expatriate and (it was said) gay community.
6
Today’s Windsor is owned by a hulking Swiss engineer called Doss, and
only some military relics and a few browning photographs of staff re-unions
testify to yesteryear’s glory. From the wire mesh window of my room, I could
see the Sharia Alif Bey lane below. As afternoon fell smoky and warm, the
teahouse across the street finally came into shadow. Tin chairs and tables
were pulled out to the pavement, Egyptian men drifted in and settled into
practised postures, and commenced rounds of the dice game called tawala,
punctuated by many cups of dark kahwa, coffee. Some puffed hookahs and
watched the moments of another century tick by.
I washed, topped myself up with tea and toast, and then set out — on
foot, of course — towards Shepheard’s Hotel. I had an Omar to trace.
Shepheard’s Hotel, it turned out, had long since been taken over by the
Egyptian Hotels Corporation, its image sanitised, its character neutralised,
and its future accordingly revitalised. Omar’s uncle was hard of hearing, and
besides, understood little English. He first showed me the collected works
of Omar Khayyam. Then, realising his error, he scrabbled among his coffee
table books, looking for a magnificent Hollywood photograph of Omar
Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Not finding it, he touched forefinger to fez
in miserable apology.
“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered.
“I am looking for your nephew,” I shouted at him for the umpteenth time.
It hit him like a thunderbolt. “Omar!” he cried, straightening up.
“Nephew!”
Growing terribly agitated, he hopped about his bookshop, waving his
arms and babbling in Arabic, until one of his assistants explained to me that
Omar could be found at his own bookshop, just outside the hotel, along
the pavement.
Following their directions, I found myself in a boutique called the
Garden City Bookshop, specialising in some souvenirs, some books, some
flowers, some cigarettes, and watched over by a polite young man who had
no clue when, or if, Omar would arrive. I left a note for him, in English,
stating the Windsor’s phone number, and asking him to get in touch when
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
7
he could, if he wished. I was already reconciled to finding my own way
around Cairo. Omar would be a bonus.
The Egyptian Art of Bargaining
An innocent evening stroll by the Nile turns into
an unexpected exploration of papyrus, and the
author gets less than he bargained for
It was close to sunset on my first day in Cairo when I left Omar’s Garden
City Bookshop, Omarless. The broad Nile twinkled pale blue in the fading
light, while the city’s neons flickered into life. A balmy breeze had sprung
up, rustling palms on a cobbled promenade across the street, where I could
see lovers adrift hand in hand and some families taking the air with their
children.
Strolling through this slice of modern Cairo life, I had soon put the
exertions of the afternoon out of my mind. I had barely walked some thirty
yards when a soft, well-bred voice spoke up from somewhere to my right,
in unaccented English: “Are you a student?”
When you are alone in a strange country, and a strange voice calls out
to you, the chances are nearly total that you are in for some sort of a setup. If the country is Egypt, then that certainty reaches a full hundred
percent. The fool who responds has only himself to blame. I took a look
at the owner of the voice: he was a ruddy fellow in his early thirties, with
close-cut curly hair, a broad forehead, and white teeth that stood out on
his tanned face. He was dressed workman-like, in trousers and a white shirt
rolled up to his elbows. He seemed harmless enough, for all the world like
a Cairene clerk on his way home after a hard day’s work.
Of course, he might have been a pimp, but I thought not. A pimp would
never have started with Are you a student? Then perhaps he was a drug
peddler. Drugs? In Cairo, where you could be sentenced to death if caught?
No, this man was selling neither drugs nor sex, and since I could not think
of a third thing, I decided to be bold. The day had been uneventful thus
far, considering the 5,000 years of preparation.
“Not a student,” I said, offering a careful smile. “Just a visitor.”
8
He continued walking alongside, a few steps behind me, without trying
to catch up or continue the conversation. “And you?” I asked finally.
“I am a student,” he said.
I was instantly at ease. All was clear. He was a student, probably doing
his post-graduation at Cairo University, going home after classes. He had
nothing to sell, nothing to gain from me. It even explained his diffidence.
“A student!” I said, slowing down so that we were walking abreast. “Really?
What is your subject?”
“Egyptology,” he said.
I was fascinated. Indians do not normally study Indology; yet here, a
stone’s throw from the Nile, was a young Egyptian immersed in a doctorate
on his own magnificent country. I was deeply impressed by his nationalism.
“Which aspect of Egypt are you specialising in?” I asked.
“The ancient art of making paper,” he said. “Egypt’s contribution to
civilisation was papyrus, you know.” I nodded; I knew.
“Papyrus is made even to this day,” he continued. “It is a subject of great
fascination and specialisation for people like me.”
I briefly wondered what more there could possibly be to study in the
making of papyrus. After all, there could have been no mystery about the
technique; and there surely was no great philosophy or metaphysics behind
it. “Going for the full doctorate?” I finally ventured.
“No,” he replied. “Post-graduation.”
My reporter’s instincts were catching anomalies. “And your age is?”
“I know what you are thinking,” he said, with a light laugh. “You are
thinking, this man looks too old to be a post-graduate. Something is fishy
in this story. Well, the truth is, I have not been a very good student. I have
to attend to my family business, which also happens to be in papyrus, so
often I am caught in a conflict of interest. I’ve had to skip a few years. Now
I’m thirty-two, but I hope this year I’ll submit my thesis.”
So. An aging student studying papyrus and running a business in papyrus.
“Your family sells papyrus?” I asked finally. We were approaching the end
of the promenade, near the Nile Hilton.
“No,” he said quickly. “We restore paintings. Ancient paintings, such
as those excavated from the pyramids, whose colours have faded or which
are damaged in some way.”
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
9
He must have sensed my awakening interest, for he said at once, “In
fact, my studio is right here. I can show you. If you feel interested. If you
don’t, of course —”
But I was very interested. I thought it was a stroke of luck to stumble
upon an art connoisseur by the end of my very first day in Cairo, when most
tourists are either watching belly dancers or being harassed by currency
touts. “No, no, let’s go,” I said eagerly.
We retraced our steps, crossed the road, turned into a lane in which all
the shops had closed, and then neared a chink of light under a portcullis
door. In the fading light, I could discern the name of the shop: King
Tutankhamen’s Treasure. Below, in smaller type, were the words: Institute
of Egyptology.
“My studio,” he said diffidently. “Fortunately for you, it is not yet
closed.”
I suppose I should have been alerted at once. But by then a kind of
reckless bravado had seized me. Even if this were a scam, I reasoned, how
could anyone force me to spend money against my will? Stranger in a
strange land though I might have been, I was surely still master of my own
wallet?
Sabir, for that was the student’s name, rapped on the shutter, someone
let it up a little and I ducked into a spacious shop. Nothing studio-like about
it. No artists hunched under lamps, painstakingly touching up details on
some pharaoh’s headgear. In fact, I was in nothing more or less than your
standard souvenir shop. By now I knew they were going to try to sell me
something, and I was curious to see how they hoped to succeed. I had only
about fifty Egyptian pounds on my person. The rest was in travellers’
cheques, back at the Windsor Hotel.
I was greeted by Hasan, Sabir’s brother, who was dressed in a traditional
white djellaba with headgear. “Welcome, my brother, welcome,” he said
with great warmth. With his hands on my shoulders, he stood back and took
a better look at my face, like an uncle meeting a long-lost nephew after many
years. “It is a pleasure,” he said. “Of course, our establishment is nearly
closed, but any friend of Sabir’s is a friend of Hasan’s. You are always
welcome. Coffee?”
10
I hesitated. I was not looking forward to a long-drawn-out evening, but
Hasan had already bustled away to a backroom, whence he now reappeared
with a tray carrying three demi-tasses of hot dreggy coffee.
I thought I’d start off with some blunt honesty. “Look,” I said. “Sabir
is not really a friend of mine, I just met him —”
“You are very modest,” he said. “Sabir has spoken very highly of you,
and I know how much you have impressed him.”
“Still, I don’t want any confusion or recriminations later, so I think it
is best for you to be clear that I have absolutely no intention whatsoever
at all of buying any kind of thing in the least from this shop or for that matter
any other shop.” I paused for breath. “Got it?”
Hasan’s hand flew to his mouth, and a look of utter bewilderment settled
over his face. “Buy?” he said. “Did I mention commerce? Did Abdul
mention commerce?” I looked at Sabir sharply: was he Sabir or Abdul?
“You are here, you are my guest, and I will show you Egypt’s glorious
culture. Selling you something is not part of my plan.” Good, I thought.
“Of course,” he added slyly, “if you wish to buy something for your
relatives or friends, that is a different thing altogether. I would never stand
in your way.”
As he set about emptying several shelves of papyrus paintings on to the
glass counter, Sabir told me about his family’s papyrus farm, on 159 acres
of Atman Island on the Nile delta. The El Shair family was large — eight
brothers and five sisters. Sabir and Hasan handled the Cairo end, while
Hani, Hasamn and Adam supervised the delta operation. Two other brothers,
Osman and Khalid, ran a small branch in Germany, along with a cousin,
Farag, who styled himself an art expert. The five girls, Afaf, Amira, Ehsin,
Aneam and Ferihe, were married and well out of the family business.
The papyrus farm was apparently an epic operation, employing 97 farmers,
64 gardeners for the flowers, and 106 artists, 69 of them women, for the
paintings.
By now, the table top was stacked with papyrus paintings, some of
them very long, nearly ten feet across. Most of them were about poster
size. “I’ll tell you what,” said Hasan. “You choose a few paintings that
catch your eye, and I’ll tell you the stories behind the images in it.” This
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
11
sounded harmless enough. “How do you like this one?” He unfurled a
twelve-footer.
“Oh, it is too big,” I blurted out.
“Only US$110,” he said.
I realised how smoothly I had slipped into his trap. Without intending
to buy anything, I had reacted like a shopper when he had showed me his
wares like a retailer. Quickly gathering myself, I went through the stack of
paintings on the counter, and chose four. By making this selection, I had
inadvertently indicated the wares I might finally buy, and thus entered Phase
Two of the entrapment.
“You have an eye for true beauty,” Hasan complimented me, as though
I had displayed an attribute genetically awarded only to Egyptians.
He picked up the first of the paintings, which depicted a giant weighing
scale, presided over by a dog-headed figure. One pan of the scale held a
heart, the other held two stick-like dolls. While two nubile maidens waited
nearby, a baboon perched atop the scales was writing something. A leg of
beef rested on a table to the right.
“This,” said Hasan, “is the jackal-headed God Anubis, who weighs
dead Egyptians’ hearts against truth, while the baboon-god Thoth records
the results. Those who fail are eaten up by a beast called the Devourer
of Souls. Of course, most people pass, and live very happily for the rest
of infinity.”
Rather a short story. “It costs US$70,” he added.
“I think it is time we stopped playing these games, my friend Hasan,”
I said crisply. “I told you once already — I have no money. In my pocket
here are fifty Egyptian pounds. The rest of my money is in uncashed US
dollar travellers’ cheques at the Windsor Hotel.”
“No problem,” offered Hasan solicitously. “The Windsor is not far. We
can stroll down there and you can write out a travellers’ cheque. We accept
them too.”
“Not buying,” I emphasised. “Not.”
He just nodded at me benignly, as though he had heard this one many
times before. “This second painting you have liked,” he said, “is a brilliant
mural from the tomb of Rameses VI. It shows the sky Goddess Nut, who
12
swallows the sun each evening. This brown disc passing through her body
is the sun. She gives birth to it again each morning. Also US$70.”
I can tell you today, with the deep wisdom that hindsight produces, that
Hasan was playing a game Egyptians play with relish all through their lives:
bargaining. It is a subtle and refined activity, in which two individuals jostle
and lock horns in a stylised charade in which the only rule is that there are
no rules. You can leave without buying anything, but if your bargaining
shows the mark of a master, you will be applauded as you depart. On the
other hand, impatience, rudeness, anger and bluntness will reveal your low
breeding and lack of culture. The bargaining will stop being fun, and you
will be dismissed as a khagawah, a local term misread as foreigner but more
accurately signifying a foolish, rich person.
I, of course, had not been bargaining at all, merely being forthright —
or so I believed. Hasan clearly thought otherwise. He considered it a strong,
if uninspired, gambit to start with a disclaimer that I intended to buy
nothing. That way, my starting price was zero. Unaware that my candour
was being misread as tactic, I now said, “We have had a death in our family
recently. My father. In our Hindu tradition, no celebrations, festivals,
entertainment is allowed for a year. Buying art in this year would be a
dishonour to the soul that has passed away.”
Hasan shook his head in admiration, not believing a word I’d said. He
thought it was a brilliant ploy. “My uncle too passed away,” he said finally,
making a sad and mournful face. “He was very close to me, almost like a
father. A wonderful man. As you know, death is a very costly affair in Egypt.
Technically, I should have built at least one small pyramid for the corpse,
but what with real estate prices and the cost of labour, we could not really
afford that. Still, the expenses were huge. We were nearly wiped out. And
now another uncle is complaining of a pain in his chest.”
A heavy, manufactured silence hung between us for a moment. “What
a coincidence,” he said gently. “Your dear father. My beloved uncle. Both
gone forever. I understand how it must be for you. That is why I make this
final offer to you of these four small but extraordinary paintings for only
sixty Egyptian pounds, which you have here with you, and an additional
US$ 150, which we can collect from your hotel.”
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
13
In the meanwhile, I seemed to have undergone some transformation.
Thinking ahead to my eventual destination, Chicago, I had begun wondering
if it would be such a bad idea to buy a few paintings. After all, there would
be many friends and relatives in the USA who would expect gifts.
“Very well,” I said finally. “Let me put it this way — I am willing to
blow twenty Egyptian pounds and fifty US dollars. What can you offer
against this budget?”
He ignored this entirely. “For seventy-five Egyptian pounds and seventyfive US dollars, I will give you all four paintings. Because you are so dear
to Mustafa.”
“Not four. Two,” I countered deftly. “And for fifty Egyptian pounds and
twenty US dollars. Because Sabir spoke so highly of your studio.”
“Make it sixty Egyptian pounds, and seventy-five US dollars, and I will
throw in a third painting,” he said expansively. “My brother likes you, he
wants you to have one more.” Sabir or Abdul or Mustafa, all pretence of
studenthood abandoned, grinned blatantly from the shadows as the
negotiations progressed.
“My last offer is fifty Egyptian pounds and fifty US dollars,” I said. “For
three paintings.”
He tried to make me part with ten more Egyptian pounds, and then
closed the sale. “You are very good,” he said. “Almost like one of us.” He
paused, struck by an afterthought: “Oh, by the way, I have some Indian
rupees, exactly 207. You are from India. Why not take them?”
By now, we were both old adversaries. I gave him a smile, as much as
to say Good try, old fellow. But it won’t work every time. Hasan shrugged
his shoulders and gamely abandoned the chase.
The Return of Omar
Just when all seems lost, a Cairene taxi-driver
arrives to take charge of our petrified traveller
and promises him the Land of the Pharaohs
That night, with my newly acquired rolls of ‘ancient’ Egyptian papyrus
standing loosely atop a dresser, propped up by books and other weights,
I jotted down my observations from my first day in Cairo:
14
•
Language: Learning Egyptian is out of the question, but one should try to master
at least the Arabic numerals while on the plane. On the way into town, practise
reading number plates on passing vehicles. It’s about as much as you can prepare
for Egypt. At least you’ll be able to have a haircut without getting gypped.
•
Egyptians always sound as though they’re angry, or fighting. Their phonetics
are gruff and aggressive. Indian phonetics, by the way, are equally
incomprehensible to them.
•
Get someone to write your name, address and other life-saving information for
you in Arabic on a chit of paper.
•
A street map is as good as useless in Cairo. All the streets have Egyptian names, written
in their script. And since most Egyptians do not understand English, you can expect
little help on the street. Come to Cairo, get happily lost.
•
Never board a taxi without getting some passer-by to first help you fix a price
— if you can find someone who understands you.
•
Egyptians take little or no care of their cars. The streets are full of ramshackle
tin boxes that belch fumes and make an awful din.
•
My first breakfast: yogurt with honey, feta cheese and black olives, pitta bread,
fried egg with bastirma, their version of pastrami, and awful, unfamiliar Turkish
coffee. LE 15.70.
•
The drink that street vendors pour out of a bagpipe-like bag is a refreshing cold
tea brewed from a flower called arksoos.
•
Cairo phones are as bad as the ones back home in India. That’s what happens
when you’ve been dragging your feet for 5,000 years.
•
Heard two tourists discussing the pyramids at the Windsor. Was struck by an
observation they made: it’s the only structure where the walls turn into the ceiling.
•
Saw not one camel on my first day.
•
Why do so many Egyptians say You’re welcome when no-one said Thanks?
•
To an Egyptian, Cairo is Misr, pronounced Masri.
•
Egyptians can’t stand Saudis.
•
Papyrus is a big industry. Every souvenir shop calls itself an ‘institute’, and every
shopkeeper is an ‘Egyptologist’.
•
Where’s Omar?
Next morning, a call from the Windsor Hotel’s lobby phone woke me from
deep slumber. “It is Halve!” someone said. “He has come for you.”
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
15
The strangely ominous words electrified me through my early morning
brain-fog. Who or what was Halve? The Egyptian secret police? Someone,
it appeared, had come to get me. My mind raced with the implications. I had
seen Midnight Express, and knew all about being incarcerated in Middle
Eastern prisons on trumped up charges of smuggling drugs. I also knew what
horrors awaited me once they discovered I was a journalist. I cast my mind
back frantically over the happenings of the previous day, searching for a
moment when I might have stepped on the wrong side of the law.
Then it hit me — Form D. The customs declaration sheet that I had
chosen not to fill. At the airport. The blue shirt officer I had confided in:
he must have set me up. I remembered telling him that I would be staying
at the Windsor Hotel. I felt a cold, sinking sensation in the pit of my
stomach. Now I would be blindfolded and taken to a small room in central
Cairo, with a fan and a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, and mercilessly
interrogated.
“Hello,” said the voice in my ear. “We are coming up to get you, okay?”
We. There were more than one of them. I jumped out of bed, slipped
into a shirt and trousers, quickly brushed my teeth, and had my last shave.
Then it dawned on me — the souvenir shop. Of course. Sabir and Hasan,
those two coyotes, they must have complained to the police that there was
a khagawah on the move with a lot of contraband dollars which he had
refused to part with. Not happy with having tricked me into buying their
worthless papyrus, they now wanted revenge because I had beaten down
their prices.
There were three sharp raps on the door. “Open, please,” boomed a
thickly accented voice. “I am from Egypt.”
Outside, in the gloom of the Windsor’s corridor, stood a short, muscular
man wearing a cap. As he strode into my room, I saw his face — a pugilist’s
countenance, battered by time and genetics, the eyes large and askew, the
grin lopsided. Through all of it, somehow, there seemed to be a twinkle,
a chink of light that hinted at a lurking humour that might have spoken
to me if only it had known anything other than Egyptian.
“Hello,” he said, extending his podgy paw. “I am Omar Halve. I have
come.”
16
In an instant, the mists cleared. This was the taxi-driver with the bookshop
and the aged uncle at Shepheard’s Hotel. “Hello to you,” I said, warmth
intermingled with relief. “Your name is Halve?”
“Not Halve,” he said pleasantly. “But Halve.”
On a scrap of paper, he laboriously pencilled the word ‘Elhelw’.
“Halve,” he said, with satisfaction. “Now we go to the Land of the
Pharaohs.”
Cupcakes in the Desert
The author risks cardiac arrest and enters
Egypt’s most famous monument, and discovers
nothing of consequence within
For two days, the taciturn but utterly hospitable Omar A. Elaziz Elhelw,
twenty-five, was my constant companion and guide. We flew through
Cairo in his beaten-up old red Toyota, windows down to let in warm
breezes, automotive exhausts, the cries of vendors in markets, the blare
of strange, lilting music from roadside cassette shops, and the din of
traffic at catatonic snarl-ups.
The pyramids at Gizeh, of course, were the obvious place to go the
first morning. We drove in silence down the arrow-straight highway that
led up from Cairo proper to Gizeh, and I found myself wondering why
something as immense as the pyramids did not dominate the city’s skyline.
It seemed to me that one ought to be able to see them from anywhere
in Cairo; and yet all you can see are the deadline profiles of middle-class
housing colonies. And then, suddenly, there between the ticky-tacky
arrays of residential apartment blocks, I got my first glimpse of the great
pyramids of Gizeh. But before I could properly see them, they had
disappeared once more.
The Cairenes seem to have somehow camouflaged their pyramids so that
you do not really see them till you are right upon them. The road, at its
end, suddenly grows greener, with hedges and landscaping, then flares out
into a parking area — right there in front of three of the most awesome
monuments known to man.
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
17
From my vantage, though, the pyramids resembled nothing if not
well-browned, free-standing cupcakes. With no objects nearby to
suggest perspective or scale, I found it impossible to gauge either their
true distance or their real size. Each seemed like a regular structure
made from regular bricks. Then I noticed the small ant-like figures
clambering up the sides of the foremost one, the Great Pyramid of
Khufu — tourists. There was an endless line of them, and they were
disappearing like termites into an aperture a third of the way up the
pyramid.
“Shall we go?” I asked Omar. I supposed it was de rigueur to make the
trip within. To my surprise, Omar shook his head.
“Don’t like inside,” he said. “You go.”
Omar Elhelw has never liked inside. This young fellow, living just a
stone’s throw from this ancient spot, has played hop-scotch around these
monuments as a child but cannot bear to enter them. He remembers the
first time he actually saw the pyramids, on a picnic with his family shortly
after Ramadan. It was noon, and they had pitched a tent out on the sands.
Omar had walked with them upto the narrow entrance, and then, beholding
the dwarf-high wormhole that sloped into the tomb, had changed his mind.
“I’ll stay out,” he’d said.
Later, when his family — parents, three brothers, two sisters — returned
huffing and puffing, and his mother said, “Never again!”, Omar knew he’d
made the right decision.
“Never again!,” he swore to me, and crawled back into his
Toyota.
The great pyramid of Khufu, still the world’s largest stone structure,
stands on thirteen acres of baking desert, and is made up of nearly two
million limestone and granite blocks, each weighing about two and a half
tons. The stones were hauled into position by gangs of ordinary labourers
using sheer muscle power and draught animals. The base of the pyramid
forms a perfect square, and such was the precision enforced by the ancient
architects and engineers that even today, the most modern instruments
cannot find more than half an inch of discrepancy in level between the
south-east and the north-west corners.
18
The stone blocks were slid on log rollers up rising ramps built in tiers
along the sides of the pyramid, three for going up, and one for coming
down. Each ramp began at one corner, and all ended at the topmost level
of construction at 481 feet. The work was completed over the pharaoh’s
reign of twenty-six years.
The chamber where the Pharaoh Khufu was buried, roughly a little
less than midway up the pyramid, can be reached today only through a
narrow shaft originally intended for ventilation. As soon as I stepped in,
I found myself bent double, for the shaft is only three or four feet high,
with smooth, rounded walls curving up into a ceiling. I clung to a railing
and carefully stepped past planks and beams erected, to keep the shaft
from collapsing.
The bright exterior sunlight receded as I stumbled towards the tomb,
past the usual graffiti proclaiming, I presume, eternal love and streetside
epithets. I was soon out of breath and panting, but my attention was
diverted from myself by the sight of a crumbling old Egyptian, easily over
ninety, negotiating his way carefully a little ahead of me. Close behind him
were his son and daughter-in-law, with several overexcited children in tow.
They seemed quite sanguine about their relative. I wondered if a cardiac
arrest inside a great pharaoh’s tomb was considered auspicious.
The shaft continued endlessly, humid, warm, constricting. Suddenly,
the ceiling grew higher and I found myself in a more spacious corridor,
but not much. After a short stretch of this, the air grew distinctly cooler,
and then we were in the burial chamber, a smaller room which served
as the entrance to the larger mausoleum. This was it. The big one. The
room behind the fanfare.
I entered, expecting to be blinded by the dazzle of legendary and fabled
treasures. Gold, rubies, caskets of gems and diadems. At least one huge
mummy. The whole hoard.
Nothing. At the centre of the world’s most famous pyramid is a perfectly
empty room, dim, cool, dank, featureless. A grizzled old fellow watching
me from the shadows cleared his throat, spat out some phlegm, and said,
“Museum. Everything go to museum.”
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
19
What Mrs Ehlehw cooked
Declining a belly dance, the author
finds a more thrilling way to
appease his own belly
On the morning of my last day in Cairo, Omar asked me when I wanted
to see a belly dance. I had already thought this one through. I had decided
that the average belly dance would probably be an expensive, touristy and
spurious affair. On the other hand, finding an authentic practitioner who
had learnt the fine control of her abdominal muscles as an art, would
probably take more time than I had at hand.
“I will not be seeing a belly dance, my friend,” I said.
“Then?” he said.
I knew exactly what I wanted: a ‘normal’ Egyptian lunch in a normal
Egyptian house. Such as, for example, Omar’s own. But how to brazenly
invite myself over for a meal? Would it not violate their sense of propriety
or hospitality?
“Are you married?” I asked him at length.
“Yes,” he said.
“One wife?”
He laughed. “Only one. I am not a greedy man.”
“Is she a good cook?”
He considered. “There is only one way to find out,” he said.
“I accept,” I said graciously.
We drove up to his house, which stood almost in the shadow of the
Sphinx and the three pyramids of Gizeh. His house, gloomy but roomy,
contained an extraordinary number of gorgeous, ancient, brocade-covered
sofas. Clearly never used, they were draped and protected from dust by large
bedsheets, which were whisked away as we entered. Between its two storeys,
Omar’s house held thirteen large rooms, in addition to two kitchens and
two bathrooms on the ground floor, and a bath and a kitchen on the first
floor. Most of the family, presided over by a matriarch well into her sixties,
sat on the kitchen floor, cutting and chopping for the afternoon’s lunch,
while on a nearby butugaz, tea brewed endlessly.
20
Omar’s nephews Mohammad and Aziz played tag in the sunlight of the
yard, watched by their sister Dina. His wife Affaf, a gentle woman with a
disappearing smile, indicated with gestures that I should make myself
comfortable while she attended to lunch. I awaited a common but typical
Egyptian meal, but what finally reached the table was one of those harmonious
masterpieces, whose excellence lies in their utter simplicity and style.
There are three players in the Ehlehw Symphony, and the simplest is
a salad assembled from diced tomatoes, cucumber, conchiglione and parsley,
with lemon juice and salt. While this cools in the fridge, salt is rubbed all
over the fowl, which is then left to tenderise for about half an hour.
The third instrument in the opus is the small, round and purple aubergine
that the Egyptians called betingan. The pièce de résistance. Preparing this
is simplicity itself — you must make a horizontal ‘mouth’ three-quarters of
the way along the aubergines, and then deep-fry them in very hot oil till
they become soft but not pulpy, turning golden brown inside the ‘mouth’.
After they have cooked and drained, an explosive chutney of equal parts
raw garlic, hot green chillies, some salt and some lemon juice is spooned
into the ‘mouth’ of each aubergine.
It was from Omar, later, that I received an account of how Mrs. Elhelw
had addressed the chicken in her kitchen. She had deep-fried the fowl in
oil that had been spiced with cinnamon, cloves, cardamoms, bay leaves,
mace, whole black pepper, things like that. By the time the chicken had
turned golden brown, it had also absorbed the fragrances of all those spices.
Well, I have put that meal on my tongue, and I can tell you I have seen
God. When aubergine joins that succulent, subtly spiced chicken, an
extraordinary duet begins. The aubergine with its spicy filling lands on your
tongue like an Ottoman warrior, full of energy, fire and piquancy. The bland
chicken suddenly meets its mate, and a remarkable pas de deux is set up,
with each dish highlighting the other. Throw in a spoonful of the juicy salad
after it, and the aria will be complete.
I left in respectful silence. At the door, I asked Omar if I could
thank his wife. He hesitated, smiled, as though allowing gratitude was
somehow at odds with true hospitality. “It is OK,” he said. “She knows
you liked it.”
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
21
A pause. “Besides, she does not understand English.”
What Happened at the Border
Form D finally takes its toll, after the author
leaves Cairo, crosses the Sinai Desert, and
reaches the border checkpost
“I am beginning to understand what you really did in Cairo,” said the Fish
to me. “You are clearly one of that breed of lizards whom I call forex fakirs.
They stay motionless, waiting for the exchange rate to turn favourable, and
then move in for the kill.”
I smirked. “You almost make it sound like I travelled to Egypt solely
to speculate on currency and not for the —”
“Yes,” he continued darkly, missing every word I’d said. “People like
you check into the cheapest hotel, and you have already admitted this. You
are not interested in history, evolution, culture, panorama, lifestyle. You,
as you have confessed, strolled. Where? I’ll tell you where — to the nearest
cambio or wechsel to ascertain the day’s conversion rate. And then —”
“Good God, man, you’re talking about the Egyptian pound, LE for
short!” I burst out in amazement. “Do you have any idea what that
miserable —”
“I have all the ideas,” replied the Fish suavely. “Don’t lecture me about
ideas. And I know all about Egypt too. The pyramid of Khushru is there.”
“Khufu,” I corrected without malice. “Plus two other cupcakes.”
It was the Fish’s contention that I must have spent three precious days
in Cairo trying to pit Egyptian pound against US dollar against Israeli shekel.
“Currency manipulations must have consumed the better part of your Cairo
trip,” said the Fish. “You don’t expect me to be that easily fooled, do you?
I know the rules.”
“What rules?” I asked innocently.
“Well, to start with, the rule that prohibits anyone from carrying Egyptian
pounds out of Egypt,” he said. “So the question arises, what did you do
with your worthless Egyptian currency?” He waited. “Go on. Tell them how
you tried to convert it.”
22
The rules were explicit, but I discovered them only on my last day, after
lunch with Omar. Seeing a Nile barge called the Queen of the Nile, which
offered luxury cruises down the famous river, I went aboard to meet its
manager and book a table for the evening journey-cum-dinner. He turned
out to be a personable Indian called Sood, and over chit-chat, when he learnt
that I was leaving the following day, he remarked, “I suppose you have taken
care of the currency matters.”
“What currency matters?” I asked, a familiar chill creeping up my spine.
“Well, they don’t like people taking more than twenty Egyptian pounds
out of Egypt,” he said. “If you have more than that, you’ll have to exchange
it, or spend it, before you leave.”
I had nearly 300 LE left. I rushed back to the Windsor Hotel, where
Doss, the owner, assured me that I could easily make the exchange at
the Bank of Egypt counter. Just around the corner from the hotel. If
I rushed.
I rushed, stood in a queue, and was finally told by a crisp Egyptian that
they had strict instructions not to give dollars away to anyone, especially
in return for Egyptian pounds. I had better try the Semiramis Hotel, further
down the street.
At the Semiramis, I met the same polite refusal to transact. “You know,
sir,” said the Exchange Counter Manager, “you should not worry yourself.
Relax, this is Egypt. Wait till you reach the border, and you will be able
to exchange all your Egyptian pounds at the Bank of Egypt counter there.
Of course, before they convert it, they will deduct US$30 for each day of
your stay here — unless you can produce dollar receipts proving that you
spent at least that much money daily.”
I groaned inwardly. I had made all my payments in Egyptian pounds.
I had no receipt for the US dollars I had blown on the paintings. I was in
a deep creek without a paddle.
By then, it was near sunset, the banks were closed. I grimly looked
forward to carrying for the rest of my earthly life 300 Egyptian pounds that
no one else wanted. I was certain that the Egyptians would have the last
laugh at the border checkpost. By then, I would be separated from Cairo
by 120 kilometres and the harsh wilderness of the Sinai desert.
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
23
I left Egypt in a rattly, poorly air-conditioned bus whose driver was fond
of speeding. He kicked up a sandstorm in his wake as he flew from Cairo
to the town of Suez. There everyone got off for cups of coffee, hot sunshine
and a few minutes in limbo, while a freight barge pulled up. The bus rolled
aboard and we made the canal crossing. There should have been a sense
of history, but all I felt was disappointment. Everything, it seemed to me,
had looked better in the movies.
The arid Sinai wilderness, bridging Asia and Africa, begins on the other
side of the Suez. Our route took us through the dunes and wastelands that
dot the northern reaches of the Sinai. It was blinding desert as far as the
eyes could see, featureless except for the stray shrub — and then, abruptly,
the carcass of a military tank or an old fighter plane. Then again, for miles,
nothing.
I kept my eyes peeled for Mount Sinai, where Moses received God’s Ten
Commandments, but there was nothing even remotely mountainous about
the landscape we were passing. I nodded off for an indeterminate interval,
and awoke with a start as the driver braked and skidded, trying to avoid
a goat. We’d reached the Egypt-Israel border.
The bus, deeply relieved to once again download a horde of infidels into
someone else’s promised land, released its anguish with a hydraulic sigh.
We tumbled out into a shadeless hot blue day, and I took my place in a
long immigration queue. No one spoke, though a fat British boy with snotty
rheum sniffled around the place whimpering to his mother about how
“nothing bloody works here”.
My passport was duly stamped at the counter, and I drifted into the
no-man’s land between Israel and Egypt, a low squat building with a few
lacklustre shops selling chewing gum, Coke, plastic toys and fake antiques.
I finally found the Bank of Egypt counter, deserted. The cashier, a short
bald fellow with a bushy moustache and no faith in the essential goodness
of human nature, saw me coming and barked, “No money. Counter
closed.”
“You speak English?” I asked him inconsequentially, holding out my
clutch of Egyptian pounds.
“I tells you, no money change,” he said.
24
“Look, I don’t have much money, and I need every bit I can carry. These
Egyptian pounds will be of no use to me in Israel, or anywhere else. I
implore you —”
“I tole you already,” he began.
“Please give me US dollars, or even Israeli shekels, in exchange.”
He gave me a long, level glare. “No,” he said at last. “Not.”
I moved on, dispirited and frustrated, and entered the matching building
of the Israeli immigration authority. The hall was identical, though cleaner.
Just as on the Egyptian side, there was a squat room in the centre, with
windows looking out on passageways on either side. The left passage was
for those entering Egypt from Israel, and the right one was for people like
me, entering Israel.
Unlike the Egyptian counter, where four immigration officers had been
vying with one another for the skilled job of stamping passports, here one
bushy-bearded, twinkly-eyed Israeli was handling the whole show, darting
merrily from one window to the other, wishing everyone a wonderful day
and life ahead of them, enquiring after kin and kith, asking if they had liked,
or intended to like, Israel.
It was here that, in an instant’s insight, I discovered what makes Israelis
so different from everyone else, and why, while one nation had 5,000 years
behind it, Israel would have 5,000 ahead of it.
After stamping my entry visa, the officer returned my passport, held my
eye for a moment, and asked, “No Egyptian pounds?”
I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “I could give you shekels,” he said.
“You’ll need them in Israel. Think about it.”
I pulled out my LEs and he changed them for shekels, as promised.
Tucking them into my pocket, I asked him the logical question: “What
do you do with the Egyptian pounds? Even the Egyptians didn’t want
them.”
“Why, I go across to that window on the other side of this room,”
he said, “and I sell it at a profit to some unfortunate fellow leaving
Israel and entering Egypt. If the money goes around, the world keeps
going around.”
A STROLLER IN CAIRO
25
Pharaoh’s Chicken
This unforgettable triad of dishes will live forever in my personal hall of fame as
a tribute to an afternoon’s lunch I had at the humble of a Cairene taxi driver called
Omar. Since the cook could speak no English, I could not leave Egypt with the
recipe. Over the years that followed, I had to reconstruct the dish, which I wittily
christened Pharaoh’s Chicken, through a process that was more error than trial. I
remember once boiling the aubergines and serving it to two polite American friends
of my sister in Chicago. Stifling a grimace, they pronounced it “Interesting.”
Well, the recipe below, finally and definitely the real thing, has proven itself
repeatedly before diverse audiences. Enjoy.
Ingredients:
To Feed 4
4 small broiler chickens, whole
12-15 small purple aubergines
1 large cucumber, in 1 cm dices
3 large red tomatoes, in 1 cm dices
2 medium onions, cut into 1 cm cubes
75 conchiglione (shell-shaped pasta), boiled al dente
Juice of 6 lemons
8 large garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
8 Serrano chillies, chopped
4 tbsps chopped fresh parsley
1 bay leaf
4 cloves
1 inch piece cinnamon
10 black peppercorns
3 whole red chillies
Salt to taste
2 cups of oil
26
Marinade:
3 tbsp dried thyme
Salt
Pepper
Method:
1. Combine the cucumber, tomatoes, onions, pasta, two-thirds of the lemon juice
and parsley. Toss together and keep in the fridge to chill.
2. Wash the chicken throughly, pat them dry and then rub the marinade of dried
thyme, salt and black pepper all over them. Keep aside for about an hour.
3. Grind the garlic and chillies together to make a fine paste. Add the remaining
lemon juice to it, and some salt and mix it well together.
4. Slit each aubergine once roughly three-quarters of the way along its length, to
create a sort of ‘mouth’. Heat oil about 4 cms deep in a wok, and when it is smoking
hot, throw in as many aubergines as the vessel will hold. Fry them till they become
soft and yielding to touch, and the ‘mouths’ have browned slightly. Remove them
from the oil, drain them on kitchen towels, and then place them under a fan or
in a fridge to cool.
5. When the aubergines are cool, spoon in a little of the garlic-chilly chutney into
the ‘mouth’ of each one. Close it again properly, wiping off any excess that might
have squeezed out of the sides.
6. In the same oil that you fried the aubergines, throw in the bay leaf, peppercorns,
cloves, cinnamon and red chillies. When the oil is hot, add the chicken. Fry, turning
it over occasionally, till it is cooked and golden brown on all sides.
7. Serve the chicken hot, with the cold salad and the stuffed aubergines.
Presently a short, pugnacious officer
with a gun click-clacked up to me.
Through years of practice he had
perfected the art of simultaneously
intimidating several passengers at
different benches, using a sort of
batch processing method. “Where did
you stay in Jerusalem?” he barked
at me briskly.
I took it that I had been found
guilty of something by now, and
that it was just a question of
establishing the details.
A French tourist does
ritual atonement for
his sins in Jerusalem
I spent eight days trying to
understand why Mr Nusseiby
(right) doesn’t think very highly
of Mr Joudeh (left)
One of the thirteen Stations of
the Cross along the Street of
Grief, the path down which
Christ bore his cross
I
S
R
A
E
L
The Doormen of Jesus
The Fish has never attempted to hide the fact that he thinks I am a
suspicious-looking character. It is his belief that I could easily be mistaken
for a terrorist.
“You are fair,” he pointed out once. “You tend to fidget with things,
you glare all the time, your hair is curly like a Palestinian’s, and you look
like the sort of fellow who wouldn’t be able to defend himself with his bare
hands. Nothing less than a Kalashnikov will do.”
I pointed out to him that all sorts of people have all sorts of opinions
on my looks. Several women, believe it or not, have detected a distinct
similarity between me and Omar Sharif.
“So,” continued the Fish inexorably, “when you say your eight days in
Jerusalem were over before you knew they had started, I’m afraid it won’t
wash with me. I know your type. Up to no good. I only hope you had the
sense to steer clear of Israel’s secret service. The dreaded Mossad. They
would have twisted your guts into challah and served it at Passover.”
“Well, since you bring it up, the Mossad and I parted on excellent
terms,” I said frostily. “They sincerely hoped that I had not been
30
inconvenienced in any way and, in fact, even gave me a small gift as a token
of their regard for me. I was deeply touched.”
“So!” cried the Fish, unable to believe this unsolicited confession. “They
caught you? You were actually apprehended by the Mossad? And what lies
did you blurt out in your defence?”
“No lies. Only what was true,” I replied, with dignity. “I simply told them
exactly what had happened. I told them I watched a war for eight days. After
a while, they had to believe me. It was the truth.”
“The truth is that it’s a half-truth,” said the Fish. “What you are calling
a war is better described as a fight between two families. That’s known as
a feud.”
“But these two families have been feuding for eight centuries, right since
the Crusades,” I protested. “Those were wars, surely!”
“Perhaps,” said the Fish. “But it doesn’t explain what you did for eight
days in Jerusalem.”
An Introduction to Saladin
The author reaches Jerusalem, barely finds a
place to sleep, and over dinner, is introduced to
an Ottoman king
In order to understand how I spent a week in the Holy City trying to
understand a quarrel between two families, the right place to start is the
evening I reached Jesus country. Jerusalem. Yerushalayim to its ruling Jews.
Operation Desert Storm and the bombing of Baghdad was exactly
eight days away. Saddam Hussein, whom the Americans would later dub
‘The Butcher of Baghdad’ had been promising “the mother of all battles”
for some time now. President George Bush, thin-lipped, rimless and
severe, had been declaring equally firmly that there would be no
compromise; Kuwait would be liberated. He made it sound like the
Crusades all over again.
Unaware of arriving at the ringside of a theatre of war, I got off the bus
and on to the pavement. As the vehicle purred away, I found myself standing
at a streetcorner in a manicured quarter of uptown Jerusalem. Not a soul
THE DOORMEN OF JESUS
31
around, not a sound except the swish of a light wind. Clearly the middle
of nowhere.
It was the magical half hour that precedes nightfall. The sun had set,
and I was at a junction between roads: the Yirmeyahu curved away to the
east, while a road called Hamem Gimel forked away to the north. The broad
avenue in front of me was Siderot Herzl. God knows where they led. Behind
me was the Jerusalem Gate Hotel. I decided to haul my luggage into the
hotel and see if they would let me use their telephone. My suitcase suddenly
seemed to weigh a ton.
I had a phone number, and it was of Beit Belgia (Belgium House) within
the campus of the Hebrew University on the Gi’vat Ram. Here I hoped to
find my good friend from Mumbai, the itinerant dancer Astad Deboo. He
had come to Jerusalem upon the invitation of the Rubin Academy of Dance
to teach a two-month course in Kathakali, Kerala’s masked martial dance.
One evening many months earlier in Mumbai, he had, with usual
generosity, made me an offer: “Come to Jerusalem in June, and you won’t
have to worry about where to stay. You can just crash out on the floor of
whichever hostel I am staying in.”
I hoped he still remembered his invitation.
The phone rang for a long time at a desk, clearly unmanned, of the
Hebrew University. I gave up, and turned to the counter clerk. “There is
a bus-stop down the street,” he murmured helpfully. “Someone there will
surely guide you.” He leaned forward and whispered confidentially,
“Shabbath is about to begin.” He meant that the Jews’ weekly day of rest
would soon be upon us, and no one would be there to help if I didn’t hurry.
As I lurched out of the hotel, half dragging, half being dragged by my
titanic suitcase, I reminded myself that I was in the very city where Jesus
Christ had hefted a cross twenty centuries earlier. Surely I ought to be able
to manage a simple suitcase somehow. And I did. Keeping my eyes on a
pretty Talmudic scholar walking sedately ahead of me, head bowed into her
copy of the Torah, I reached the bus-stop. She knew a few words of English,
and directed me into the right bus, which she herself boarded. Turned out
she was headed for the Gi’vat Ram too. With a serene nod, she signalled
where I ought to disembark.
32
I collapsed on the sidewalk, suitcase, camera and all, and then, resurrecting
myself, began the slow trek into the vast acres of the deserted university.
The Beit Belgia was empty too.
By the time Astad returned from his evening’s dance workshop, it was
nearly nine, and I was asleep on the steps of a spiral staircase in the foyer.
He shook me awake. “I thought you’d forgotten about Israel,” he said.
“Welcome. Feel like eating something?”
My eight days had begun.
That evening, over supper in the dining hall below, I listened in on a
conversation between members of a visiting British theatre troupe who, like
Astad, were conducting various summer dance courses for the Rubin
Academy. The situation in the Gulf dominated the chatter; the prevailing
opinion seemed to be that war was inevitable, and that there was no way
Israel would not find itself involved.
“Just a little provocation, and Israel will not be able to contain itself,”
said Robert Verbrugge, a volatile and irrepressible Dutch dancer. “They’ll
go in blazing, and then the USA will have to figure out how to deal with
them. You mark my words, we’ve got a good little war brewing up.”
“Nothing new for Israel,” said Christine Carter, from Britain. “They’ve
taken enough wars in their stride. This will be just a minor skirmish.” She
could hardly have guessed how much terror Saddam Hussein’s randomly
aimed flying cigars — the SCUD missiles — would create in Israel over the
weeks that followed.
I seized this opportunity to put in a question. “Not a good time to visit
Israel, is it?”
“On the contrary,” she replied. “Israel is at its best when there’s a war
coming up. You should go down to the Old City, the walled part of
Jerusalem. You’ll see an Israel there that’s survived centuries of bloodshed
and battle. Right back to the time of the Crusades and the Emperor Saladin.”
The conversation veered easily towards the exploits of Saladin the
Conqueror, one of those larger-than-life monarchs, like Genghis Khan and
Tamer Lane, who have captured the western imagination with their fabulous
exploits. This one had apparently been more than a match for his British
counterpart, Richard the Lion-Hearted, being quite as strong but twice as
33
subtle. Legend has it that when the crusading armies of Richard finally
reached Jerusalem, the British king, hoping to avoid outright war, sought
audience with Saladin. In the Ottoman king’s court, he asked for a large
slab of granite to be brought in, and then, raising his sword high, he clove
through it as though it had been butter.
“That is truly impressive,” murmured Saladin. “We certainly do not have
such powerful skills.” With this, he called for a length of fine, light muslin
cloth to be fetched, and threw it into the air. As it sailed down, he whipped
out his sword and with blinding speed, sliced through the cloth. “That is
as far as we have managed to reach,” he said.
I was fascinated by this strong and intelligent king. And at night, lying
awake in bed, I wondered if in the Old Walled City of Jerusalem, I might
find a family that could trace its origins back to the days of Saladin.
Lost and Found in the Old City
The author enters the holiest of holies of three
religions, and gets distracted by an insurance
agent from Florida
By ten the next morning, I was standing outside King David’s Gate, one
of the seven entrances into the Old City. The massive pale gold walls, built
from Jerusalem limestone in the mid-1500s, enclose eighty-two hectares
shared by four surcharged religious communities — Jews, Muslims, Christians
and Armenians. Though it is sublimely holy ground for each of them, Old
Jerusalem’s people have known no history other than flight and return,
repair and destruction, re-union and fragmentation through six millennia
of violence.
As you walk about this hill so near to heaven, you may sense the immense
fortitude that the soul needs to survive in history’s crucible, but what you
see will be the tetrapaks and aluminium cans of a modern civilisation, and
fast food wrappers in the same gutters where the blood of a million devout
has flowed, mingled with their tears. The narrow lanes leading away from
King David’s Gate are flanked by souvenir stalls, selling mementos and Tshirts transfer-printed with Hard Rock Café, and souvenir crosses and
34
prayer beads, to tourists in dark glasses, hefting backpacks. It will almost
seem sacrilege to stroll, with a can of Coke in your hand, along via Dolorosa,
the Street of Grief down which Christ carried his cross to the crucifixion.
Sitting on a kerb in one of the gullies near King David’s Gate, I played
a little guessing game with myself. Randomly picking some passer-by who
looked like a native, not a tourist, I would try to guess which quarter he
belonged to, Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Armenian. Then, looking at my
street map, I would try to build up a small scenario regarding where he or
she was headed this morning.
The easy ones were the ultra-Orthodox Jewish clergymen: dressed in
regulation black, double-breasted coats and brimmed felt hats, they’d
generally be seen weaving briskly through the crowds, as though the end
of the world were nigh and they were already running behind schedule. I
do not remember seeing even one who did not wear steel-rimmed spectacles,
or did not look deeply troubled by some inner predicament.
Occasionally, you might see two of them generating temperature and
pressure at a streetcorner, stroking their sidelocks and releasing their
earnest and animated opinions about everyone’s past and Israel’s future.
With an average of six children per family, ultra-Orthodox Jews represent
a rapidly growing and vociferous segment of Israel’s population. To many
liberal Jews, they are the face of a rigid, authoritarian and dogmatic Judaism,
close to dictatorship. Not the sort of chaps you want to stop and ask where
they were headed, but I guessed they’d be on their way to prayers at the
Wailing Wall.
Four gaily laughing women in grey shadors and black cowls, their laughter
tinkling ahead of them, emerged from the bright sunlight of the streetcorner
to my left, and then disappeared into the shaded alley to my right. Their
laughter hovered over the lane for some moments after they had passed.
They were Muslims, judging from their attire, and yet, perhaps not, judging
by the fact that their faces were not shrouded by burqas. I asked a nearby
shopkeeper who seemed to have a comfortable knowledge of English.
“Egyptian Copts,” he said. “They probably live in the lanes around the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”
“Why are they so happy?” I asked him.
35
“Even God wouldn’t know the answer to that,” he said. “All they’ve done
in the walled city is fight with Ethiopian Orthodox monks for their ‘right’
to the mud huts on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They’ve
fought with bare hands, and sometimes in courts, but nobody wins such
fights in Jerusalem. The dispute itself is the goal.”
A burly fellow in a singlet with black curly hair on fleshy arms, dark
blue stubble, and bad teeth walked by humming horribly, swinging two
empty cloth bags. I guessed he was Muslim, and probably going shopping
to the meat and spice market in the Muslim Quarter. If you should visit
here, you will find yourself in a crowded, energetic and aromatic market
where commerce has abolished secular differences. All are united by the
universal faith that requires its faithful to eat heartily. You will find every
denomination here, from the twenty or so Christian sects to every variant
of Jewish belief, to Islam, all toting shopping bags and bargaining as their
ancestors must have done centuries ago.
Look down at the bricks that pave the market, and you will see an
exposed layer of flagstone from the Roman days, still carrying the vivid
indentations of a cartwheel. Here, inside the marketplace, you might discover
the truth behind Jerusalem’s truth: in order to continue the war against each
other, Jerusalem’s religions first have to co-exist as neighbours. In the
process, war becomes just another aspect of life, like shopping for meat.
Between battles, it’s chow time. I’m not certain how my first day in the
Old City, my second day in Jerusalem, passed. I remember stepping into
a small café outside Jaffa Gate and ordering felafel and tabbouleh without
quite knowing what to expect, and being delighted by the savoury pocket
of pitta bread that flew to my table, accompanied by a tart and crunchy green
salad crowded with fresh parsley. It seemed to me later that I spent most
of the day sitting on a step near King David’s Gate, watching life and soaking
up history. But I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.
I promised myself to get down to my quest in right earnest from the next
day: finding a family that could recount its ancestry upto the reign of Saladin.
A fixed routine slowly evolved. Astad would have left by the time
I awoke, so I would shower and dress, eat a rye cracker or two with
a cup of coffee, and then board Bus 9 upto the Central Bus Station.
36
From there, I would wait for Bus 13 to take me to Jaffa Gate. En route,
I considered anyone with even a smattering of English as fair game. After
all, any of them might have been from the special family I was seeking
in the Old City.
I particularly remember a fair, portly Palestinian called Josef Aref
Abu Ghoush. After establishing that we had enough English between
us to talk for a few minutes, I told him I was from India, visiting Israel
— which always creates a small and useful empathy — and where did
he come from?
“Abu Ghoush is also the name of my village area,” he said. He was tubby
and looked a bit like a banker though he was a clerk in an office. With
an English-medium school education, he considered himself ‘cultured’, but
under his surface urbanity, there seethed anger. “Of course, we don’t have
any land in that village any more,” he said, with a mirthless smile. “We
are Palestinians. The Jews took our land away.”
He glanced sideways to see my reaction to this. I kept my face neutral.
“Hate Jews,” he said.
“Your family?” I asked, wishing to change the subject.
“My wife only,” he said. “My sons have left Israel, and are scattered
all over the world. They know where to reach me, but I don’t know any
more where they are.”
“How many sons?”
He replied, absent-mindedly, “Seventeen, I think.”
On my second day, I trekked around the Old City’s four quarters armed
with a street map and my Blue Guide to Jerusalem. I made little effort
to specifically chart a course, instead walking where my interest took me,
and now and then pausing to reorient myself. Exploring Old Jerusalem
is a bit like being a character in a giant, real-life game of Dungeons &
Dragons. Every nook carries its secret history, its blessings, special
powers, curses. There are stones here that have been made smooth by
the penitent fingers of countless sinners, and pavements grazed by the
faithful foreheads of millions.
37
You turn a corner and find a hunchback with a twisted face, one eye
shut forever, for all the world like some deformed Biblical sinner whom
Christ will forgive and make whole. Elsewhere, you will nearly jump out
of your skin when a shadowy section of a wall takes an ominous step
towards you; but it will only be a young Israeli soldier, his Uzi loosely
cradled in his arms. I never got used to the sight of these young warriors,
ready for battle through every moment of peace. I would hurry past them
as fast as I could.
One moment you will be on a smooth paved road where cars can park;
the next you will have turned into an alley with narrow stone steps winding
downhill sharply. Children will be playing tag, nimbly dodging goats and
beastly tourists. Then you will pass a stone arch and find yourself in a
bazaar, a cool, deeply shaded, covered corridor, where the vendors’ faces
are sidelit by their lights. Afar you will see where you can re-emerge into
bright sunlight.
I met Bartholomew, a young investment broker from Miami, Florida,
at the mouth of an underground tunnel that leads to the Western, or
Wailing, Wall, where Jews throng to pray. Barry, a bull-necked, crew cut
giant with straw-coloured hair, was one of those hearty, bewildered Americans
who react to too much reality like a devil to holy water. The trip to Jerusalem
was a good-performance reward from his firm, and he had undertaken it
in good faith, so to speak, but now he was terrified. He had never been
to any place so disorganised and frightening as this walled city.
I noticed him first after I clicked a photograph of a peeling yellow
building with black-haired Palestinian children peering out of every
window. About five seconds later, I heard another click, like an echo of
my own camera. It was Barry, standing about ten feet away, frowning
fiercely as he tried to frame the same building in his point-and-click
camera. Catching my eye, he nodded gravely, like one viscount greeting
another. “Hey man, is this building a Jesus-building or what?” he said
half-heartedly. An utterly lost tourist.
Pretty soon we had become wandering companions. I think he was
hoping I might be able to tell him what was what in this complex
settlement.
38
“Isn’t this place wild?” he enthused, as we reached via Dolorosa,
the Street of Grief, up which Jesus had carried his cross to the
crucifixion.
A small procession of pilgrims toiled uphill past us. Their leader, a
tormented, barebodied man with an unkempt French beard, was sweating
and panting as he carried a large and definitely heavy cross on his right
shoulder, in reverent imitation of Christ’s agony, a ritual atonement popular
with many Christian pilgrims.
Barry was grinning widely at this sight. “Hey man, check this out,” he
called out to me. “This is just like in the movies.”
Barry made Jerusalem manageable by reducing it to concepts of two
syllables or less; he tamed complexities by matching them with home-grown
American simplicities. At the shrine marking the spot where Pontius Pilate
had rained whiplashes on Christ, he frowned mightily for a while and then
recognised an exciting word whose meaning he knew but which he could
not pronounce: flagellation. “Church of the Flagamacallit, hey? Is this like
in, uh, Penthouse?”
I explained that this was called scourging, and was nothing like S&M.
He listened intently, and then nodded to himself: “I get it. They beat
him up.”
As we passed the magnificent St James Church in the Armenian quarter,
sonorous strains of organ wafted across a courtyard. Barry perked up:
“Where’s that music coming from? I go for that kind of music, man, back
in Miami.” Almost at once, he was distracted by the crisp aroma of meat
frying somewhere at hand. “I wanna check out sheesh kebobs, man,” he
said. “My Dad told me this is the country where they invented sheesh
kebobs, y’know. You like sheesh kebobs or what?”
But for the most part, Barry was content to stay in my vicinity, like a
well-trained mastiff, exquisitely alert to whatever photographs I took.
Occasionally, to demonstrate that he could figure things out for himself,
he would independently frame some arbitrary photograph. After some
mighty diddling with his batteries-not-included-brains-not-needed camera,
he would turn to me and say something like, “You reckon this is a good
picture or what?”
39
And it was thus, ambling like two mismatched refugees from another
world, that the Indian and the Floridan finally stepped into the gravelly
forecourt of the shrine at the centre of Christendom: the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre. There were nearly as many soldiers here as tourists, and
neither seemed to mind the other. I turned to Barry, who had nervously
cached his camera in his haversack, and remarked, “This, Bartholomew,
is the shrine at the centre of Christendom. The Church of the Holy
Sepulchre.” I knew it would take him several minutes to wrap his mind
around these few concepts. Predictably, a frown appeared on his face at
once. Thoughts began to form within.
I wandered off, losing Bartholomew somewhere in the darkness of the
church. It was an enormous edifice, a medley of architectural styles imposed
by different pious Christian monarchs who wanted the key to the kingdom
themselves. The interiors were dark, and the acoustical qualities magnified
and distorted whispers and the shuffling of feet. From the stained glass on
the ceiling high above, a single Biblical shaft of light reached in, forming
a smoky pool of light within the cathedral, in which I could see a huddle
of Armenian women with their children, like refugees caught in a searchlight
while fleeing.
Where was the hill of the crucifixion? The answer was an arrow pointing
down into a basement. I followed the steps and found myself in a hall with
a large underbelly of rough rock hanging from the ceiling. It must have
been one of the outcroppings of the original Golgotha, but today it is all
that you can see of the hill. I retraced my steps back to ground level, lingered
for some minutes at the shrine marking the spot where Christ was resurrected,
and then left.
On my way out, I was ambushed by Bartholomew. The mists had
cleared from his loft by then, and he had the look of a man who had
cracked a difficult code, except for a few niggling details. “Hey, man,”
he cried, running up to me. “How did you like that place? Intense,
wasn’t it?”
I agreed that it had been that.
“Uh,” he said, reaching for the main issue, “what was that Sepsomething you mentioned earlier? Is it important?”
40
“That’s the Holy Sepulchre,” I replied patiently. “Sepulchre means
tomb. Grave. Where people get buried, you know.”
Barry nodded, understanding illuminating his face. “I get it,” he said.
He cast back in his mind for a suitable analogy, and found it. “Like in
Michael Jackson’s Thriller.”
The Keykeeper’s Tale
Two old Muslim families, and the key from
an emperor that binds them to
all Christians everywhere
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre magnetised me, and I returned to it
again and again over the following days. There was an abiding peace inside
the quiet, cool sanctum which even the throng of tourists and militiamen
with guns could do nothing to disturb. Everything about the place touched
something deep inside me, from the rich fragrance of frankincense, to the
gleam of candles in the prayer-polished darkness. My original purpose, of
finding a family with ancient roots, slipped to the back of my mind.
And then on my fifth day in Jerusalem, I had a stroke of good fortune.
That morning, I stood in the courtyard of the Church, admiring the
ancient door. Over 800 years old and nearly twenty feet tall, the door stands
under a double arcade with a frieze surmounted by a twelfth century
cornice. A hoodmould of finely carved rosettes overhangs the portal’s arches.
Flanking the entrance are rebated marble triple columns with capitals and
imposts carved in floral designs. Touch the age-old carpentry, and it is
difficult not to feel a sense of awe, for this wood has known the touch of
kings and saints and sinners through history.
As I watched, the door began to move.
A ferret-faced fellow was laboriously swinging it to a half-shut position,
ostensibly to regulate the thronging pilgrim crowds. Because of his vaguely
Levantine looks, I approached to ask him if he was a Church employee.
“No,” he said briefly. “I am Wajeeh Nusseiby. A guide.”
“Then how –” I was perplexed. “How is it that no one stops you from
handling this door?”
41
“I am allowed,” he said. “I am always allowed to handle this door.”
I pressed further, “By who?”
“By al-Malik al-Nasir-i-Salah al-Din al-Ayyoubi,” he said importantly,
after a pause.
Salah al-Din. The Emperor Saladin. My pulse quickened. “Can we talk
somewhere?” I asked him, hoping my excitement would not show.
Now Nusseiby was a crafty fox, and no stranger to publicity. He muttered
vaguely about being busy, and walked off, confident that I would follow
him. Eventually, he led me into a sheltered chapel within the Church, and
retrieved a briefcase from somewhere. He bade me sit, and began talking.
Over the next hour, I heard the ironic narrative of Nusseiby’s twin
legacies, one from a Sultan and the other from a Messiah. History has teased
Nusseiby by allowing him to open and shut the doors of Christianity’s
church every morning and evening, but alas, he may not keep the keys. That
honour belongs to another Jerusalem family, the Joudehs.
“How did the Joudehs become the keykeepers?” I asked.
“How do such things happen?” he said, as though it didn’t make any
difference to him. “They had more money. They must have made a donation
to the Sultan. Sultans have always understood donations clearly.”
“Are you friends, your family and the Joudehs?” I asked.
I suspected Nusseiby would not have fancied dropping in for a nice cup
of tea at the Joudehs even if they had been the last two families left in
Jerusalem.
“Of course we are friends,” he said, without emphasis, his face a mask.
“Why should we not be friends? We may meet. If the need arises. Or we may
never meet. It is the same thing either way. Friendship does not come into it.”
“How may I meet this Joudeh?” I asked delicately.
“Meet Joudeh?” he reacted sharply. “You needn’t meet Joudeh. You
have met me, you have the facts, the whole picture is before you. I have
shown you the documents, and here is the church. There is no reason for
you to waste your time further.”
The very next day, in Jerusalem’s Palestinian weekly, Al-Fajr, I stumbled
upon an unexpected wealth of historical detail about the story behind the
Church door.
42
In AD 1187, Saladin threw the Crusader armies out of Jerusalem. His
advisors, still smarting from the Crusaders’ AD 1099 massacre of 70,000
Muslims at the al-Aqsa Mosque, strongly urged him to demolish the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre. Much to their chagrin, Saladin decided instead to
re-open it to devout Christians. However, to dissuade Crusaders from sneaking
back disguised as pilgrims, he declared a Muslim holiday in honour of the
Prophet Mousa to coincide with the Christian celebration of Easter. Not
only would large Muslim crowds fill the walled city at the same time as the
Christian influx, his army would also gather for displays of equestrian and
martial prowess. The day’s climax would be a procession from Jerusalem
to the Prophet Mousa’s shrine some twenty-five kilometres eastward.
In the second year after the Muslims regained control, the number of
pilgrims increased dramatically. As a precaution, Saladin ordered one of the
entrances to the Sepulchre closed permanently, and as a measure of abundant
caution, gave the keys to the Goddayehs, a noble Muslim family and ancestors
of the Joudehs. Christianity was already divided — between the Latin
Church, favoured by the Crusaders, and the Orthodox Church, which
Saladin himself supported. Saladin did not wish to appear partisan, and
besides the Goddayehs were respected by all factions of Jerusalem society.
They still have the farman — the official decree authorised with the royal
seal — that Saladin issued them.
But the Joudehs, though honoured enough to receive the keys, had a
slight problem. In the social protocols of the Arab world, they held a not
lowly place. It would be unseemly for them to be opening and shutting
doors to let crowds in. They accepted the key and then politely declined
the duty.
Another farman a few years later charged the Nusseibys with opening
and shutting the doors of the Holy Sepulchre. Wajeeh Nusseiby’s ancestor
was stung by the second-rate honour. After all, he was an Ansar, of the tribe
that had ministered to the Prophet’s needs. Why should the Joudehs get
the keys? How dare they accept?
“Originally, of course, the keys had been given to us,” confessed
Nusseiby, with the casual candour of someone letting out an accepted fact.
“That was in AD 636, long before Saladin, long before the Crusades.” He
43
claims that the Roman patriarch Saffronius had handed them over to the
victorious Caliph Omar ibn al-Khatab, who had given them to the Nusseibys
for safekeeping.
“Then what happened?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.
“Well,” said Nusseiby sheepishly, “my ancestors fled Jerusalem when the
Crusaders attacked in 1099. For many years, we hid in Boreen, our village
in Nabulus. By the time we returned, the key was with the Joudehs. We
couldn’t get them back. The Sultan said we’d have to open the doors. And
that’s what we do today.”
In the darkness just before Jerusalem’s dawn, two pairs of feet crunch
across the gravel forecourt of the church that houses Jesus’ tomb.
A nightbird flying overhead would see two men walking briskly, dressed
in warm clothes against the chill air. One, the larger and clearly the elder,
has the air of a merchant banker, with imposing spectacles perched on a
generous nose, and a close-trimmed toothbrush moustache. He is Jawad
Joudeh, believed to have descended in a direct line from the Prophet
himself. In his hand, Joudeh holds the ancient keys to the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre.
Wajeeh Jacob Nusseiby el-Khazram is trotting along by his side, hurrying
to keep pace. He is shorter, light-haired and tidily dressed, almost dapper.
Joudeh and Nusseiby, almost like father and son to a casual observer, walk
north across the parvis to the massive church door. Here, at exactly 4 a.m.,
they will once again carry out their 900-year-old historic duty. As always,
there will be no one to see them, and no one to wonder at the almost divine
paradox of two Muslims, with neither self-consciousness nor arrogance,
making it possible for Christians to pray at their holiest of holies.
Joudeh will hand the thin, long iron key to Nusseiby.
Nusseiby will insert it into the church’s door and turn it.
Then, leaning with all his weight and pushing with both hands, he will
throw open the doors to Jesus’ church. The key will go back to Joudeh, who
will pocket it. A little later, he will deposit it in a secret safe nearby till eight
in the evening, when the doors close again.
44
Without saying a word, the two men will return to their homes, Joudeh
perhaps to resume his interrupted sleep.
Jawad Joudeh, who fills Nusseiby with such rancour, may be found
in the small fruit and vegetable shop his son manages not far from
Damascus Gate. He speaks with urbanity, his command of English
impeccable, thanks to his education at the Anglican Bishop Gobat School
on Mount Zion. Unlike Nusseiby, Joudeh is a bit of a celebrity, occasionally
written about because of his historic office of keykeeper, and he is
accustomed to the little fame.
He confirmed in every detail what I already knew from the records, and
showed me copies of Saladin’s farman to his ancestors.
What did Joudeh feel about Nusseiby?
“What about that other man?” I asked innocently. “The one who says
the keys originally belonged to him?”
For a moment, I thought Joudeh hadn’t heard me. He was silent, but
a faint smile hovered on his face as he looked down at his shoes. “You mean
that little fellow?” he said finally, frowning as though trying to recall a
difficult name. He shrugged, waved his hand airily.
And with that, history’s winner dismissed its loser from the conversation.
I walked back from Joudeh’s fruit shop to the walled city, and ambled
for one last time quite slowly through it, passing the Church, and the
narrow streets that had somehow begun to feel like a pavement home of
sorts to me. A young Israeli soldier stopped me. “Where are you going?”
he asked me.
“Home,” I said. It was my last day in Jerusalem. And I was just hours
away from a historic meeting with the Israeli Secret Service.
A Meeting with the Mossad
A searing encounter with the world’s toughest
security service, and how the author proved
that he was no terrorist
Astad had warned me about the Mossad. “There’s a lot of them at the
airport, and they will ask you a thousand questions, even if you’re a ninety-
45
year-old grandmother who can see through only one eye and has to be
moved about in a wheelchair.”
“Don’t get witty with the Mossad, darling,” said Verbrugge, the Dutch
dance teacher. “They just detest that. They might just shoot you on the spot
and be done with it.”
“Don’t try to bullshit them,” said Carter. “Don’t crack jokes. Don’t smile
too much. Speak softly, though not inaudibly. Don’t try to strike up a false
camaraderie. Don’t stay too aloof, on the other hand. This is not a bunch
of streetcops.”
When I reached Ben Gurion International Airport at Tel Aviv, it was
nearly two in the morning. The airport was deserted and I was very sleepy.
Arranging myself on a hard plastic chair in a corner, with a foot over my
mountainous suitcase, I nodded off for two hours. When I awoke, there were
soldiers everywhere. The Mossad had arrived. An announcement was directing
passengers of TWA’s Chicago flight to their security check.
As I moved to the queue, I thought about the dozen or so days gone
by. There had been the three days in Egypt, with Omar the Taxi Driver,
and the pyramids and the glorious chicken. And these eight nearly
supernatural days in the Holy City in which everything had been larger than
life, awe-inspiring, nothing ordinary about even a moment. I knew I had
been privileged to enjoy a very rare holiday. I doubted if there was anything
the Mossad could do to spoil it for me now.
“I was an ideal tourist,” I told the Fish later. “You couldn’t lay a finger
on me. I walked all over the place, observing things, taking notes, studying
the culture, learning, thinking, that sort of thing.”
The Fish, however, holds that this was precisely how a potential hijacker
would have passed his time if he had wished to remain inconspicuous. “He
would have pottered about the old walled city pretending to be mesmerised
by history and culture. The Mossad is trained to look out for exactly such
inept fellows. Don’t expect me to sympathise. I am not a whit surprised at
what happened to you.”
What happened was that I was finally introduced to a grim sort of
Mossad operative, possibly from their Firearms Division, at Tel Aviv’s
Ben Gurion International Airport. We conversed for a longish interval
46
while I good-naturedly let him satisfy himself that I was no malcontent
or bomb expert or anything like that. After this, pleased with his
findings, he let me leave Israel. We parted as friends, with no hard
feelings on either side.
I just thought I’d give you some of the details of this encounter, so
that you may judge for yourself how terribly off the mark the Fish is
in his views.
A timid-looking youth, with crew cut hair and an apologetic style of
talking approached and invited me to place my baggage on the inspection
bench. Smiling cooperatively, I did so.
The interrogation began.
“So you have been long in Israel?” he asked me.
“Eight days and a few hours,” I replied.
“Been here before?”
“No, as a matter of fact. First visit.”
“Why did you come?”
“Oh… I have always wanted to come to Israel,” I volunteered. This
sounded tame. “You have such a history, such a past.” Sounded thin. “A
very intense civilisation. I have read all about it in the National Geographic,
and I was keen -”
He cut in with, “So, did you see the sound and light show at King David’s
Gate of the walled city?”
“Actually, no.”
“Did you visit the Knesset?”
“Didn’t quite manage it, I’m afraid.”
“How did you like the Museum of the Holocaust?”
“Odd, couldn’t get around to seeing that particular one, really.”
“What did you see in Israel then?”
“Well — I walked about a good deal within the old walled city. That
was what I did, walked about a lot.”
“Walked about?” he said, plainly sceptical now. “For eight days you
walked about? In the old walled city?”
“When you come down to it, as a matter of fact, that is just about what
I did,” I affirmed.
47
He rifled through my passport and discovered that I had come in via
Egypt. “How many days did you spend in Cairo?”
“Three days.”
“Do you know anyone there?”
“I do now,” I said, paying tribute to my well-known ability to strike up
friendships wherever I go. Then, realising that he might consider this an
unnecessarily witty answer, I said, more seriously, “No, officer, I know no
Egyptians.”
“Then what did you do there for three whole days?”
“Well, I saw the pyramids…”
“That’s half a day.”
“…and then I, well, sort of, you know, went for a stroll around Cairo
a bit. I like walking around quite a lot, actually.”
Later, analysing this, the Fish pointed out that “walking about” is probably
the answer most terrorists give when asked to explain their whereabouts at
different times. “They are amazingly unimaginative people,” he told me.
“Years of homelessness have destroyed their geographical skills, and they
cannot tell you anything about their whereabouts. You unwittingly made
yourself a perfect target. In my opinion, the Mossad must have viewed you
as a total turkey.”
The Mossad man, who had till now not dropped his mask of deference,
motioned me to wait, and walked across the large hall. I noted that there
were other passengers at fifteen or so benches parallel to mine, and each
was being given the full treatment by a Mossad sergeant.
Quite damp about the forehead by now, I waited. There was some South
Indian coffee powder in a sealed plastic bag in my suitcase. What if they thought
it was gelignite? Or cocaine? Such thoughts flashed through my mind.
Presently a short, pugnacious officer click-clacked up to me. He was
clearly a senior fellow, for he held a gun. Through years of practice he had
perfected the art of simultaneously intimidating several passengers at different
benches, using a sort of batch processing method.
“Where did you stay in Jerusalem?” he barked at me briskly. I took it
that I had been found guilty of something by now, and that it was just a
question of establishing the details.
48
“Beit Belgia on the university campus,” I said, equally briskly. I didn’t
want to appear as though I was searching for the answer.
“Do you know some students?”
“No, I have an Indian friend at the campus.”
“What does he do?”
“He is a Kathakali dancer.”
“What is this?”
“An ancient Indian military dance form, from the southern state of
Kerala, involving a lot of make-up and giant masks…”
“A military dance? What is this fellow doing teaching a military dance
in Jerusalem?”
I knew I was really in it by now.
“Do you dance?”
“No.”
“Are you in the army?”
“No, not at all, sir.”
“What is the Beit Belgia phone number?”
“Er… I don’t really know. I never had reason to call up Beit Belgia.”
“Show me a receipt for your stay.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have one. I was an unofficial guest of my dancer friend.
Slept on the floor. The lodge does not allow extra guests, but made an
exception in my case. They billed him twenty-five dollars extra for me. I paid
him in cash.”
“His name?”
I told them.
The deferential young man sprinted off, ostensibly to call Beit Belgia and
confirm all this. He came back presently, shaking his head, as though it was
all over for me. I guessed no one had answered the phone at that hour.
“How did you travel to the old city every day?” continued the pug-like
officer.
“Bus number 9.”
“That only goes up to the Central Bus station.”
“Yes,” I said eagerly. “It does. Then I would change to bus number 13
to King David’s Gate.”
49
“What is your profession?”
“A journalist,” I said, with some pride. “I write.”
“You are an Indian journalist?” he said, as though I had finally strained
his credulity to the hilt. “I think you will have to come with us.”
By now a group of people were watching with unconcealed curiosity.
I was led into a large room by the Deferential Young Officer, who told me
he was only a trainee — and presumably not very good yet at intimidating
chaps. In the room, where I was the only other person, my bag was placed
on a large stainless steel platform somewhat like an operating table, and
opened carefully. Every item in the suitcase was meticulously removed and
placed separately. When it was all out, including the coffee powder, each
item was individually passed through an X-ray machine.
Yea, even unto each separate Liberty underwear.
The process took about forty-five minutes.
Then it was all over.
Smiling broadly now, the Mossad sergeant approached me with his hand
outstretched. I waited tensely. “You are free to go,” he said. I knew the
game: they would mercilessly gun me down as I sprinted towards the
aircraft. Shot while trying to escape. “We are sorry that this may have
inconvenienced you a little. We wish to give you a small token of our regret.
With the compliments of Mossad.”
It was a small ugly pen made in Taiwan.
I have still not dared open it.
After all, it might be a bomb.
Challah
I saw this divinely twisted bread first in Jerusalem, while visiting an old British
couple who had settled down there. I encountered the name for the second time
while reading an account of an employment and free housing project in New York:
it appeared baking challah was one of their sources of income. So when we came
upon the recipe for challah in a book on the Middle East, Shilpa gave this distinctive
pretzel a go.
50
Ingredients:
To make two loaves
5˚ — 6˚ cups flour, unsifted
3 tbsps sugar
1˚ tsp salt
1 package dry active yeast
˚ cup butter (or margarine), softened
A pinch powdered saffron
1 cup warm water (120o - 130o F)
4 eggs (at room temperature)
1 tsp cold water
˚ tsp poppy seeds
Method:
1. Combine 1˘ cups flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Mix in the softened
butter. Stir the saffron into the warm water until it dissolves. Add a little at a time
to the flour mixture and blend thoroughly. Beat for two minutes with an electric
mixer at medium speed, scraping the bowl occasionally.
2. Separate the yolk and white of 1 egg. Blend the single egg white and the other
3 whole eggs into the batter. Reserve the single egg yolk. Stir half a cup of flour
into the batter and beat at high speed for two minutes, scraping the bowl occasionally.
3. Blend in enough additional flour to make a soft dough. Knead the dough on a
lightly floured board for about 8 to 10 minutes, or until it is smooth and elastic.
Place the dough in a greased bowl, turning it once to grease the top. Cover and
allow the dough to rise in a warm, draft-free place until it doubles in bulk
(approximately 1 hour).
4. Flour a pastry board lightly and set the dough on it. Divide the dough into two
equal portions. Divide each portion into two pieces, using one-third of the dough
for one piece and two-thirds of the dough for the other. Divide the larger piece
into three equal portions. Roll each of these into 12-inch ropes. Braid the lengths
together tightly, using your fingers to press the dough together at the ends.
51
5. Divide the smaller piece into three equal portions. Roll each of these into 10inch lengths and braid tightly. Place the smaller braid on top of the larger one and
seal the ends. Repeat this process to form the second loaf.
6. Place both braided loaves on a greased baking sheet. Mix the reserved single egg
yolk with 1 teaspoon cold water and brush the top of the loaves with this mixture.
Sprinkle on the poppy seeds, and let the loaves rise until double in bulk in a warm,
draft-free place (approximately 1 hour). Bake in a preheated 400oF oven for 20 to
25 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool on wire racks.
Hummus bi Tahina
(Chickpea with Tahina)
My first meal on my first day in Old Jerusalem included hummus and the wonderful
crunchy tabbouleh salad. Both are easy to make, and make not only wonderful
accompaniments to most Middle Eastern meals, but also good starters (or mezze,
as they are known).
Ingredients:
120-180 gms chickpea, soaked overnight
Juice of 2-3 lemons
2-3 cloves garlic
150 ml tahina paste (sesame paste)
Garnish
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp paprika
1 tbsp finely chopped parsley
52
Method
1. To make the tahina paste, grind 150 ml of sesame seeds until they reach a creamy,
white consistency. Do not add water.
2. Boil the soaked chickpea in fresh water for about 1 hour, or until they are soft.
Drain the chickpeas, reserving the cooking water, and put aside a few whole ones
to garnish the dish.
3. Press the rest through a sieve or pound them in a mortar; or better still, use an
electric mixer or blender to reduce them to a puree. In this case, you will have to
pour the lemon juice and a little of the cooking water into the bowl or container
first to provide enough liquid for the blending to be successful. Add the remaining
ingredients and blend to a creamy paste, adding more water if necessary. If you
are blending by hand, crush the garlic cloves with salt, add them to the crushed
chickpea and pound them together until they are well mixed.
4. Add the tahina paste gradually, followed by the lemon juice, and mix vigorously.
If the paste seems too thick, beat in a little water to thin it to the consistency of
a creamy mayonnaise. Keep tasting and adjusting the seasoning, adding more lemon
juice, garlic or salt if necessary.
5. Pour the hummus bi tahina into a flat serving dish and dribble a little red paprika
mixed with olive oil over the surface. Sprinkle with chopped parsley, and arrange
a decorative pattern of whole chickpeas on top. Serve as a dip with Arab bread
or pitta.
H E A T H R O W
The Curious Incident of
the Cake
As we happened to be leaving India on my birthday, the airline had very
kindly arranged for a cake to be presented to me aboard the flight. This
was not because I am a celebrity of any kind — as you might erroneously
conclude — but simply that that particular airline was working hard on
building a certain warm, humane, thoughtful image of itself.
Of course, the passenger had to first find a suitably discreet way of letting
the airline know it was his birthday, so that various bakers could swing into
action. I accomplished this by enlisting the aid of my friend, known as the
Fish for reasons long forgotten. He simply phoned up the airline and bluntly
told them a cake had better be ready.
The cake boarded the plane at Abu Dhabi, the first stop, but thanks to
certain time-zone differences, jet lag and the fact that we were a little late,
it was already the day after my birthday. To be precise, it was one hour past
my birthday.
54
On top of everything, the air hostess charged with the delivery was a
bit of a schoolmistress, very severe and businesslike, who strutted up and
down the First Class aisle, asking, “Birthday, anyone? Any birthdays here,
please?” much as though she were selling fresh halibut.
Under the circumstances, I thought it best to look out of the window
and pretend I hadn’t heard. But the Fish, may God rot his soul, piped
up with what I thought unnecessary eagerness to impress the matron with
his command of English, “Yes, ma’am, it’s this here man’s birthday.”
Needless to say, this was one of the last journeys I undertook in the
company of the Fish.
Despite my vigorous protestations, the cake was unceremoniously dumped
on my lap. A peek revealed it to be a chestnut-brown affair, decked with
dried fruits and some icing, with my name slightly misspelt, with a ‘D’ used
instead of a ‘G’.
The Fish was all for eating it immediately, preferably by himself, but
I pointed out that the Middle East is not renowned for the quality of its
bakers as much as its drilling rig operators. Thus, cake in hand, we reached
Heathrow, where, after a five-hour wait in the transit lounge, we were to
board a connecting TWA flight to Chicago.
I was unaware that TWA had very recently tightened its security
procedures, in the wake of two or three bomb threats. In particular, they
were on the lookout for innocent passengers carrying suspicious-looking
parcels that had been consigned to their care by strangers at the airport.
So when a young, broad-shouldered collegian type of American, wearing
a Michigan U T-shirt, casually strolled up, and began pointedly discussing
the business of accepting parcels from strangers at airports, I did not treat
it as grounds for concern.
“Some people, man, they’re real hick, man!” he drawled. “They just take
ahold of any old bag from any old terrorist who sashays up to them. ‘Hey,
man, y’all carry this here innocent bag that’s just got some chocolates for
my little girl ?’ Next thing you know, the plane’s ready to blow up at cruising
altitude. You know?” His eyes travelled down to the packet in my hands.
“What’s that, man?”
“Cake,” I replied.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE CAKE
“Ya don’t say!” he said, suddenly excited, and sprinted off a little
distance, to where his buddy was waiting. The buddy was about eleven feet
tall, in dark glasses, and a trenchcoat with collar opened up. If he was not
a terrorist himself, he was certainly a bruiser at least.
This was when the Fish informed me that he could spot a CIA man at
twenty paces, and this was a CIA set-up if he’d ever seen one. The CIA,
in his opinion, had probably been on to me from Abu Dhabi itself; he
conjectured that they might now “grill” me a little bit. The Trenchcoat,
meanwhile, ambled off in the very opposite direction to where I was
standing, whistling hoarsely and horribly, presumably to lull me into a false
sense of security.
Presently, I heard the same horrible whistling but from somewhere
directly behind me. I whirled around and beheld The Trenchcoat. He had
a single gold tooth among the white.
“So!” he bellowed softly, if you can imagine that. “You’ve got some
cake.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. The ‘sir’ came automatically.
“Where’s it from?”
“Abu Dhabi, sir.”
“Where are you from?”
“Bombay.”
“Now is that right? You’re from Bombay and you jest went along and
picked up a little cutesy-pie bit of cake at Abu Dhabi, is that what you’re
saying?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“And how come you haven’t eaten it?”
Speak only the truth, I told myself.
“Well, I don’t exactly like cake.”
“Ho?” he burst out. “Now you’re from Bombay, you don’t exactly like
cake, and you’re carrying this cutesy-pie bit of cake from Abu Dhabi, is
that what you’re saying?”
“Well…yes,” I managed.
“And where are you going?”
“Um…Chicago. Sir.”
55
56
“I see. Man from Bombay, goin’ to Chicago, picks up some cake at Abu
Dhabi, and he don’t exactly like cake either, is that about right?”
I must confess it had all begun to sound a little thin even to me. Behind
The Trenchcoat, the Fish had begun shaking his head from side to side
in a saddened sort of way, as though he hadn’t expected this from me. The
Trenchcoat suddenly galvanised himself into action. “I think I just better
take a look at this cake of yours, son!” he growled, grabbed the package
from my hands, and, holding it at arm’s length from his body, dashed off
towards a nearby room. I was sweating freely by then.
Fifteen minutes later, The Trenchcoat and the University student reemerged from their labours, both visibly relieved, though shaken as well.
The packet was open, and crumbles and gobs of ex-cake fell in a trail behind
them as they walked towards me. They reached me, beaming like the Mayor
and his deputy on the eve of giving away a Good Citizenship Award.
“Here y’are,” the Trenchcoat said, handing me back my demolished
birthday treat. “It’s cake all right!”
NORTH INDIA
In the Buddha’s Footsteps
“This is most embarrassing,” smirked the Fish. “You were obviously a very
sick man, afflicted with a malady no-one would dare mention in polite
company. Some might say you were close to committing larceny.”
“You mean blasphemy,” I said, after a moment. “After all, there was
something religious about the assignment.”
“And it is so typical of you,” he continued, as though I had said nothing
at all, “to commit such heresy, and then deny that you had visited these holy
shrines while suffering from such a fundamentally embarrassing disease.”
I thought it was time I spoke up in my defence. “First of all,” I said,
“piles is not a disease. It is a condition, characterised by one slightly swollen
vein. Second of all, I was not suffering from piles when I did my journey
to the Buddhist shrines. I, I, I had a mild cold.”
“It is well-known that people who suffer from piles pretend that all they,
they, they have is a mild cold,” said the Fish shrewdly. “And you, good
God!” — a major thought was born — “you actually rattled along all over
north India in winter on the hard wooden benches of second class
compartments. Must have been traumatic. At a very basic level.”
IN THE BUDDHA’S FOOTSTEPS
59
“They did have rexin covers,” I corrected him. “So even if, only
theoretically, one had been suffering from piles, one would — theoretically
— have been reasonably comfortable. Not that I had, you know, piles or
anything.”
He nodded his rotunda in crocodile commiseration. “Not that,” he
purred. “But assuming that, only theoretically, you had been suffering from
piles, that would explain why you found that hideous dinner of boiled
squash or bottled gourd or whatever so mesmerising. Pileys are supposed
to stay off the fried stuff, aren’t they? And don’t even bother denying that
you had a bottle of fleaseed husk in your tote bag. It’s standard issue for
hammerheads.”
“Has it struck you,” I asked him, my ire completely roused by now, “that
if a person were in fact suffering from haemorrhoids — not that I was —
then he could do worse than study something of the Buddhist way of life?
They have wonderful ways of dealing with earthly pain, you know.”
He unveiled a slow, manic smile, as though he had finally scored a
direct hit.
To understand my pilgrimage, we must go back to an afternoon in early
December in the late seventies, when the late, great Desmond Doig, the
ebullient Irish editor of the once and only JS magazine, summoned me to
his cabin to anoint me official Roving Reporter. I nodded, understanding
nothing at all.
“I want you to tee off with Lumbini,” he said briskly.
He paused for my reaction, knowing it would be complete bafflement.
Where on earth was Lumbini? “Some, some, sort of story?” I finally managed
to say.
“Only the greatest story ever told,” he said. “The story of the Buddha,
revisited on the 2,500th anniversary of his birth, which, of course, was at
Lumbini. Do a Buddha number for us. Take yourself off to the places where
he lived his life and did his work, from Lumbini to Kushinagar, and everything
in between. A sort of Eightfold Path born again. Just grab your tote bag
and hit the tracks.”
60
The tote bag, as it turned out, was made of yak hide, and loaned to
me by Desmond himself. Awash with what I told myself was Buddhist
asceticism, I had decided to travel frugally — a well-weathered pair of
jeans, a thick, orange full-necked sweater, some disposable underclothes
destined to be jettisoned into the Indian hinterland after use at the rate
of one per day, and toiletries. Bedtime reading was What is Buddhism?
by Christmas Humphreys.
I would be travelling almost without cease for a week in the footsteps
of the Buddha. The pilgrimage would touch five spots, though in logical
rather than chronological order: Sarnath, where he delivered his first sermon
after attaining enlightenment; Lumbini, his birthplace, somewhere across
the Indo-Nepal border; Kushinagar, not far from Lumbini, where he reached
parinirvana, escaping forever from the cycle of rebirth; Bodh Gaya, where
he attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree; and Rajgir, where he sat
atop a mount and discoursed in his latter years. My nights were for travelling,
with a hard, penitent sleep on cold wooden berths; daytime was for observing,
listening, talking, understanding. For food, I would forage on railway platforms
and wayside stalls. Or perhaps eat nothing at all, keeping my belly empty
and my mind open.
I had forsworn shaving for the duration of the trip; it seemed somehow
ascetic and appropriate. By the time the ten days were up, I was not just
tired, dirty and ravenous, but also my face felt like a cold cactus. The chill
winds had dried my skin wherever it was exposed, and the airborne dust
of middle India had made my chappal-clad feet unwashed and brittle. By
the second day, I felt like my feet were on hire-purchase, not mine at all
except to use during the trip. At night, I would wash them in ice-cold water
from some leaking tap in a tin-top hotel, and that would make matters both
better and worse. My feet would be cleaner, but they would be nearly rigid
with cold. Even the thickest quilts I pulled over myself would be unequal
to the task of warming them enough for me to get a few hours of decent
sleep. In brief, I shivered through the nights, consoling myself that it was
probably atonement for sins past.
But it was at Sarnath, whence the Buddha began spreading his light, that
I too received illumination. It became clear to me that for the rest of my
61
journey, I was destined to suffer exquisite mortal pain with every step: I selfdiagnosed a full-fledged attack of Napoleon’s famous ailment. Well, I
determined, it would take more than one wayward vein in the descending
colon to undo me.
It was a bitingly cold, clear, tubelit night in the alleys of Varanasi when
I got off the train. A lucid, starry sky reigned over Hinduism’s most chaotic
junction, but there were already people and animals about. Cows, snouts
inside garbage bins, huddled together for warmth. The gateway to one
religion’s holiest spot also happens to be the port of entry for another’s
shrines: Sarnath is a mere ten kilometre gallop north-east of Varanasi, but
as it was too early to find a horse-drawn carriage, I picked my way between
chandals, outcasts who are employed in cremations and smouldering Hindus
at the Manikarnika ghat, heading towards the famous Ganga river.
Cold mongrels slithered on wet flagstones and fled yelping before
Madhukar Polé, the awesome priest, as he strode towards his holy dip,
chattering mantras. He was a large, pot-bellied man with bushy eyebrows
and hooded eyes, and the permanent scowl of one whose hot line to the
Almighty has been disconnected due to non-payment of dues. He was clad
in the thinnest of cotton towels; there wasn’t a fresh set; presumably, as
prescribed by his monastic vows, he’d wash and wear the same one again.
The musty stench of still-damp cotton, intermingled with the sweat of holy
men is my most distinctive olfactory memory of Varanasi.
Polé, oblivious to my riveted presence three broad steps behind him,
raised his hands high over his head, exactly as advertised in the National
Geographic, and executed what was clearly the first move of the yogic
Sun Salutations. The sun, still below the horizon, waited patiently for
Polé’s departure. He extended one foot into the cold water, retracted
it, wiggling his toes, and then bravely splashed in like a walrus,
disappearing up to his navel into Manikarnika tank. The static escaping
his lips grew louder and more urgent, and then suddenly sharply nasal,
as he grabbed his nostrils and dived entirely under water. According to
myth, the goddess Parvati lost her earring here and her consort Shiva
62
scooped out the tank in his efforts to retrieve the ring, filling the
depression with his sweat.
The seconds passed. Then, as the bloated carcass of some large beast
of burden slowly hove into view at the edge of the picture, Polé too surfaced,
slush streaming off his skin, mumbling frantically to his God.
His eyes looked upwards and he saw, not God, but a lesser relative, the
Indian journalist. He stared at me with distaste for a few moments.
“If you are a true Hindu,” he finally shivered at me, “bathe in the holy
water of the Ganga.”
He began towelling himself briskly. By the time he was merely damp, a
more placatory extension of this thought had occurred to him: “If you feel
the water might be too cold for a holy dip,” he said, more gently, “then you
can please God equally by feeding a Brahmin.” A pause. “I am a Brahmin.”
He ate a dozen sweet hot jalebis from a ghatside confectionery, and then
washed it down with a carafe of hot milk. A full burp, and then he looked
at me blankly, wondering exactly who I was. I realised that my act of charity
had won me nothing of Polé’s friendship; it was my security deposit with
his God. Still, I thought I ought to get some bang for my buck. “How do
I get to Sarnath from here?” I asked him as he rose to leave. He told me.
I might as well not have gone to the Deer Park. The Buddha didn’t live
there any more, though the tourism ministry undoubtedly did, and there
seemed to be as many Japanese tourists as there were flies at the snack stalls.
It is a shrine whose time has gone; that time, to be precise, was AD 640,
when the Chinese traveller Xuan Zhang visited, and recorded in his diary
that there were nearly “1,500 monks and a stupa nearly 100 metres high”
(actually no more than thirty-four).
When the traveller Gopinath visited Sarnath two millenia later, he learnt
that a five-star hotel and a convention centre were due to come up there.
I walked around the gardens, growing aware, like the Buddha, that to be
alive was to be in pain and misery. It was hot, and the first day of my devoutly
undertaken assignment was turning out to be markedly irreligious and banal.
By evening, I was bound on a cold train for Gorakhpur, whence I would
change trains for the border town of Naugarh, and then hop across the
border to Lumbini, the Buddha’s birthplace.
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The onward train from Gorakhpur to Naugarh was berthed at a siding.
Learning this at two in the morning, I decided I’d rather crawl in there and
hope to sleep than lie on a thin sheet on a windy railway platform with my
head on a yak hide pillow. The train was entirely dark and deserted, but
I located an open door and captured a berth. I had no blanket to cover
myself, and the intense cold made sleep impossible. I lay there in a tense
half-sleep.
Around then, there occurred one of those entirely unforgettable moments
that come and go, leaving the world suddenly a better place. I heard a sound
nearby like a heavy door creaking open and thought I discerned footsteps.
I did not stir at all, in case it was some railway official on his rounds. The
footsteps seemed to approach very near me, and then receded. I dozed off
fitfully again. A while later, after my slumber had deepened somewhat, I
awoke with a start — someone’s hands were moving about in my vicinity.
I froze, fearing to move even a little. To my amazement, those hands pulled
a warm woollen blanket over me, and tucked me in, like a mother would.
I could not see my benefactor’s face, but I knew it was the railway inspector
who had come just moments earlier. Clearly, this was the blanket he would
not be using as long as he was on duty. I knew he could not see me either.
He had just assumed that I was a cold, lonely derelict human being who
had crawled into a dark coach to sleep.
I folded it and left it in a corner of the berth with a small note of thanks
when the train reached Naugarh around 7 a.m. For me, there was more
of religion and god in the charity I received from an utter stranger in the
wee hours before dawn than all the priests and monks of Varanasi and
Sarnath put together.
If anything sets the Buddha’s birthplace apart, it is neglect. Winds howled
and tore at Lumbini, tucked amidst fields two kilometres from the IndoNepal border. No one comes here; weeds rule. There is a tea-shop, an
impoverished provision store, and two rows of dark huts around the
hamlet’s only lane. It is said that Gautama Buddha was born premature,
while his mother was en route her parents’ home. As she passed through
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the wooded glades of Lumbini, she felt the first contractions of labour.
As though by magic, the bough of a nearby tree bent towards her, and
she delivered the infant Buddha while standing upright, grasping the
bough for support.
That “wooded glade” is today a brick-walled garden overgrown with
weeds. Rats have built burrows between the carcasses of fallen trunks. There
is the air of a graveyard, not a birthplace. I strolled here and there awhile,
without much purpose; other pilgrims who had come in the same bus with
me seemed similarly rudderless. A few cupped hot tea from the tea-stall;
someone bravely tried to pee behind a peepul tree before the wind changed
direction; others stood bowed in the middle of the village’s only street, hands
deep in pockets, windcheaters billowing about them, their hair ravaged by
the shrieking winds. It was desolate and tragic.
An old man, face like old leather, eyes rheumy and sad, said something
towards me, but against the wind. I walked towards him, asking, “What?”
but he had begun walking away. I followed him and saw him disappear
into a hut. I stopped short; had I been invited? His face and a hand reemerged from the darkness, and beckoned, so I entered the hut. After a
few moments my eyes re-adjusted to the dim interior light, and I noted that
I was in a large space with a high roof. There was the smell of ashes in
the air, no doubt from daily cooking fires. Another door led out to a yard
in the back. A young girl, strong and lithe, watched with open curiosity
from there, a snotty child on her hip.
From one of the teak rafters of the hut, there hung a stout coil of woven
hemp, the size of a sportsman’s wrist. I tugged at it; it was firmly knotted
around the rafter. The old man, seeing the question in my eyes, went out
the back door and re-entered with his grandson. They both stood a small
distance away from me, watching expressionlessly.
“My daughter held on to that when she gave birth to this boy,” he said
finally, so softly that I nearly did not hear it.
To me those whispered words finally made Lumbini special. Here, in
the village where the Buddha was born 2,500 years ago, today’s infants are
delivered standing up. No tree may bend down to help — but a rope does
hang from a rafter.
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When the Buddha died at Kushinagar his ashes were scattered over seven
spots all over the earth. A few ashes, I was told, were retained at Kushinagar,
so that’s what I searched for when I got there. No one seemed to know, so
I carried on walking, and eventually found myself outside Kushinagar, on a
narrow village road flanked by fields of tall sugar cane. It was a clear, sunny
winter day, verging on warm. I took off my sweater and knotted it around
my waist. Presently, I heard the tinkling of bells and saw a cow-cart dancing
down the road towards me. It was the only vehicle on this passage in the
middle of nowhere, and I was the only other human being in sight. The singing
youth driving the cart smiled at me — young man, clear, white eyes, bright
and confident smile, almost straight out of a calendar — and offered me a
lift. I got on and lay down on hay, watching the blue sky go past.
“I’m looking for the Buddha’s ashes,” I said to him at length. “Do you
know anything about it?”
He stopped singing and pointed to a perfectly bald hill in the distance,
with one perfectly overgrown tree nearby. I hopped off when we drew up,
and took in an unexpected sight — a little shrine, a labyrinthine banyan
tree, many pilgrims and mendicants, and a perfectly manicured mound, with
neat rows of gladioli and roses and marigolds, brick paving, gravel paths
— and a withered, rootless gardener watering the plants from a bheestie’s
waterbag.
I learnt that a portion of the Buddha’s ashes had been buried at this
spot. The gardener, over eighty, one eye glassy with cataract, back bent with
spondulosis, snowy white stubble on his toothless face, had tended to the
garden at the Buddha’s grave since he had been a lad of sixteen. A hermit
called Pagal Baba had made the upper reaches of the banyan tree his home,
and had grown into an eccentric healing legend, visited by the ill and those
in pain from miles afar. My own pain was considerable by then, but Pagal
Baba had already attained nirvana if not parinirvana.
I stayed till the sun crossed noon, and then departed.
By the time I reached Rajgir, I was in nearly mortal distress. It had taken
the Buddha an entire princely childhood and part of his manhood to
66
realise that there was nothing more to life than pain and misery. I had
come to the same realisation about railway travel after just a week on the
hard rafters of second class coaches. In deference to my condition, I had
adopted the Buddha’s Middle Way of moderation in all things, but it was
a strategy yet to bear fruit. I was abjuring spicy food entirely, surviving
on bananas and tap water; I moved without malice even towards those who
rough-shouldered others in ticket queues; I hadn’t sworn at a stray dog
in days; and I had managed to somehow relegate the unbearable painfulness
of being to a back corner of my consciousness, so that it spoke but only
when spoken to.
Still, you will understand why I was not somehow in the right frame of
mind to appreciate the little town famous for its sulphur springs and the
hill where the Buddha had set out his doctrine. I took a cable car to the
top of the hill — a result of investment by Japan and not Bihar — and sat
on a rock sampling the crisp winter air, and the flat and featureless vista
of Pataliputra’s countryside stretching away on all sides, but it did not allay
my soul’s agony. By evening, when I had returned to earth, I was all but
ready for parinirvana myself.
Elaborate misdirections from a sleepy fool had led me to the outskirts
of Rajgir, which was apparently completely uninhabited. Ahead of me a
pencil-thin road ran straight to nowhere. I began walking, each step a labour
on the gravel, a bird coo-cooing somewhere in almost perfect sympathy.
There was, I’d been told, a government guest house beyond the horizon.
Perhaps one with a kitchen. I was extremely hungry.
The eastern sky had turned to night, but to the west it was still the
enamelled blue of a jay’s eye, drifting to peach where the sun had just
drowned. A single Lucifer shone unblinking on this sky’s forehead. The
arches of my feet ached, and the yak-hide shoulderbag felt like the complete
yak. The earth, flat and featureless all around, was in silhouette.
To my right, from the breast of Buddha’s hill, a deep gong boomed
slowly, completely understanding my sacrifice. I plodded past it, forgetting
sky, stars, night, body, soul, listening only to the rhythmic scraping of my
boots on the tar and the impatient growling of my stomach. Finally, that
sound itself mesmerised me. I reached perfect freedom from want, and
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contemplated my pleading, whining stomach from afar with interest. The
creature wanted something to eat, it seemed. How ordinary.
A slow thought walked past me: What if this road never ends, but carries
on, straight as an arrow, to an entirely different world?
Just as I thought I was approaching an understanding of infinity, lights
marched over the horizon. Very dim, now there, now not, but finally, there
indeed. Perhaps a hut. Perhaps a late-closing teahouse. But no, it was the
circuit house, and it stood a little off the road, surrounded by a demolished
wall, a bit of barbed wire, a wooden gate that someone had dismantled and
laid flat on the grass.
A bluish light shone from the building, but all else was dark. There
could have been no guests. From somewhere at hand, I could hear the
frenzied screeching of violins. With diffident steps, I walked in through
the wide open door. Within were three corridors, one turning left, one
running straight, and one turning right. Ready by now for ghosts, I tiptoed
towards the glow.
It was a recreation room. As I reached the door, a tall, quivering figure
rose from the wicker chair, where he had been absorbing a Hindi film’s
violence and violins on a fuzzy old television set. He turned to me, his face
stubbled white, hands gnarled, eyes crinkly and sad and full of water, and
a fading smile.
“You are hungry,” he said.
I don’t remember speaking or hearing another word. He disappeared
through a dark door into another world where he pottered about for about
forty-five minutes. I could hear a kerosene stove pump itself up. Some
aromas began to stray out, a dance of friendly spices led by a coriander fairy.
A black pariah dog suddenly sprinted out through the door, its thin eyes
darting with fear and uncertainty, and fled. I heard steel clanging steel, water
gushing out of taps, something bubbling. Under it, I could hear human
muttering, as though the old man was reminding himself of the recipe.
Then dinner arrived.
You may never understand why I value that meal so much. There was
rice, flaky and wet and steaming. There was a very simple dal, of urad, with
a long sliver of ginger and two cored and halved green chillies in it. For
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a vegetable, there was gourd, steamed, lightly fried, garnished, God knows
what else. And with them was salad on a cheap white plate: sliced and salted
tomatoes and cucumbers, with a squeeze of lime. A small dish of crystal salt
on the side. A hot roasted papad.
Is this a meal to write about?
I can still not forget it. The warmth filled my belly, and every mouthful
tasted like a miracle. All along, the old claviger sat deferentially a few feet
away on a rickety chair, his hands clasped before him, his moth-eaten fez
slightly askew on his hairless head. He would begin nodding into sleep, and
his body would start falling forward. Reawakening briefly, he would set
himself right and continue waiting.
Thus was dinner served in the land of the Buddha.
B H U S A V A L
The Pigs of Bhusaval
Word spread rapidly among the pigs of Bhusaval’s Bamb Colony that two
young fellows were going about removing uteruses. You will not be surprised
to learn that Bhusaval’s pigs remained indifferent to this information; they
calmly continued poking their snouts into ripe garbage. Pigs are like that;
they feel invulnerable when they’re in the sewer. They wake up only when
they realise that someone’s got a firm grip on their trotters and a knee in
their gut, while someone else has slit their underbelly and is pulling out their
hopes for posterity with two fingers. Then the squealing begins.
“They will not have any piglets,” the young municipal veterinarian
announced grimly, having flung the pink flesh into the bushes and wiped
the blood on the pig’s back. “Now they will grow and reach this height.”
His palm rose to his hip. The pig, released, bounded away helter-skelter for
the healing vapours of the drain.
According to a human source, there are 1,80,626 voters in Bhusaval,
Maharashtra’s self-conscious railway town. There is no count of the pigs
because pigs do not vote, so everyone leaves them alone. The esteemed Leva
Patil community also ignores them entirely, because fortunately the pigs
Salunke, veteran freedom
fighter and irrepressible
writer, brings out Bhusaval’s
voice, the weekly Chitragupt,
from his ancient treadle press
You will see Bhusaval’s pigs
everywhere — floating like
dinghies in the sewage canal;
trundling through main street
traffic, uterus intact, with a
grunting conference of piglets
in tow; investigating the shit
along the railway tracks;
celebrating among mountains
of wet, steaming biomass at
the mandi, where amazingly
fresh vegetables arrive from
the countryside every
morning.
A typical Bhusaval pig,
thirsting for some action
A great moment in the
vegetable market:
Bhusaval’s famous
green aubergines are
on sale
THE PIGS OF BHUSAVAL
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don’t much care for green aubergines, which the Levas love to eat, and
yellow bananas, which they love to sell.
So you will see Bhusaval’s pigs everywhere — floating like dinghies in the
sewage canal; trundling through main street traffic, uterus intact, with a
grunting conference of piglets in tow; investigating the shit along the railway
tracks; celebrating among mountains of wet, steaming biomass at the mandi,
where amazingly fresh vegetables arrive from the countryside every morning,
to sell out by forenoon. For the pigs of Bhusaval, there will be a feast of rotting
cabbage outers, decaying papaya pulp, entire branches of harbhara, hay,
slush and straw, with soggy cardboard in dung sauce for dessert.
“This is my refrigerator,” says old Salunke, who owns a dilapidated
treadle printing press in a corner of the vegetable market. “Fresh vegetables
each morning; wonderful lunches by noon.”
He is, however, not allowed to have too many wonderful lunches because
of an abdominal hernia judged to be inoperable at his age. They removed
his cataracts five years ago, though, so Salunke is back to proofreading. Most
of the time, it is trivial but breadwinning work, such as wedding invitations,
but once in a week it is Bhusaval’s top paper, the weekly Chitragupt, eight
tabloid pages printed in red ink and authored entirely by the irrepressible
old man. Like all veteran freedom fighters, Salunke has a deep understanding
of independence, and his printing press is his ticket to an elusive selfreliance. In a good month, he might earn Rs.3,000 or so, enough for many
wonderful lunches for himself and his descendants. In a bad month, and
there have been many, everyone advises Salunke to close down his tin-shed
press, but he digs his heels in.
“People are addicted to liquor,” he says. “For me, it is my press. Like
a baby. Cannot be allowed to die.” He sits there every morning, surrounded
by two compositing daughters, and eats fresh fruit before attending to the
wedding cards. “Please — fling the peels outside.”
Following his example, I fling the debris of several bananas, sapodillas
and papayas out of the door to mess up the freshly cleaned porch; I feel
mildly uncivilised. Within minutes, however, a task force of pigs appears
and clears up both the doorway and my conscience. In Bhusaval’s ecosystem, pigs are clearly vital and useful.
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“But,” says Reddy, Bhusaval’s famous reporter, raising a gloomy finger,
“it is a useless town.” Given enough time, Reddy could probably argue
against himself on this very issue of Bhusaval’s usefulness. He would probably
win, too, trouncing himself with Bhusaval’s undisputed crowning glory —
that there are more ways to leave this no-hope railway town than any other
place in India. Fully eighty-two trains that year, going up and down, pass
the historic junction, not forgetting the more important sixty-five goods
trains, many of them disseminating bananas from Leva Patil farms. The
platforms, extended to accommodate the banana wagons, are unfortunately
only the second longest in India.
“But if you should only consider the Central Railways,” says Reddy
craftily, “then Bhusaval has the longest platforms in the world.”
Reddy, lost in his detailed numbers and triviata, is now dreamily listing
the trains that can take you away from Bhusaval to any part of India that
you wish. There is the Kanyakumari Express via Madras, which pretty much
takes care of the south. The Ahmedabad-Bangalore Express connects those
two growing centres of commerce. Then there are mails and expresses and
flying ranees and shatabdis to whisk you away to equally miserable
Gorakhpur, and thence Nepal, or most of northern India — except Jammu
and Kashmir which are handled by other trains. There are five daily trains
to Howrah and the east, including the superfast Gitanjali Express. The
reputed Bose & Company take advantage of this to shamelessly export
quintals of the delicious lalpari fish freshly caught from the sweet waters
of the Tapi River. To Reddy, there is something juicy and scandalous about
this — Bengalis getting fish from Bhusaval.
“Nobody is interested in Bhusaval town,” he says. “They only want
its station to improve.” Living proof of this is that all the line switches
were automated over just three days in January this year. The rest of
Bhusaval, with its 1,80,626 people, lies unloved as always, its roads
craters, its air full of highway gases, its streets murky and unlit, and its
electricity erratic. These days, even the water runs for only an hour at
dawn and dusk.
“Some politics is going on,” he adds darkly. He feels the Banana Lobby
is at work again.
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“Other cities have sugar lobbies, or a jute lobby or a tobacco lobby,”
he notes. “We have a Banana Lobby. They control everything. Very rich
fellows.”
My own theory, that Bhusaval has a powerful baingan lobby, was blown
to bits by this. Among the vegetable market’s most distinctive offerings is
the luminous, white-streaked green aubergine, available in several sizes
ranging from the plump, fist-sized one that may be slit and stuffed with
spices, to the large, coconut-sized numbers that are charred over dung-fires,
and pounded along with green herbs into the delectable mash called bharit,
usually eaten with bhakri or maize bread.
I had already been served Bhusaval’s bharit once, during dinner at the
Vaikudes’ and then again the following day at the Patils’. A visiting sonin-law on his first visit is thought to be equal to a minor deity, and one
visiting for the first time is close to God, and will surely be fed bharit
wherever he goes. As I arose, congratulating the Vaikudes with my mouth
full, my wife murmured, “Naturally it’s excellent. Leva Patils love green
baingans.”
I went cold. These wonderful people were Leva Patils. The dreaded
Banana Lobby.
“They’re descendants of a nomadic tribe of Gujjars,” confided Reddy.
“And they’re said to be very wealthy.”
When a Leva marries a Leva, cash and gold passes from the girl’s family
to the boy’s, the exact ratio depending on the boy’s vocation. A Leva
labourer will get 15:10, that is, Rs.15,000 in cash and 10 tolas of gold. But
the new-breed, MIT-returned Leva may command as much as 55:50. The
gold given freely at the daughter’s wedding will, however, come back at the
son’s wedding. The important thing is to keep it moving and to keep it in
the community.
It is equally important to keep the bananas moving, and this requires
what Reddy calls “lumpsums”. The Banana Lobby is constantly aware of
its vulnerabilities, specifically to cardamoms. A fistful of the pods planted
among the bananas in a goods wagon will release sufficient vapours to start
a rapid decay. By the time the bananas reach their destination, they will be
nearly liquid, and the Levas will never know who did it. On the assumption
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that everyone from the railway employees downwards is out to undo them
with cardamoms, Levas (according to Reddy) use attractive cash “lumpsums”
to safeguard the health and welfare of their bananas during the journey.
Until recently, they even used only their own trusted Leva labourers for
loading the fruit into the wagons, but of late, they have begun demanding
that their clients demonstrate their interest by arranging to pick up the
bananas themselves from Bhusaval’s railway yards. The cash thus freed up
could be put to better use to ensure that only Leva candidates win in the
local elections, and perhaps later pass stringent legislation regarding bananas
and their care and maintenance during transit.
It was as a result of such finagling that the unfortunate but kind-hearted
Dr Abdul (formerly Congress) has been forced to stand as an independent
candidate from Bhusaval in the forthcoming municipal elections, using a
Baba Frock as his symbol. The trouble began when the party announced
that its official candidate from Bhusaval would be Dr. Abdul, but carelessly
omitted the surname. The news brought immediate joy to Dr Abdul Asgar
and Dr Abdul Khan, both medical doctors and both loyal party workers.
However, Dr Asgar, the wrong Dr Abdul, was quicker off the mark, filing
his papers and getting his ticket almost within a day. The following day,
inexplicably, he publicly renounced his candidacy “in the greater interests
of the party”, stating that in even accepting the candidacy, he had been
remiss in his duties towards Bhusaval’s ailing and the aged. He magnanimously
stepped aside in favour of “a more experienced and mature candidate”.
But the people of Bhusaval suspected the Banana Lobby’s hand again.
There was speculation that the good doctor might even have been offered
a petrol pump along Highway Number 6 in exchange for abandoning his
feeble political fantasies. The real Dr Abdul, enraged at being left out
through such tragic bungling, is now busy explaining the inner significance
of the Baba Frock as an electoral symbol to whoever will listen.
And thus proceeds life in this smoky non-town, where people win some,
lose some, but the pigs win every time, along with the industrious Leva Patils
— and of course, the glowing green Bhusaval baingan. Just consider: the
vegetable is immune to cardamoms. It isn’t afraid of pigs. It hates travelling
except, reportedly, to Dombivali, where Mumbai’s Leva Patils are clustered.
75
It enjoys nothing more than a good blistering over a coalfire. And when it
grows up, it would like nothing better than to be turned into bharit.
A self-respecting bharit will dominate the meal. Unlike Punjab’s baingan
bhartas, where oil and spices submerge the aubergine, the bharit honours
its chief vegetable. It is a five-piece orchestra, smoked, mashed aubergine
singing the aria, and solos played by chopped spring onion greens, garlic,
green chillies, fresh coriander and, a distinctively Maharashtrian touch,
roasted peanuts. A final blessing is a touch of hot home-made ghee.
The rest of the meal might include dal, perhaps some green peppers
dipped in a chickpea flour batter and fried, spicy green chilly pickles, and
of course, bhakri steaming hot off an iron griddle. This is what I, as a deified
son-in-law, consumed without shame or regret during my week in Bhusaval.
The moment you are served bharit, a strange thing will happen. In an
instant, forgetting upbringing, manners, social protocol and good fellowship,
you will abandon all pretence of civility.
And turn into one of Bhusaval’s pigs.
Bharit
This simple and unassuming dish is one of the big staples of Maharashtra’s Leva
Patil community. Their cuisine, founded in their innate frugality, includes artful
combinations of fresh vegetables and herbs, cooked minimally perhaps to conserve
fuel, but thus abounding in natural flavours. It was served to me as a special treat,
as befitting a visiting son-in-law, at the home of the Vaikudes, a hospitable Bhusaval
family.
Ingredients:
1 kg green roasting aubergines
250 gms coriander leaves
12 large green chillies
10-12 garlic pods
3 tbsps whole shelled peanuts
76
3 tbsps grated coconut
100 gms oil
salt to taste
Preparation:
1. Separate the coriander leaves from their stems and shred them.
2. Fry the green chillies briefly in a teaspoon of hot oil till they blister. Coarsely
pound the green chillies and garlic with a little salt.
3. Over a coal fire, if you have one, or over a gas flame, roast the aubergines till
their skins char and crack. While they are still hot, quickly peel off the charred skin.
Mash the inner aubergine pulp to a fine paste, making sure that there are no lumps
in it.
4. Add the chilly-garlic mixture, shredded coriander leaves and a little salt to taste.
Continue pounding the ingredients together till you have a smooth and even
mixture. Right at the end, heat the oil and add the shelled peanuts. Sauté them
briefly till they redden slightly. Add the aubergine mash and fry it for few minutes.
And there it is — bharit as the Vaikudes of Bhusaval make it.
Puri masal
Railway stations remind me of platforms, and platforms remind me of the ubiquitous
puri bhaji. Few meals can match the immediacy and on-the-spot glamour of thickskinned fried puris along with their country cousins, spuds in a thick spicy gravy.
Bhusaval, with its famous railway junction, reminded me of puri masal, and the
recipe below describes the South Indian counterpart.
Ingredients:
6 medium-sized potatoes
2 onions, chopped medium fine
1 inch piece of ginger, finely chopped
4 green chillies, chopped
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Juice of 2 lemons
1 tsp urad dal
1 tsp chickpea
1 tsp chickpea flour
2 dried red chillies, torn in halves
˘ tsp turmeric powder
A few curry leaves
A little asafeotida
Salt to taste
2 tbsps vegetable oil
Preparation:
1. Boil the potatoes, peel off their skins, and then, lovingly with your fisted knuckles,
mash them into soft pebbles.
2. Heat the oil in a heavy pan, and when it is very hot, toss in the urad, chickpea,
red chillies, half the curry leaves and asafeotida. Stir till the urad turns a golden
brown.
3. Now throw in the chopped onions, ginger, green chillies, and the rest of the curry
leaves. Stir till the onions turn translucent.
4. Make up a medium-thick solution of chickpea flour with the turmeric powder
and water. Pour this into the pan, and quickly follow with the potatoes and salt.
Stir it till the potatoes have mixed in well, and add some water so that a gravy forms.
Let it simmer for about five minutes, or till the gravy is not watery any more. Squeeze
in the juice of two limes. Serve with hot puris.
A brown should
always allow a white
to beat him at chess
A quiet moment at
Circular Quay, Sydney
The author flirts with
death, picking up an
Australian koala bear
“The average coon,” said the
Fish, “is terrified of displeasing.
This is why, by the way, he
makes such an excellent
domestic assistant. He will be
impeccably tidy, he won’t pee in
corridors, his shirt will always
be tucked in, he’ll always say
Please, Sorry and Thank you.
You are brown, and though you
may claim an exotic coffee
colour, you are merely a coon
from the developing world.”
Lunchtime jazz at
the heart of Sydney
The sky and sea at Sydney
are 175 per cent bluer
than in the Mediterranean
S
Y
D
N
E
Y
Down under the Ozone Layer
When I later told him about my game of chess with Graham in Sydney,
my friend the Fish claimed there was a clear correlation between skin colour
and chess.
“Remember that chess itself is a play-off featuring white against black,”
he pointed out. “You are from the Third World. Graham was a white —
and therefore affluent — westerner. You are brown, and though you may
claim an exotic coffee colour, you are merely a coon from a part of the world
charitably described as ‘developing’.”
I protested mildly. “Don’t you feel coon is a bit strong?” I said. “In
certain parts of Australia, like Bondi Beach, even the so-called ‘white’
Australian is actually a pale coon colour, thanks to hours of frying in the
blistering sun.”
“Coon is not a colour of skin, it is a state of mind,” said the Fish, wagging
a finger. “The average coon is terrified of displeasing. This is why, by the way,
he makes such an excellent domestic assistant. He will be impeccably tidy,
he won’t pee in corridors, his shirt will always be tucked in, he’ll always say
Please, Sorry and Thank you. The average coon is a pleasure to deal with.”
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He looked at me to see if his words were having the desired effect. They
weren’t. “I presume you allowed Graham to beat you at chess?”
I gave it just the right pause. “No, as a matter of fact,” I said. “I beat
him.”
“Oh dear,” said the Fish, shaking his head from side to side and looking
very grave, as though this was the worst news I could have brought him
from Australia. “Oh dearie me.”
In the view of the Fish, I was solely to blame for all that followed.
If I hadn’t gone job-hunting in Australia, I would probably not have met
Graham at all; and there were only two reasons why I went job-hunting.
The more urgent of these was that I was nearly broke, having carried hardly
any money from India. The lesser but more interesting reason was that I
simply had a great deal of time on my hands. In Sydney, with its great open
windy spaces, wide green bays and brilliant blue skies, time becomes a valet,
not a sergeant-major. I was by myself, had no social commitments, and a
complete month ahead of me. I had nothing to do, so I could do anything.
And, believe me, I did.
Sometimes, a news item seen on the telly would set me off on an enquiry
into some aspect of Australia, such as its growing number of accountants.
I’d make calls, take notes, analyse my findings and discuss them with old
Aussie pensioners on park benches. By afternoon, I’d be feeling a sense of
personal triumph, like a cop who has solved a tricky crime.
At other times, it might be a chance encounter on the street, such as
the one I had with a vagabond Polish immigrant who enjoyed jazz and
adored Fred Astaire. Whenever a good lunchtime jazz band gave an open
air performance at St Martin’s Plaza, Zbigniew would be there, grinning
toothlessly at the girls through his snowy stubble and shuffling to the beat
as best he could. Lunching secretaries would applaud. After he grew tired
of shuffling one afternoon, he let me buy him a cup of coffee in exchange
for some of his World War II memories.
On certain days, I would find myself preoccupied with Australia’s own
preoccupations, and among these, a big one was the environment, including
DOWN UNDER THE OZONE LAYER
83
the ozone layer, the depletion of rain forests, global warming and the
recycling of waste. According to the Fish, developing an ecological sensibility
is the first expression of the natural coonish desire to please. “As long as
you were in India, you were content to spit on the sidewalk, gas yourself
into a carcinogenic torpor with automobile exhaust, and throw your garbage
into the creek. Reach Australia, and suddenly you’re atingle about the
depradation of natural resources. You’re worried sick about wind and water
and sky.” Life’s like that, boy, I thought to myself.
The hole in the ozone layer hangs directly ten kilometres above Australia;
through it pours cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. Within Australia, the
problem is sharpest in the lush, green island of Tasmania, which falls directly
below the hole. In the warmer months, as the earth’s axis shifts, the hole’s
zone of influence too moves somewhat northwards. The carcinogenic sunshine
kisses Melbourne and breathes on Sydney.
“Wouldn’t you worry,” I asked the Fish, “if someone told you that you’re
toasting yourself in the sunshine of the country with the world’s highest skin
cancer rate?”
“I always wear dark glasses,” replied the Fish cryptically. “I can ignore
any country’s sunshine.”
I couldn’t. Australia in July is difficult to ignore. It is winter in
the southern hemisphere and the air is cold and clear like glass.
Everything seems sharper, more in focus, even the people on the
street are more to the point. And the sky over Australia is larger than
anywhere else.
“It’s exactly about 175 per cent more blue than yer’ll find in yer average
Mediterranean resort,” joked a large, hearty Aussie called Harvey, with
stringy, carrot-coloured hair. “The water in the bye [read ‘bay’] ’ere is
several shades of blue deeper. Cross the harbour in a ferry and it’ll crinkle
under yer like satin. Yer sittin’ in God’s own country, myte.”
Harvey was also drinking God’s own draught beer while sitting in a bar
in downtown Sydney. I had dared steal in and plant myself on a nearby stool.
Next thing I knew, he’d ordered a stein of bitters for me. “First one’s on
me, myte, if yer’ll tell me which part of the world yer from. I’m bettin’ it’s
Sri Lanka.” It is always a surprise when someone in white skin remembers
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the name of a small developing nation, and the mention of Sri Lanka gave
me pause. How on earth? Then the answer hit me. Of course — cricket.
“I’m from India,” I confessed.
“Good on yer,” he said. “Gavaskar’s a good man.” I nodded.
It was a gloomy pub, with hardly any customers in that part of the
afternoon in this part of downtown. After a while my eyes adjusted to the
light, and I looked around me. At a table by the window, a vaguely British
looking squire was holding forth in a serious, urgent voice while two Japanese
tourists listened with extreme courtesy. From their nodding, I surmised that
they were doing their duty to save the host’s face.
“We as Austrylia must now face the challenge of adulthood,” said the
squire. “We fought off the Brits when they wanted to control our political
affairs. We made them move out, and with them the French and the Dutch
departed as well. We have made a lot of money, and I speak of us collectively
here. But have we really grown up? It seems we have not. We have always
been proud of describing our nation as a ‘young country’. But now we must
ask — is it enough?”
The Japs shook their heads, as though funeral arrangements were being
discussed. The squire bit his lip and looked out of the window, with the
air of a recently elected premier deciding on a tricky diplomatic matter.
Then, reaching an internal consensus with his various voices, he returned
to the Japs. “No, my friends, the single-minded pursuit of profit is not
enough. It will impair our efforts to reach greater strength and maturity.
Self-control, that’s what we need.”
The Japs reached for their steins at the same time and drained a half
tankard in one gulp, their eyes never leaving their host’s.
“That’s Austrylia for yer,” said Harvey suddenly to me, catching the
direction of my glance. “Never a dull moment, always figgerin’ out who you
are, always full of surprises.”
Australia is a nation obsessed with questions of its own identity. Are they
mono-cultural or a melting pot? Are they civilised or urbane? Does the land
belong to the aborigines or to the white settlers? Should they be rich or
poor? More like the Brits or less? Should the Crocodile Dundee image be
dismantled or was it good for tourism?
85
“Australia’s always ever doin’ only one thing,” said Harvey. “It’s gittin’
over the chip on its shoulder. It’s tryin’ to go beyond its own ingrained
inferiority complex.”
A newspaper analysis by Max Walsh in that morning’s Weekend
Australian had isolated several traits that were not Australian at all.
According to Max, Australia is:
— not big-hearted, shirt-off-your-back hospitable, democratic camaraderie;
— not the emergence of a speech dialect so gross and slovenly as to require
sub-titling for export purposes;
— not our puzzling mix of energy and hedonistic inertia;
— not a worship of the politics of populist mediocrity;
— not our supremacy as one of the world’s most dedicated boozo cultures, nor
even our skin-cancer, outdoorsy, supposedly common lifestyle.
“We may not like Indonesia, gentlemen,” the squire was saying earnestly.
“But we have to learn to live and work with it.” The Japs nodded their heads
together, almost as if they thought Indonesia had any place in the scheme
of things.
I knew that two years down the line, the squire would probably still be
sitting at the same table guzzling his umpteenth beer and droning on to a
new bunch of immigrant faces. The Japs, meanwhile, would have bought
up his home, his city and probably most of his state. In just one month of
that year, Japanese businessmen bought up US$ 1.6 billion worth of Aussie
land. In the thirty-seven years till then, their combined acquisitions had not
exceeded US$ 500 million. According to figures released by the Japanese
Ministry of Finance, fifty-three percent of Japanese investment in Australia
is in real estate.
A story making the rounds in those days concerned a Japanese tourist
who was looking around for a good patch of Australian earth to put his
money on. Finally, finding something that pleased him, he approached the
Land Department and tried to get an estimate of its price.
“Can you describe the exact acreage you are looking at, sir?” the officer
said.
Thinking hard and consulting his notes, the tourist began naming
landmarks that identified the property he wished to buy. By the time he
86
finished, it was clear he was looking at the entire state of Queensland. It
is typical of the Aussies that they did not bat an eyelid, but instead retreated
to an inner chamber to figure out whether there was any legal way a state
could be sold to a visitor and then rented back from him.
Further north, a group of businessmen from Hong Kong were sailing
the offshore seas, specifically looking at Port Darwin. Their brazen plan
entailed rebuilding Hong Kong here brick by brick, so that when the
Chinese finally took over in 1997, there would be nothing left there.
I was on my third beer, and the day’s details were beginning to meld
together pleasantly. The squire’s voice, still succinct and pedagogic, had
retreated to a corner of my consciousness. “Do the French worry about
Frenchness?” he was asking piercingly. “I bet they don’t. They’re
whites.” The Japs, expressionless, were no doubt thinking about
Yokohama and Japness.
The squire, regaining wind, was launching into a brand new assessment.
“The broad sweep of history now suggests that the aberration will almost
certainly be seen to have been the colonisation of this fetching paradise
by a bunch of paleface, Anglo-Celtic whiteys from the other side of the
globe. In the end, the winners will be -” he raised his tankard in silent
salute — “you.”
“Serrrrp,” Harvey belched beerily. “Yer like what yer see? Think yer’ll
be settling down?”
I weighed his statement, trying to decide whether it was an invitation
or a challenge. When an Aussie sees any non-white, he naturally assumes
he is either an immigrant or a wannabe immigrant. They’re coming from
all over the world, with hope in their hearts and work permits in their hands:
from China, Lebanon, Turkey, Japan, India, Yugoslavia, as well as a minority
from western countries like Germany, Italy and the UK. Work is scarce,
the immigrants are warned, unless you have a skill Australia needs. Be
prepared for difficult days, they are cautioned. Things may take a while to
work out, they are counselled. But nothing stops them.
“Nah,” I slurred at length. “Think I’ll go for New Zealand.”
“Cancel that beer,” Harvey ordered the barman sternly at once. “‘E don’t
like this place.”
87
He was only joking; seeing my startled expression, he punched my arm
rather hard and roared with laughter. “Play good cricket but don’t ’ave a
sense o’ humour in the Third World, do yer?”
That night, I watched Australia’s erstwhile premier, the remarkable Bob
Hawke, announcing on the telly that in his latest view, Australia was actually
a “multi-cultural nation”. Backing theory with practice almost at once, he
launched a typically over-generous fund to create bridge English language
courses to enable immigrants to know at least enough English to communicate
in their new home.
Australians, though clearly startled and flustered by this radical thought,
willingly entered a new stage of introspection at once. Channel 9 Television’s
popular anchorwoman Jana Wendt, at once conducted a T.V. poll , in which
146,313 people were phoned at home and asked if they supported Bob
Hawke’s call for a multicultural Australia. The results were announced:
fifteen percent were in favour, eighty-five percent apparently, were not. Of
course, in Australia, such statistics prove nothing, because here change
seems to have a way of getting ahead of public opinion. The same poll done
a day later might have shown the exact opposite trend.
My usual day of bumming around in Sydney would start around nine
when, bathed, fed and invigorated, I’d step out of the digs I’d taken at
Mosman on top of a hill. Steep steps would take me down to the gently
rolling pier. The ferry ride across the bay is one of my most pleasant
memories of Sydney: breezy, picturesque and thrilling. In a half-hour span,
you get to see some of Sydney’s major sights all at once, as you pass the
sailboat inspired Sydney Opera House, and then pass under the bridge
named The Coathanger because of its shape, and finally alight at the
Circular Quay, where new electronic ticket vending machines are befuddling
simple old Aussies who are used to asking for what they want, not punching
buttons for it.
I blow at least two hours on Circular Quay itself. A sad old black in a
trenchcoat is singing Louis Armstrong’s It’s A Wonderful World, while a
trainee joker on stilts is practising his long stride. A Vietnamese vendor has
88
a small army of white pandas, which roll realistically on the stone paving
once they are keyed up. There’s a tightrope walker from Perth, and once
he’s perched on a monocycle on a string, it turns out he’s a juggler and a
fire swallower as well. He calls one of the onlookers to light him some fires
and then does his deadly stuff. Wins a patter of applause — they’ve all seen
this before — and some petty cash. Life goes on.
A Filipino youth is pursing his lips into the most ingenious shapes and
emitting an aviary’s worth of bird calls. Some fascinated coins fall in his
direction. A couple of Thais have set up a beverages stall; their carrot and
celery juice is notable; I have some.
My attention goes mostly to the white-faced mime student who trots
along behind unsuspecting passers-by, mimicking them, feigning innocence
when they whip around wondering who everyone’s laughing at. He’s cracked
up the whole quay, but after a while, he retreats to the waterside, and is
joined by the stilt-walker, who briefly comes down to earth to enjoy a
cigarette. Both the jokers have a real-life moment as pokerfaces are replaced
by scowls and regrets. They are both immigrants, and there’s nothing funny
about life in Sydney.
The Federal Government’s Office of Multicultural Affairs asked 4,500
Australians to rate different ethnic groups on a ‘social distance’ scale:
0
17
33
50
67
83
100
Welcome as family
Welcome as close friend
Have as neighbour
As workmate
Allow as Australian citizen
Visitor only
Keep out of Australia
The Vietnamese emerged as the most disliked, with 83, followed by the
Lebanese and the Turks (50); the Japanese (46); Indians (45); Yugoslavs
(43); the Chinese (41); Germans (36); Greeks (35); Italians (32); and the
British (23).
Rated according to racial grouping, Asians came off the poorest, with
54, followed by Blacks (42), Aborigines (37), and Europeans (33).
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“Do you think an Indian should settle down here?” I asked Harvey.
“We’re the fourth least favourite community here out of eleven ethnic
groups, you know.”
“Ah, that’s when you ask the white Aussies,” he said, as though he’d
caught a fatal flaw in my argument. “That Aussie is always a minority, and
his view ought not to count. He’s good for a beer or two, but he’s past
working to save his skin. ‘E’s a regular Gulliver, all tied down to the sand.
You Lilliputs can have your time now.”
He meant no ill, but there was bitterness bubbling through the beer now.
I picked my moment to leave.
“Never make the mistake of emigrating to Australia,” I was told by Raman,
a tubby South Indian doomed to push a rock uphill all his life, like Sisyphus.
Raman, in his early fifties, and father of three schoolgoing children, gave
up a perfectly comfortable job as manager of a multinational’s Calcutta
branch, and shifted with his wife and children to Sydney. Many would say
he acted precipitately, for he arrived in Sydney without work in hand, on
a relative’s sponsorship.
I had known Raman from his early days in a newspaper, where his
indisputable English language skills made him a superb sub-editor. He was
an affectionate, warm, kind and intelligent man though somewhat
argumentative, I was fond of him.
Less than a year as an immigrant had robbed Raman of both peace and
warmth. He found little joy in Sydney’s glorious skies, abundant seas and
glowing futures. Having re-started life as a lowly sub-editor in a local
newspaper, working gruelling shifts, he found this time that he also had to
suffer the ignominy of being mistaken, because of his skin colour, for one
whose English could not possibly be much good.
“They’ll learn,” he told me defiantly. “They’ll learn that my command
of English is better than the pack of them put together.”
Within months of his arrival, Raman compounded his errors by buying
himself a house. It was a thoughtless, ill afforded purchase. He could hardly
have anticipated that shortly afterwards, the Australian government, in a
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final attempt to curb runaway consumerism, would push up prime commercial
interest rates from 13.5 per cent to 20.25 per cent — causing a corresponding
increase in mortgage interest rates from 13.5% to 17%.
Almost overnight, more than half of Raman’s salary began disappearing
in mortgage re-payments. “It was an emotional thing I did, buying the
house,” he admits now, with regret. “But I’ve done it and that’s it. In the
long run, my children will be better off. I’m past the age of expecting
anything great from life.”
So there you have the Ramans: a rat’s life in a maze. They have few
friends, none of them Australian. Never mind Bob Hawke’s latest theory,
integration and multi-culturalism are furthest from their minds. They miss
India; they also know they cannot ever go back. And finally, they now realise
that though the land abounds with opportunities, those opportunities do
not seem to be destined for them. One door closed, but another did not
somehow automatically open.
Two days later, looking out from the ferry window on my usual morning
trip over the water to Sydney for another glorious day of loitering, I found
myself next to a lean, studious chap poring over the classified ads in the
Accomodation section of the Sydney Morning Herald. Every five minutes
or so, his glasses would reach the tip of his nose, and he’d jab them back
to the bridge with a peevish forefinger. The other thing that held my
attention was a beige butterfly that had been perched on his collar since
he boarded the ferry. I wondered if I should disturb this self-contained ecosystem; finally, for a lark, I tapped his shoulder. The butterfly flew off at
once, foolishly heading out over the wide water.
“Yes?” said Glen Wiffen, peering quizzically at me.
“Nothing,” I said. “A butterfly. Gone now. Looking for a house?” I
glanced over at his newspaper.
He was indeed looking for a house. A cheaper house. He and his wife
Trisha had figured out that they could get $139,000 for their present home
in Bulli, Wollongong. They had nearly agreed on a new home costing $80,000,
at Grafton, much further off. There was a neat profit of $59,000 in it.
91
“Just a change of scene?” I asked.
“Goodness, no,” he replied. “We’re nearly finished already. We’ll perish
if we don’t find a way to make some money.”
Glen and Trisha deferred having a baby for thirteen years, while she
worked as a legal secretary and saved what she could. Once little Holly
arrived, Trisha quit work, and the couple bought a cute little house, on
a $57,000 mortgage. They had calculated that they could easily make the
mortgage repayments on Glen’s monthly earnings of $350 as a carpenter.
But that was six months ago. When the interest rates went up, the Wiffens,
like the Ramans, were devastated. Each month now, $200 disappears into
mortgage.
That leaves them $150 for food, clothing and petrol. Of that $60 goes
into ferry trips each month to work. The Wiffens never eat out; the only
entertainment they can afford is on the telly.
“I’ve never counted pennies so much in my life,” said Glen. “Now I pick
up something and I’m about to buy it, and then I think, no, I can buy it
for six cents less somewhere else.”
I wished the Ramans could meet the Wiffens. The immigrants and the
original settlers, both in the same boat, each believing that the hard times
are seeking them out. In the ferry, I met enough middle-class Australians
who had been laid low by mortgage repayments to realise that well-dressed
poverty is what a lot of Australia is about.
Of course, admitting poverty is like pleading guilty before a grand jury.
Society would never tolerate it.
“We’re not poor at all,” said Marcia Ryan, a thirty-one-year-old social
science teacher at the University of New South Wales. “It’s just that we’ve
stopped being able to budget; there’s simply not enough money for us to
bother with a budget. Don’t get us wrong — we’ve still got options poor
people don’t have. It’s just so happened that our standard of living at this
stage of life is much worse than our parents’ was.”
Her forty-year-old husband David Watkins is a full-time student, studying
mechanical engineering to improve his prospects. They are reeling under
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a $60,000 mortgage, with monthly repayments as high as $940. While
Marcia goes off to work, they leave six-month-old Alex and daughter Sam,
three years old, at the Lois Barker Childcare Centre at Waterloo. Then the
centre raised its fees to $460 a month — and suddenly the family was adrift.
“Where are you travelling today?” I asked them. They’d been sitting next
to me on the ferry and had started the conversation by asking me if I was
from Lebanon.
“To the University where I teach,” said Marcia. “But Dave had a great
idea last night — he said if he switched over from studying mechanical
engineering to child care, then he could stay at home and mind the babies,
and maybe a few other babies in the neighbourhood as well. We’d save
playschool fees, and maybe earn some extra money. We’re going now to
check out the childcare courses.”
I never understood why white Australians always complained that they
could not find work, while immigrants behaved as though every job in
Australia was theirs for the asking. On Mondays you can see them,
Australia’s unemployed aliens, shivering at Circular Quay, and waiting for
the weekly Nine-to-Five, the government employment magazine. Each new
issue brings new hope that, at last, perhaps there’ll be something for them.
There was something for me, I can tell you. Just a week or so into my
Australian holiday, sitting on a bench in the sunshine of Circular Quay,
I browsed through Australian futures as advertised in Nine-to-Five. There
was a flood of vacancies, in areas as diverse as computer programming,
teaching, welding, data entry and telephone sales. Non-specialists could
apply for a range of jobs, from ‘temps’, or temporary jobs, usually on an
hourly rate, to full-time, more long-term appointments.
I found several promising offers on page thirty-three, under ‘Casual
Work’.
A.A.A.ARDVARKS
$100 per day
Travellers with a sense of humour, casual work available in Sydney
(accomodation available) or interstate. No experience necessary. Casual
dress ok. Art promo immediate start. Chris 6604390.
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I didn’t need accomodation or interstate travel, so I skipped on.
AAARLBEST
$200 per mth
Work in Sydney or all over Australia in fun atmosphere promoting
art. Paid daily. No exp nec. Annika 357-2598.
A.A.B.A.E.
SWEDISH, Dutch, English-speaking people, 21-30 years for art
promotions. No exp nec. $650 per wk. or $100 per day. Call Marianne
363-1300.
It was an offer I could not refuse: $650 per week. Within minutes, I was
at a pay booth to Marianne. Come on over to our gallery, she said sweetly.
We’re open all hours. And that was how, in the lounge of a small art-shop
in Sydney, I met young Graham.
I don’t think his real name was Graham, but he looked like a Graham,
if you know what I mean — a pimply youth, with somewhat wan, bright
eyes, limp, chestnut-coloured hair, and an easily upset temperament. Both
of us were waiting to be called in for an interview — the art-shop had
advertised for young Swedish, Dutch, English-speaking travellers who didn’t
mind earning a few dollars by promoting art — which meant selling landscape
paintings door-to-door in the Sydney suburbs.
Having mixed myself a hot coffee sans lait from a self-serve counter, I
was awaiting my turn in a sofa by a large potted aspidistra when I perceived
Graham beckoning to me. In front of him was a chess set, all arranged for
a game. He was inviting me — or perhaps challenging me, I thought, as
I graciously moved over to play.
I whipped Graham in the first round. Let me be truthful: it was not
because of my prowess, but the fact that Graham, erroneously assuming an
easy victory, made a few glaring mistakes which I took advantage of. “Do
not be misled, I am not a good player,” I began to reassure him, but to my
surprise, he had already left. He seemed upset.
94
I shrugged my shoulders.
Presently, the interview took place, I was selected, and late that afternoon,
a young supervisor called Tino, of Greek descent, herded four of us into
a ramshackle red Bentley whose boot had been stacked with terrible paintings
imported by the kilogram from Hong Kong. In the car with me were Jojo,
a terrifying British punk with a bull neck, earrings and closely cropped hair;
Pim, a morose, dense Australian youth who later admitted he hadn’t followed
a word of Tino’s instructions on how to sell paintings; myself, the honourable
coon; and — wonder of wonders, Graham the Grandmaster. He hardly
spared me a look.
I found it impossible to get rid of any paintings. We were unleashed on the
manicured suburbs of Duneside, the air still and cold at 8ºC. Tino had given
us wonderful options on the sort of codswallop we could dish out while
describing the paintings to unsuspecting customers: “If it’s a lush green landscape,
you can say Tasmania. If it’s mainly brown, then stick with Northern Territories.
Seaside and beaches, or rivers, Queensland is safe. Most of all, improvise. Say
poor Australian artists did them. Or say you did them. Remember, you sell a
painting for sixty-five dollars — and you get to keep ten dollars.”
But my temperament and upbringing did not permit me to barge in on
large families of large supping Australians, who might have had unpredictable
reactions to a nervous coon standing at their door with an armload of ghastly
art. So I listlessly loitered about Duneside for two hours, and finally was
picked up by Tino — who had presumably been loitering himself in some
warm pub nearby.
As I had expected, Jojo and Pim had sold nothing to anyone either,
though not for the same reasons. Jojo, with his appearance, would have
struck terror into all potential clients and made old ladies faint; and Pim
had probably spent the whole time under some lamppost trying to remember
what Tino had said. I turned to Graham the Grandmaster and raised an
eyebrow, in what I fancied was a faintly British way.
“Two,” he sneered. “Oy sold two of the bleeding’ things.” He gave a
perfect pause here. “To Indians.”
According to the Fish, I should have realised right then what was going
on. “You had given him a drubbing at chess. You, a coon, had shamed him
95
in an artistic environment in a casual manner in the presence of his peers
and coevals. You should have realised that you had set yourself up as a target
now. In fact, you had set up all Indians in Australia as targets for Graham’s
wrath.”
He paused to consider what he had unwittingly said, and then warmed
to his theme. “You have created a monster,” he continued. “This Graham
of yours will now become a menace in the suburbs, stalking unsuspecting
Gujaratis, South Indians and Bengalis and selling them horrendous art
created by indigent Chinese students from Guangdzong. Perhaps he’ll even
go for other Asians. After all, to an Aussie, a coon is a coon.”
I tried pointing out that Australians in Sydney had showed no signs of
being unduly racist, but he waved me away. “You will see,” he warned,
ominously.
Almost three weeks passed and I did not see Graham again. To be
truthful, I had hardly expected to. I had not returned to the art gallery,
finding the job too tedious. Instead, I concentrated on enjoying myself,
taking photographs and doing similar touristy things. My spirits began to
improve and grow a little uncharacteristically boisterous, perhaps because
of the perfect weather or the good food or the scintillating air.
I began to develop what I feared was a distinct cockiness in the way I
spoke to people. For example, when an Aussie greeted me with, “Hi, myte,
how ya goin’?” — which is their way of asking, “How are you?” — I would
reply, “Me? Oim goin’ by bus, how ya goin’?” This was possibly not even
very funny, except to me.
When I met up with Graham the Grandmaster again, it was at the wharf
of Circular Quay. The time was 11 p.m., and I awaited the last ferry to take
me to Musgrave Street Wharf. I was in the middle of ordering a cup of
Lebanese coffee from a takeaway eaterie at the wharf when I heard a thin
but strident voice not far behind me: “Oy, myte!”
It is always mildly alarming to be hailed loudly in a foreign country.
Besides, I did not recognise Graham instantly. I hastily looked over my
shoulder, in the hope that he was hailing someone else, but no. It was me.
The Grandmaster drew up, said, “So — did you go back to that art place
again or wot?” In an instant, the tumblers clicked into place, and I relaxed,
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slipping smoothly into Round 3 of the game that had begun a month earlier.
It is even possible that I was looking forward a little to the kill.
“That art place? Hah!” I scoffed. “That’s too much work — and all for
peanuts. I got me a better job.”
“You did?” he said, amazed at what coons were getting up to these days.
“Doin’ what?”
“Oh, computers, you know,” I replied casually. “Thirty-five dollars an
hour, you know. Maybe six or seven hours a day. On a bad day.”
Graham’s eyes had grown circular by the time I had finished. “Dinkydo, man!” he whistled. I knew I’d won Round 3. “That’s like $250 a day,
man!”
I shrugged casually.
“You makin’ that kind of money, man — you can pay for my coffee!”
Round 4. He’d won. I had barely a dollar in my pocket.
While he sipped his brew, I learnt that he had continued selling paintings,
and was managing to earn twenty to twenty-five dollars on a good day. “So
— what do you do with it?” I enquired.
“Do?” he yelped. “I bleedin’ spend it on gittin’ around, don’t I?”
The moment he said that, I knew Round 5 had begun and I would win
it. If he was spending that much on his bus, train and ferry tickets everyday,
it could only mean one thing — he did not know about weekly cut-price
Travelpasses. I had one of those, and for as little as eight dollars a week,
I could travel where I wished.
I eased into the arena with a faint predatory smile. “You mean you’re
giving away $125 a week to the Australian government? I am amazed,
my good man. Where do you buy your tickets from? Which precise
counter?”
He led me to the ticket window.
“Stand where you normally stand while buying your ticket — go on, do
what I say.” Bewildered, he took his position.
“Right, you’re here, the ticket window’s there, and you’re looking straight
ahead at the ticket seller, right?”
“Right,” he answered, perplexed.
“Now — glance up and look a bit off to the right!”
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There, to one side of the ticket window was a giant, colourful wall poster
outlining the twelve or so Travelpass schemes covering different combinations
of city zones. Graham the Grandmaster gawped at this for a full minute.
I walked back to my coffee. (Needless to add, Graham found the logistics
of computing the best Travelpass combination for his needs insuperable and
bought the costliest one.)
Round 5 was over, the ferry arrived. We got on, and a brief, triumphant
Round 6 began. After we had plonked ourselves on adjacent seats, I asked
him, “So — which part of Australia are you from?”
His face screwed up in a sneer. “Austrylia? Oim not from bleedin’
Austrylia. Oim from England!”
I was mortified by the monstrosity of my misconception: I’d thought
poor Graham the Grandmaster was an Aussie. He was a Pom. That
explained the whole Brown vs White business. “Oh, really?” I said,
genuinely interested. “Whereabouts in England?” I have travelled a bit
there myself, you know, Gloucestershire, the Cotswolds, Buckingham
Palace, Piccadilly, that sort of thing.
Graham slapped the seat in front of him with a bang. “Oi just ’ate that
kind of talk! Whereabouts in England?” he mimicked me rudely. “Wot do
youse know about England anyway?”
I maintained a discreet and judicious silence. White was on the verge
of violence for I had insulted him with the worst racist slur yet — by calling
him an Aussie. The Grandmaster sulked right until his stop, Old Cremorne
wharf, drew up.
I brooded. Now that I was reviewing Graham in his new British context,
something about his distinctive accent was niggling at the back of my head.
I had heard it somewhere before, and it had not been England. Where,
where? Suddenly, just as Graham grumpily rose to leave, the answer popped
into my head.
“Liverpool!” I shouted, pointing an accusing finger at him. “You’re from
Liverpool!”
Graham stood transfixed, as though I had nailed him with a dart.
“SCOUSE! You speak Scouse!” I cackled triumphantly, using the British
word for the distinctive patter of Liverpudlians.
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“But — but — ’ow can you tell?” he stammered.
How could I not tell? How could I possibly not tell that famous accent
that we had heard so often in the radio shows of our schooldays — when
four young mop-haired musicians called John, Paul, George and Ringo,
speaking their Scouse, had driven the world mad with a whole new brand
of music?
We used to call it Beatlemania.
Eleanor Rigby, a
sculpture by Beatle
fan Tommy Steele,
waits forever at a
Liverpool bus-stop
Penny Lane is just a
sign on a wall;
Strawberry Field, not far
away, is a shrine to
Lennon
I once missed the Beatles
by five minutes at a sitar
shop in New Delhi
Liverpool, with nothing left
to do but imagine, has reorganised itself around the
trivia of its four sons.
There is the two-hour
Ticket to Ride (£4.50), a
bus tour that takes in the
Beatles’ birthplaces,
schools, important venues,
Penny Lane, Strawberry
Fields, and so on. To get
the tour and the exhibition
together, you need only
buy the Day Tripper
ticket.
L I V E R P O O L
The Beatles are not Home
On second thoughts, don’t go to Liverpool. What would you see there
anyway? Not John, Paul, George and Ringo, they moved out long ago. Their
music may be heard, yes, but only in the Beatles Museum at Albert Dock.
Which, by the way, is dock no more, but a vast tourist jamboree. Ships don’t
stop at Liverpool these days, shoppers do. And what they see and buy are
the carefully contrived, moneymaking evocations of the Fab Four. Liverpool
has nothing to offer but counterfeit memories.
But I’m a fool. I went anyway, because it was a pilgrimage I had waited
twenty-four years for. As our magical mystery bus from London wafted into
the Liverpool evening, I glimpsed a shopwindow’s placard announcing that
they were open 8 Days A Week — and the introductory suspended chords
of that hit played briefly in my head, and then faded as the bus sped on.
Moments later, I glimpsed a Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Pub, and my
heart leapt. Would there be pretty, flirtatious meter-maids inside who would
nearly be yours on a sofa later if you only sang the right song?
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The bus stopped. I set foot on sacred soil, but again, the illusion evaporated.
This was not the rough, war-ravaged town the Beatles had singed with their
songs. This was a reconstructed Liverpool, sanitised and characterless, not
real and rude and rich in texture. The port on the Mersey River which had
bred the John Lennon who became an anti-establishment cult hero just by
being himself did not use to have such antiseptic streets.
That had been a rough, unsophisticated town, where the Beatles did
unspeakable things. At least, that’s what they told us. . .
At the Reeperbahn’s Star Club, in Germany, where the Beatles got an early
gig, music alternated with sex shows and lady mud wrestlers. John once
walked onto stage naked with a toilet seat around his neck, to cheers from
his audience.
His sleeping quarters were across the street from the club, next to a
hapless Catholic church. On Sunday mornings, he would hang a water-filled
condom outside his room window to taunt Catholics on their way to mass,
or construct an effigy of Jesus with an inflated condom for a penis. One
morning he urinated off the rooftop onto the heads of three passing nuns.
If John was the iconoclast, then sweet, baby-faced Paul McCartney, the
group’s left-handed bassist, was his antithesis. Everyone had their favourite
Beatle, and mine was Paul. He was Gemini, so was I, and it was easy to
believe that I too would be able to compose if I just tried. With a little help
from the Beatles, any of us ordinary folk could dream, and we did. Do you
know how Paul composed Yesterday, which entered the Guinness Book of
World Records as the single-most recorded song in history, with over 2,500
versions by 1980? In the early summer of 1965, while finishing the soundtrack
for their film Help!, Paul rolled out of bed one morning, went to the piano
and wrote the entire song in one sitting, calling it Scrambled Eggs until he
could figure out real lyrics. Someone noted that Yesterday was a miraculous
creation: like an egg, seamless, flawless, a wonder in itself.
I have had the privilege of missing Paul McCartney once by a mere five
minutes. En route to Rishikesh to attend Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s
transcendental meditation camp, the lads had a day to kill in Delhi.
THE BEATLES ARE NOT HOME
103
Determined to apprehend them, I chased their shadows through Connaught
Place. Finally, in a sitar shop on the outer circus, I thrilled to hear from
the dour shopkeeper that barely five minutes earlier, four noisy foreigners
answering to my description had stirred up a small storm and left without
buying anything.
I remember taking a deep breath and holding it for as long as I could
— I was inhaling the very air the Beatles had breathed.
More than twenty years later, I was doing the same thing in Liverpool.
Me standing in the characterless, prim town centre, taking a deep, cold breath
of Liverpool air. As it happened, the last time a Beatle breathed here had
not been very long ago, and it had been Paul McCartney. He had returned
on June 28, 1981, as a native son, to deliver the inaugural performance of
his Liverpool Oratoria, a sort of symphonic tribute to the ground that had
bred him, within the imposing vaults of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral.
Which, by the way, had found him unsuitable for its choir in 1953.
The Beatles gave us a sound we had never heard before. Every song was
an allusion, and their lyrics were ageless because they came straight out of
daily life, reflecting every nuance of the Beatles’ experiments with themselves.
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide or LSD, the hallucinogen they were checking
out, gave them (it is said, though they denied it) the title of their surreal
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. A circus poster they had seen in Liverpool
inspired Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite. And we all remember the
mesmeric drift of A Day In The Life, described by some as an account of
the drug-driven suicide of a young man in London.
On the back cover of their epoch-making Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band — what a name! — the Liverpudlian quartet wore quasi-military
garb in definitely unmilitary colours, with trinkets thrown in to heighten the
absurdity, and their long, trendsetting hair and rimless glasses adding to the
mystique. Those were days rapt with conjecture — why was Paul’s back to
the camera? The answer floated past in a thought bubble — he must have
died. The certainty grew, and before we could say crabberlocker fishwife,
it was a cover story in Time or perhaps Newsweek: Is Paul Dead? But how
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could Paul die? How could John die? By a mere bullet or a shot from a
camera? Not a chance.
The Fab Four died finally at their own hands, fragmented by human
frailty, greed, and growing temperamental differences. They continued
composing as individuals, but the magic was over. We watched with deep
grief as the man who had composed Let It Be ripped into the one who had
created Give Peace A Chance. To my generation, it was intolerable — surely
the Beatles, of all people, could not behave like mere human beings. But
the Beatles have always been true to life, and their coming apart was finally
as credible as their coming together.
It remained for me to revisit the shrines — Penny Lane, Strawberry
Fields, the Cavern.
There is no barber shop in Penny Lane, though I did see a Patricia the
Hair Stylist. No banker sat in there, waiting for a trim, as the song describes;
neither was there a fireman with an hourglass. The street — a minor
suburban lane, really — down which Paul’s walk to school took him each
day, is completely nondescript. The “shelter in the middle of the roundabout”
used to be an intercity bus-stop, now replaced by a cafeteria from which
you can apparently see both bank and barbershop. But we drove past
without even getting off to stroll. My head rang with the triumphant climactic
oboe notes that end the song, but nothing else rang.
Strawberry Fields Forever, the song that helped a whole generation trip
out on its not-quite-with-you-man lyrics, was actually a Salvation Army
Children’s Home. As a child, John used to look forward to attending the
annual fête here. The old Victorian mansion has been replaced by more
recent construction, but the ancient metal gates remain. This is a shrine to
Lennon, and the nameplate is a cemetery slab today, blackened by
candlesmoke and incense, and overwritten by the graffiti of long-haired
rebels and John Lennon’s mourners.
The biggest disappointment was the Cavern Club at 10 Mathew Street,
the high-voltage cellar with its low ceiling and interlocking arches where
so many Liverpudlian groups made their debuts, and which the Beatles
THE BEATLES ARE NOT HOME
105
electrified with their music. The Club was demolished in 1973 to make way
for the ventilation shaft of a railway tunnel which, alas, never got built. For
years, a car park stood at the site. Only when the City Council realised that
they’d razed a potentially profitable monument to modern music did they
begin to recreate it. The new Cavern was built, says the brochure, with the
bricks of the old, and to “exactly the same design, but obviously to fit the
needs of the 1980s”. Whatever those may be.
You buy a ticket to enter. At the bar within, you will get a pathetic
welcome drink from a sultry, sour Liverpudlian girl. You can gaze for a while
at a sort of stage where cardboard cutouts of the Beatles appear to sway
slightly, almost as though they were performing, against a sunset colour
backlight. Old analog-recorded Beatles songs play over authentically
antediluvian speakers. For a moment, you can pretend nothing has changed,
but you have to close your eyes and be very very imaginative.
Liverpool, with nothing left to do but imagine, has reorganised itself
around the trivia of its four sons. There is the two-hour Ticket to Ride
(£4.50), a bus tour that takes in the Beatles’ birthplaces, schools, important
venues, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, and so on, and also offers you the
option of ending with the Beatles Story Exhibition at Albert Dock itself.
To get the tour and the exhibition together, you need only buy the Day
Tripper ticket (£7).
If that does not please you, then you can do it all alone, at pedestrian’s
pace. A tour guide and pocket map available at Albert Dock lists no less
than forty-six different sites of Beatle interest. No item of memorabilia,
however petty, has been left out. There is 3 Gambier Street, where John
shared a flat with some fellow art students for a short while; Blacklers, on
Great Charlotte Street, where George worked briefly as an electrician; and
the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital, where Ringo suffered two illnesses
as a child.
You can waste your time, if time is not your problem, gawping at
identical ticky-tacky British homes and streets, and filling in colour and
memories by referring to the booklet. Or you can do what I did — walk
slowly about in the environs of the Cavern Walks, remembering. You can
down a pint of ale at Grapes, the pub where the Beatles used to go after
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the evening’s gig at the Cavern Club was over. A little further, near the
Beatles Shop, an old hobo is playing a cheap, tinny guitar and singing
horribly — almost a parody of what Liverpool stood for. Toss him a penny.
Now walk a little further, till you emerge on to the wider Stanley Street,
and there at last you will see Eleanor Rigby.
If there had not been this moment, Liverpool might have been for me
the graveyard of an entire generation. But it’s there, a blackened streetside
sculpture of a sad woman sitting on a bench at a bus stop. It was chiselled
by Tommy Steele, an early Beatles fan who was appalled at the lack of
tangible tributes to them in their home city. Drawing inspiration from the
haunting Beatles composition Eleanor Rigby, he created this unsung
monument, and gave it to the ungrateful city for “half a sixpence”. A plate
nearby carried the legend: “To all the lonely people”.
In a moment, for a moment, the Beatles are alive again, and the song
wakes up with renewed innuendo. It’s the Fab Four, cocking their snook
once more at the eternally damned and lonely people of Liverpool, who did
not see them while they were in it, and can’t bring them back now that they
are gone.
“You go to the city famous for
being the headquarters of
Playboy, see a lot of babes there,
and soon you lose control of
yourself. You go sex-crazy. You
start prowling the streets like a
serial killer,” said the Fish. “But
the average American WASP is
looking for someone with weightbearing shoulders, not clavicles
waiting to be loved.”
This is the home
of girls next door,
centrefold bunnies,
gangsters and
Creole food
A typical scene from
the Illinois countryside
Dan Swanson takes
my photograph
C H I C A G O
Phone Fun in Chicago
“I can’t blame you for having a thing about white skin and blonde
hair,” said the Fish understandingly, lighting up an obnoxious cigarette.
“It is recognised as one of the main reasons why the average Indian
goes West.”
“You have misunderstood everything,” I retorted. “As usual.”
“Au contraire,” said the Fish. “I have grasped the essence of your story.
As usual. You go to the city famous for being the headquarters of Playboy,
see a lot of babes there, and soon you lose control of yourself. You go sexcrazy. You start prowling the streets like a serial killer.”
“And do I find what I am looking for?” I asked. No point trying to prove
innocence when the judge is the jury.
“Of course you don’t!” he cried. “The average American WASP is
looking for beefcake, someone with weight-bearing shoulders, not clavicles
waiting to be loved. Someone with personality and a commanding manner,
not a listless wimp writing bad poetry while he awaits further instructions.”
“I really think you’re overdoing it,” I protested. “I admit I made a few
phone calls, but if you had been there, then -”
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“But that’s exactly the point, don’t you see!” the Fish cackled
triumphantly. “I would never have been there! My loves are all eastwards,
specifically in Singapore, and they are gentle and sweet, with pale skin,
black hair and slit eyes. You can keep Chicago, with its shivering gunmolls
and plasticine babes.”
Taking Pot Shots at Chicago
It’s cold, it’s criminal, it’s costly, it’s sinful, but
when board and lodge is free, there’s no better
way to enter the USA
My difficulties in Chicago have always revolved around too much time and
not enough money. My sister, Lakshmi, lived in that city for many years and
the prospect of free lodging was magnetic for me. I could sneak into America
via Chicago, spend the entire month there holed out on 1559 North Honore
if I wished, and sneak out again without anyone being the wiser. I might
see nothing more blood-curdling than poor blacks taking pot shots at poor
Puerto Ricans in the inner city, and I might eat nothing more homely than
nachos, but I would have conserved my dollars, and that was the big thing.
I would return to the Third World with my usual poor man’s hoard: a small,
discreet selection of colognes, stacks of writing pads, pens and stationery
items, some choice music, some chosen software. And perhaps a few copies
of the latest Penthouse for resale in India to recover my costs. When people
asked where I had gone for my holidays, I would say without looking up,
“Oh, don’t you know, America. At least once every two years. I have a
multiple-entry visa. Valid for life.”
Travelling with this plotted miserliness, I have visited the USA five times,
and travelled in detail over its length and breadth. But the port of entry has
always been Chicago. It is there that I have earned my US colours. Chicago
has broken me in, cut my teeth, shaved my stubble, made me a man worthy
of supermarkets and the American Discount Dream.
For the Indian innocent unchained in America, shopping can be a
disabling joy. There is nothing Americans don’t know about packaging,
shop-window displays, wheels and deals, eye-stopping advertising and, of
PHONE FUN IN CHICAGO
111
course, plain, old-fashioned undercutting. Illusion is reality, and everything
you touch changes your lifestyle, self-image, credit rating and aspiration
level. Indeed, many Indian immigrants there naturally assume that the
greatest hospitality they can extend to visiting fellow Indians would be to
let them loose inside some endless shopping mall.
Believe me, it can be a corrupting and devastating experience. You can
buy anything, anytime, anyplace and almost anyhow. You are encouraged
to borrow money so that you may buy more. The more you buy, the better
your rating as a serious buyer of ‘things’, and the easier it will be for you
to borrow even more. You can shop by computer, by phone, in person, on
the web, transcontinentally, using discount coupons, availing of free sample
offers and a plethora of other imaginative ways. You can demand full
satisfaction or, failing that, a full refund.
Appropriately enough, the voice of that particular summer was Tracy Chapman,
the spiky-haired black minstrel who had risen from the sidewalks of America to
sing raw about poverty, lovelessness and America’s obsession with ‘things’:
Won’t die lonely, have it all pre-arranged
Hire a grave so big and deep for me
and all my mountains of things
In the best and the worst of my shopping experiences in America, the
devil has been the American telephone, with its endless leash that allows
you to walk all over the neighbourhood while talking, eating nachos with
salsa, picking your nose, doing your laundry, making instant soup, having
a bath, or even, on occasion, groping with the cheerleader next door.
The telephone brought America to my doorstep; and when I opened the
door, I was tempted by every sin known to the deacon. I became besotted
with bargains. My transactions seduced me towards damnation in
imperceptible degrees, starting with harmless trips to shops here and there
in downtown Chicago to buy innocuous cultural debris.
On my first morning in Chicago, I was out on the streets by 8. It was
July, but cold. The skies were piercingly blue, the air zingy with a cutting
112
wind made sharper by the appetising fumes of unleaded petrol, and the
aromas of coffee and hot dogs frying in local delis. A brisk walk past all
this would set my cheeks atingle, and also bring me to the Metro rail
station of Damen, whence the famous heart of Chicago, called the Loop,
was about twenty-five minutes away.
Chicago is among those planned cities, like New York and Jaipur, which
are built on a civic grid. The zero point of this grid is where State Street
intersects Madison Street, right in the heart of downtown. Roads generally
cross at right angles, and are uniformly named along their length, except
for a suffix that tells you if they are north, south, east or west of the State
and Madison intersection.
My practice was to get off at any of the stations on the Loop, climb up
from the warm cocoon of the underground station to the street-level blast and
roar of Chicago’s windyweather. It is always a thrilling moment. Chicago is
like a good-natured tough guy who leaves you alone as long you don’t make
trouble. Always huge, always dwarfing, always ready for rough stuff, but in
between willing to strut some of the finer things of life. In the so-called ‘blues
bars’ on Clark Street, I’ve had perfect evenings listening to raw blues played
by tubby blacks with rolled up sleeves and suspenders who had learnt the
tubes from their grampas. I’ve spent an evening at the Funny Firm, listening
to the usually barren wit of swaggering young men in windcheaters hoping
to accidentally deliver that crippling one-line nugget which will launch them
on the gold trail to Hollywood, in the footsteps of Woody Allen.
Sometimes, I’d merely amble around these hard streets, and then I’d pass
well-appointed shops that have dealt in finest tobacco since the last century;
sprawling art materials’ stores, where draughtsman and painter alike can
find gizmos to suit their needs; crowded utility stores specialising in military
reject outfits, canistered mustard gas for women with hidden fears, and
gleaming stainless steel Bowie knives with bone handles, sheathed in chamois
leather for you to blaze a new trail through the modern American jungle.
In a day or two I had checked out the breath-stopping architecture.
I had gone up and down Sears Tower, America’s tallest building and
among those most preferred for suicide at one time due to its commanding
height and breath-stopping view of the earthly hell you would never see
113
again. I had viewed the Water Tower, one of the survivors of the Great
Fire that nearly wiped out Chicago in 1879. I had seen the old red-brick
buildings where well-loved gangsters like Al Capone and John Dillingers
had their shootouts. Chicago loves its gunmen. Chicago is a city proud
to be bad.
Within a week, I had cased all joints worth casing. I had also tagged a
couple of eating places as suitable for ducking into for a bite during a hard
day of trudging on asphalt pavements.
Eating, now. For gentlemen of particular Indian preferences, such as
myself, the wild West can prove strenuous. If your stay is longer than, say,
three or four days, you will quickly be beyond the novelty value of T-bone
steaks and potatoes, or hot dogs and fries, or quarterpounder burgers with
bacon, lettuce and tomato. By the third day, I had realised that without at
least a fat squeeze of spicy French mustard to propel it, the muck would
not even move down my oesophagal hatch.
By the fourth or fifth day, I had visited Devon Street, better characterised
as Divan Street, Chicago’s Little India, and, after sampling some of the awful
Mughlai fare at the restaurants there, decided that popped corn might be
better. By week’s end, in desperation, I had tried out at least one Chinese
and one Thai eaterie, found the spicing too mellow, suitable perhaps for
American palates but definitely not mine. In brief, I was pining for a little
hot rice, with dal, and perhaps some old-fashioned bharta. In this time of
need and deprivation, the nearest I came to something home-like is probably
the chain of Creole fast food joints called Popeye’s.
I discovered the eaterie by accident, intrigued by their oddball offering
of ‘chicken and biscuits’, spelt out in large letters next to a bicep-popping
cartoon of Popeye, the sailor who made spinach famous. On the wall menu,
I spotted Spicy Red Beans and ordered one, reminded of rajma, Punjab’s
famous red bean gravy that is so delicious that it needs only a little rice with
some clarified butter and perhaps a bowl of curds to go along with it. I
looked about for a matching rice accompaniment, and struck gold with Rice
with Minced Beef. Greedily anticipating an afternoon of fun with hot food,
I took home a carry-out order of these, planted myself before the telly, and
set about some serious consumption. An hour later, my eyes streaming and
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my tongue ablaze with unknown Creole spices, I was the happiest fellow
in the Wicker Park district.
On the last day of my first week in Chicago, I visited the Temple of
Conspicuous and Meaningless Consumption, the showroom of the company
called The Sharper Image, specialists in creating and merchandising a range
of products no one suspects they need until they see them in Sharper Image’s
show window — such as, for example, a watch that displays the phases of
the moon, or a laser beam that undulates when you wave your palm in front
of its encasing glass dome. Needless to say, Sharper Image’s tempting and
largely useless lifestyle products are lapped up instantly by the burgeoning
breed of high-flying, career-minded, status-conscious, thing-loving American
young called the Yuppie.
I can say only that I finally somehow emerged unscathed from between
supermarket shelves, my psyche intact, my dollars even more so. It remained
for me to address the important pending task of Buying Software. By then,
surface Chicago had no more secrets left for me, and I had not yet woken
up to the Hidden Mysteries. So I headed out to Walker Drive, where I had
spotted a discount software store. It was my first step towards the Great
Telephone Experience.
The Telephone Wheeler-Dealer
After setting out to buy software by telephone,
the author encounters Charlene, and
comes a cropper
“Tell you what!” said Pat Dulin. “You find out the cheapest prices you
can get for the software you want to buy. And I mean anywhere. Then you
come back to me, and I’ll give it to you for one dollar less than the lowest
price you got out there. No questions asked.”
The shop is part of the Egghead Discount Software chain of stores in
the USA, and Patricia Dulin, salesgirl, was merely stating policy. Egghead
claims that its retail prices on software are the lowest anywhere in the USA
— and are willing to prove it. One dollar less was not a princely offer, it
was just irresistibly cute.
115
All I had to do was find out the lowest prices for every particular software
anywhere in America. Simple. So easy. Actually, so Machiavellian. Deceptive
Dulin was suggesting I traipse all over a country three times the size of India
checking out the prices of software. I slowly grasped the brazen assumption
behind the one-dollar-off deal: no-one would be up to such bargain shopping.
Fizzling out halfway, they’d slink back to Dulin’s web at Egghead Discount
Software and take what they were given.
Not I. Reaching home, I grabbed fortifications of nachos and salsa, and
planted myself on the couch, armed with the Chicago Yellow Pages and the
telephone. Over the next four hours, I methodically ploughed my way
through every one of 103 shops listed under Computers and Software. On
a separate sheet, I duly noted down, in tabular form, shop names, phone
numbers, prices and so on. Not everyone obliged, of course. Some would
shoo me off, wise to my cheap Third World bargaining tricks; others would
indulge me, as though they knew I would not be buying. In some cases,
after a detailed runaround, I’d reach a pre-recorded voice telling me that
so-and-so salesperson was busy with another customer and would I like to
leave a message after the beep. I must have left a total of at least twenty
messages on different salespersons’ voice mailboxes that afternoon.
The replies only began to kick in the next day — by when, alas, I
had clean forgotten my enquiries dispersed all over Chicago. Mayhem
began.
Lakshmi answered the phone. It was a Bruce, seeking a Gawby. She
passed it to me.
“Bruce?” I said to her, covering mouthpiece with palm. “Don’t know
any Bruce. Could it be a wrong number? Friend of yours?”
No, it was a Bruce, and it was for a Mister Gawby. Who could this be?
I tried to picture a Bruce: square-shouldered, blond, clean-cut, shortstop
on his college baseball team, all-American, unimaginative but pleasant. On
the other hand, perhaps a middle-aged huckster in a trenchcoat and eyes
permanently narrowed against cigarette smoke, calling furtively from a
phone booth while his eyes darted around for patrolling cop cars. In fact,
at the moment, there was no way to tell. Bruce was a complete enigma.
“Hello,” I ventured cautiously.
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“Hi,” said a thudding baritone. “Is that Mister Gawby?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Hey, how ya doin’, Gawby?” said Bruce, bursting out in alarming
familiarity and good cheer. Was I supposed to know him? Met at a party?
A pen-pal from childhood?
“I’m doin’ gude,” I replied, slipping easily into the twang and resonance
of American chatter. “Haidoon?”
“I’m gude,” said Bruce. I waited. He waited. Then he said, “Uh, you
still need that thang?”
“Thang?” I repeated moronishly. He meant thing. What thing? Was
Bruce a tele-drug-dealer? I decided to play along till I found out what the
‘thang’ was. “No luck, man,” I said. “What about yourself? You still need
that thang?”
There was a longish silence. “Hey, who am I speaking with?” he said,
finally.
“This is Gawby,” I said. “I told you already.”
Another silence. Then a small snicker. “Hey, man, is that a real name?”
There followed a succession of other callers, some perfunctory, some
useful.
Then, just as I was tiring of Haidoons, Charlene called. A silvery,
effervescent, girly all-American voice sang out, “Hi! This is Charlene, you
called our store yesterday, how can I help you?” Then, struck by a thought:
“It is, uh, Mister Gawpee, right?”
“It is indeed he,” I replied. “In person.”
It was already clear to me that I was talking to a cheerleader. This was
definitely a voice that had sung Two four six eight, Who do we appreciate?
at countless league matches. Hers were the perfect legs that had pirouetted
on Founder’s Day parades in Cincinatti, Ohio, while she had twirled her
baton and flashed a perfectly white thirty-two at the home crowd. It was
a matter of time before Charlene would be seen in her entirety by the nation,
smiling warmly without a stitch on from a spectacular Playboy pictorial
called perhaps ‘Cheeky Charlene’.
Clearly the relative prices of software were not the issue here. In fact,
with Charlene here, shopping became instantly de-prioritised.
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“So,” I said at length. “Your name is Charlene.” I paused, wondering
what to say next. “How long have you been called Charlene?”
The Fish insists Charlene is a figment of my fevered brain. His own
proposition is that I must have imbibed too much Miller Lite that afternoon
and eventually begun to sprout my own full-blown versions of the American
Dream, featuring bunnies in red, white and blue swarming all over me. He
is especially certain that I could not have had even a small part of my
aforesaid conversation with Charlene because (he claims) I am not capable
of such fine dialogue.
“You were speechless that a real American girl was talking to you,” he
said. “You could think of nothing to say, and you maintained a thunderstruck
silence. She finally put the phone down, disgusted.”
The story continues, even if Charlene does not. Over those few days,
I came under the spell of the amazing American telephone, unfailingly
efficient, capable of giving uniform satisfaction every time. Never a wrong
number; never any line noise; not once the irritating message that the
number you have dialled does not exist. The sound quality was always
superb. If I closed my eyes, I could treat myself to the illusion that I was
sitting face to face with some friendly American stranger in a living room.
No wonder I was finally hooked. The phone was simply the cheapest
way to see America, make new friends, and enjoy daring adventures from
a safe distance. I spent most of my time attached umbilically to Lakshmi’s
telephone.
I suppose you might say this was how I finally met Dan Swanson, the
computer gypsy.
Tracking down Dan Swanson
An ex-Vietnam hippie who makes a living
as a designer shows the author the
cornfields of Illinois
Those were the early days of the Macintosh computer. I had been a
passionate zealot since Apple Inc’s first ad in Time magazine, showing a
cute, smiling box with a cheerful, sky-blue monitor and the handwritten
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greeting ‘Hello’ on it. In the years since then, I had come to enjoy the
distinction of being one of the early Indian adopters of this happy little
computer.
The ability to let you draw freehand on the screen was the Macintosh’s
greatest breakthrough, the one that took our breath away. With time, an
array of powerful graphics software came into being, the best of them
emanating from a California-based company called Adobe Systems. Their
two flagship programs, Illustrator and Photoshop, quickly dominated the
graphics market. As soon as I could, I began dabbling in graphics software,
including Illustrator. I used to work without the benefit of manuals; what
I knew to do was whatever I had figured out by myself, using native third
world intelligence.
One day in Chicago, after the telephone had revealed its true charms, it
occurred to me that it would be fun to locate other artists who were as tickled
pink with Illustrator as I was. I knew that with a good plan and a good phone
this ought to be possible. But how? In a copy of Macworld, I found and dialled
Adobe’s toll-free 1-800 number, and was soon talking to one of their customer
service executives in San Francisco, a sunny fellow called Jeff.
“I wonder if you could let me have the phone numbers of any registered
Illustrator users in the Chicago area,” I said to Jeff. “I’m keen to trade
notes.”
In a few moments, Jeff had seven addresses for me: five of them were
studios and design shops, and two were individuals. Within fifteen minutes,
I had made my calls, fixed appointments to visit certain studios over the
following days, and left messages for those who were not home. One of these
was Dan Swanson, described by Adobe as graphic designer, freelance.
An hour later, shortly after lunch, the phone rang, and a cheerful voice
sang out, “Namaste!” It was Swanson. Calling from his car phone. He had
been on the move, but had called his answering machine to retrieve his
messages, and heard mine. “I have a soft spot for India,” he said. “I would
be very happy to meet you.”
I assumed he meant that we should somehow go over to wherever he
was, or fix a meeting place at a restaurant. “Just give me your address,” he
said. “I could be over real soon.”
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“Address?” I repeated blankly. “Soon?” This was going too fast. For all
I knew, Dan Swanson was a Chicago gangster with a sawed-off shotgun
specialising in robbing unsuspecting ethnic families blind after gaining entry
into their homes as a computer buff. I looked wildly at Lakshmi, but she
was immersed in her work.
“Maybe we could meet at a nearby Pizza Hut,” I began, but he was
already ploughing ahead: “I can bring my computer, if you like. It’s a
Macintosh Plus.”
Suddenly, Dan sounded real. I detected the slightly batty tone of the true
Mac evangelist. “Where are you?” I asked. “How far away?”
“I’m outside Chicago,” he said. “About forty miles outside, but traffic’s
good. I could be there two hours max.”
By teatime, Swanson was sitting across the table from us, beaming
broadly. With a bustling moustache, a head of bushy hair, he looked like
someone who might have been fired from the Grateful Dead. He was on
the wrong side of plump, but was clearly at an age when it didn’t matter
a damn to him. Home was in a satellite town outside Chicago called Batavia,
where his ancient mother, his only dependent, lived in an old house.
Swanson, revealed Swanson, was a loner, a baby boomer and product
of the Vietnam years, when he saw action in the Mekong Delta. After
the war, Swanson footled around hoping for some heavenly sign as to
who he was and what he should do in life. His native skills, acquired
and deployed in the years of his draft, were carpentry and plumbing.
In the depressive, soul-searching years after Nam, Swanson saw no great
future in either. Indeed, you might say that for a while back there
Swanson saw no great future in any activity at all. Seeking anchor, he
joined the Church of Scientology. This proved palliative, and he decided
to stay with it.
Dan was essentially unemployable. Like many of his questioning, questing
flower-child generation, his viewpoints were too individualistic for him to
survive long within a workplace hierarchy. So after a life in which he has
drifted and been flung into arenas as tumultuous as the battlefield and the
chapel, he finally works alone, undertaking graphic assignments for selected
clients.
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The Macintosh and Swanson belong to the same anarchy. When Swanson
heard that the back plate of the first Macintosh carried the signatures of
the missionary team of garage technologists who had put the computer
together, he knew he was home. It was just the sort of personalised
individualism that spoke right to him. About the same time as I, he acquired
his Macintosh, and started teaching himself computer graphics software.
Within a year, he was making a fine living as a freelance graphic designer.
His home, outfitted with telephone attached to answering machine, was his
workplace, but his heaven was his car, equipped with a mobile phone. He
executed his graphic designs using Illustrator; he tracked jobs, billings,
schedules and costs with a relational database program called Double Helix.
He needed nothing more to manage his entire life.
“Have you seen anything of Chicago?” Swanson asked presently. We had
and we hadn’t.
“Would you like to go for a drive along Lake Shore Drive?” he asked.
“I would enjoy showing you around. Then, if you like, I could take you for
a drive in the American countryside, the heartland. I’m sure you’ve never
visited there. It would be like a picnic.”
We had driven several times past the wide windy expressway that touches
the southern shore of Lake Michigan, but I didn’t say so. “That would be
fine,” I said.
Around eight one clear morning, Dan Swanson was as good as his word.
He picked us up in his Chevy, the one with phone attached, and we set
out. We connected with the freeway, passed under the elevated railroads
of downtown Chicago, and then sped beyond to the northern suburbs of
Evanston. Soon they were behind us, and we were moving through quieter
precincts, with wide and shady avenues, gabled houses, churches from
which emanated the deep hum of organ practice, and manicured parks
where pensioners with poodles sat on benches.
I don’t know at what point the city’s last vestiges disappeared and we
were flying through a comic book America of blindingly blue skies and
endless, wind-ruffled yellow cornfields where harvesters inched along like
toy beetles. This was the land of high-school proms, Pop Tate’s, Archie and
Veronica, and people hosing their cars in the front yards in the morning
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and getting the dog all wet, and polite young men offering to carry books
for the sweet, clean-cut girls they had crushes on. This was mythical America,
where the horizon never ended, and all problems had simple solutions.
I looked around. But there was no Superman. Only good-natured Dan
Swanson punching someone’s number on the keypad of his mobile phone.
A Costly Mistake
The author, having discovered credit card
shopping by phone, joins a CD Club, and ruins
his sister’s happiness
I was soon perfecting the art of what I call ‘relay shopping’. Simply, this
is a lowdown and unethical bargaining technique in which you ‘relay’ one
vendor’s price to another, back and forth, and set in motion a domino of
crashing prices, a cock-fight in which there is only one winner — you. By
now, of course, I had been delivered the coup de grace of the American
Dream: teleshopping without paying a cent. Having bargained by dint of
product catalogue and telephone, and having finally found the exact article
that you want, you can close the deal by phone.
All you need is a valid credit card.
My sister Lakshmi, unaware of how I was about to shatter her fiscal peace
of mind, allowed me to use hers. I was discovering worlds of greed, decadence
and gluttony, and she would pay for it. I promised her recompense in dollars
on the spot or, if she was amenable, in rupees back in India some other
year of her life. Or some other life.
I was now a many-limbed telecom maniac. One hand held the Yellow
Pages, the other a telephone handset. A third hand brandished my sister’s
credit card, and the fourth gripped a bunch of product catalogues; the fifth
hand, sprouting behind my head, held a lined notepad and a biro, for taking
notes.
Armed thus, I made a costly mistake. I joined a CD Club.
I have long been mesmerised by the two-page black-and-white
advertisements in respectable magazines like Discover that invite you to join
a coterie of music-loving aficionados, and pick up eight CDs over a twelve-
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month period. The first four of these are yours for free as soon as you become
a member, paying one dollar. You buy the remaining four CDs at your
convenience over the remaining year, at a reduced rate of fifteen dollars each.
Of course, you have to reveal your mailing address and credit card number,
when you choose your first four free CDs from the hundreds listed in the ad.
Here’s how it works: every month, the club will send you four CDs to
inspect at your leisure over the next days, with no obligation to keep. If none
of the CDs interest you, you notify the club within the ten-day period, and
send the merchandise back at their cost. You lose nothing.
Should you find a CD or two worth keeping, then you inform the CD
Club rightaway, and return the ones you have rejected. They will debit your
card at the rate of fifteen dollars per CD retained.
It was a wonderful scheme with no losers, it seemed to me, except
the CD Club itself. Poor fellows, saddled with staggering godown stocks
and disposing of them at throwaway prices. It was a complete mystery
to me how they afforded the cost of double-page advertising in topline
magazines.
My own plan was fiendish: I knew I’d have left Chicago before three
weeks were out; I’d join the club for a dollar, collect my four free CDs, and
hightail it back to the Third World. Lakshmi would receive four CDs for
trial each month thereafter, and doubtless she’d automatically refuse to even
open the packaging. I didn’t even deem it necessary to let her know of my
membership.
Nemesis caught up with me only two years later, when I returned to
Chicago and, excitedly looking forward to many more stimulating telephone
escapades, asked Lakshmi for her current credit card details. She looked
at me quizzically, trying to remember something from long ago. “Did you,
by any chance, join some sort of CD Club when you were here last?” she
asked me finally.
I admitted this. Why? I asked her. Any problems?
She threw me a scorching look.
There’s a small catch to CD Club membership, and it is mentioned
casually in the fine print: if they don’t hear from you during the ten-day trial
period, then they assume that you are delighted with all four CDs, and bill
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you sixty dollars rightaway. Lakshmi, whose habit with junk mail is to sweep
it aside to a corner of her stoop on her way to work, had not even been aware
that any CDs were arriving. After nearly six months, while rifling through the
accumulated junk, she spotted the CDs. By then, she had received twentyfour of them; all of them had been charged to her card. She’d paid $360 for
music she’d neither asked for, nor wanted, nor listened to.
“That’s how CD Clubs clean up,” she told me. “Most people aren’t
organised enough to return the trial CDs within ten days. They overshoot
the limit and end up paying the full price.”
Still, she made the mistake of letting me use her credit card again.
The Girls Next Door
The author pays $2 a minute but doesn’t find
the cheerleader of his dreams
My second, and terminal, credit card episode was provoked by a weekly
tabloid called The Reader. This remarkable three-part publication,
published every Thursday and available entirely free to Chicagoans, has
one section of editorial material such as reviews, interviews and quick
analyses of life and trends in and around Chicago, as well as display
advertisements for movies, theatre and concerts. The remaining two
sections consist of millions of classified ads, under every heading from
Accommodation to Livestock to Computers to Vacations. In The Reader
you could find a companion for a crosscountry hitchhike, or wangle a
discount deal on airline tickets from hole-in-the-wall travel agencies, or
find a mate for your rare African Grey, or buy and sell books, music,
musical instruments, sound systems, cats and old furniture, or learn
hang-gliding, windsurfing, shadow-boxing, web graphics, negotiation
skills, or leadership qualities. You could meet the love of your life. You
could put yourself out in the marriage market. Or the remarriage market.
Or even the sex market.
“There,” said the Fish. “You’ve finally said the word. Sex. And this, I
suppose, is where your true nature surfaces. Finally, we begin to understand
what drew you to the city of Playboy.”
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“You have it quite wrong,” I countered. “Surely you can see that my
encounters with advanced telecom technology had mesmerised me. I was
specially interested in the limits of the voice mail system.”
“So you began listening to the appeals of steamed-up young women
pleading for sex in Chicago?”
That was not quite how it happened. A substantial section of the second
supplement of The Reader was devoted to adult personal ads, divided quite
logically into four sub-sections: Men Seeking Men, Men Seeking Women,
Women Seeking Men and Women Seeking Women, properly abbreviated
as MSM, MSW, WSM and WSW. In addition to separate classified listings,
The Reader offered its lonely advertisers the option of leaving a voice
message on their voice mail system for a small additional charge. In return,
a unique key number would be printed as part of the ad. Anyone interested
in a particular advertiser could go a step closer towards acquaintance by
dialling a special 1-700 number which offered access to all voice mail ads
in that issue, using the key numbers.
As with such phone-based systems, the instrument’s keypad becomes an
alphanumeric input device in which you first key in your name and credit
card number. Once these have been verified and found valid, you are
warned that you will be billed two dollars for every minute that you listen.
The phone keys that control playback, repeat, skip, cue forward and so on
are also made explicit. Then you’re on your own.
I chose a lazy weekday afternoon for my first phone foray into this world.
Lakshmi was busy with some artwork in her studio and would probably not
notice me making an extended phone call, but I was taking no chances. I
would first listen to Men Seeking Men, then Men Seeking Women, followed
by Women Seeking Women, and only then reach my real objective, Women
Seeking Men. There would be an air of strict sociological inquiry about the
entire thing. I might even write about it later. It would be a fastidiously
professional event.
To prepare myself, I first read through that week’s Adult Personals
minutely, and familiarised myself with the abbreviation protocol: S Single;
M Male; F Female; D Divorced; B Black; W White; J Jewish. A sample ad
might be:
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Ravishing strawberry blonde, 29, SWF, interested in ballet, gardening, and
physical workouts seeks handsome, athletic SWM of independent means,
interested in camping, swinging, jazz, barbecues and experimentation. Must
have sense of humour.
23091
Or
DJF, only 22, slim, cute, sexy and without encumbrances, is looking for exclusively
short-term physical relationship with protective, cash-rich daddy who enjoys the
good life. I love to party. Do you?
45772
The five-digit number at the foot of each ad was the voice mail key. It
would bring the strawberry blonde SWF and the party-loving DJF alive.
They would talk into your ear. My ear. I tiptoed upto the kitchen, picked
up the handset of the wall-mounted telephone there and looked around to
check that Lakshmi was still busy. She was.
I dialled, and waited.
The phone rang, a computer picked it up, and I was through. I keyed
in Lakshmi’s credit card details, and then began to listen to the disembodied
voices of America’s lonely.
This is Martin, and I’m 35, looking for a younger man who is thinking long-term.
I’m thoughtful, artistic and have suffered a lot of pain in life, and am looking
for an enduring relationship with a caring man…
Wanna come over, baby? I’m Randy, and I’m randy as hell. I’m single, white
and unattached, built like a tank, and I’ll show you things your Dad never
showed you. I’m here, and I’m willing and I’m able — and it’s you I’m
waiting for…
By the time I was through with MSMs and MSWs, I had started becoming
acutely aware of the dollars ticking by, at a rate of two a minute. Nearly
forty-five minutes had passed, and Lakshmi was down ninety dollars — and
I had still not reached WSM.
Abandoning strategy, I headed for the kill.
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It’s a long time since you’ve paid your respects to Erica. I want you here now
this very minute and I want you to get ready for a serious spanking across your
bottom.
Hmm.
This is Judith, twice married, 46 but young at heart, and tired of waiting…
I hit 2 on the keypad, to skip to the next message.
Hi, I’m Patricia, I’m a black piano teacher and I got divorced last December.
I’m 52, and I’m looking for a sensitive, caring man who likes kids…
Onwards to…
Call me Meghan. I’m sinful, sexy, and ready to seduce. If your soul belongs to
the next millenium then your body belongs to me. Just tell me when, where and
I’ll tell you how. Oh, and another thing — you better be white, over six feet
and single. Nothing else matters.
Outstanding. Next.
I’m Cynthia. How do you like the idea of a slow boat ride down the Chicago
river, under golden autumn leaves, with birds trilling their song…
I took the handset off my ear to wipe the perspiration off it, when I was
jolted out of my skin by Lakshmi’s voice behind me. “What sort of
conversation are you having?” she asked me. “I’ve been standing here for
a full minute, and you haven’t made a sound. Is that telephone sex going
on, by any chance?”
“Right, you can call me later,” I said briskly to The Reader computer.
“Maybe at night, when Bombay rates are lower.” Replacing the handset, I
walked away, casually throwing over my shoulder at Lakshmi: “Call from
India, some work. Bad line. He’ll call me later.”
That was close. I had run up a bill of about $300. Nearly Rs.9,000. The
equivalent of approximately one year of phone calls in Bombay.
“And did you finally lose your virginity?” asked the Fish. “If you say
you didn’t, I won’t believe you, you know.”
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“It is not possible,” I replied. “You can get all steamed up over Chicago’s phone
lines, but you cannot have actual sex. When pinch comes to pummel, you have to
live with the fact that you are from another world. It’s not the First World, it’s not
even the next world. It’s the Third World. And one must know one’s place.”
Along the road to this profound discovery, I had noted several other
disturbing points, all of them linked to the cost per minute of meeting a human
being on the phone. By the end of my session with The Reader’s readers, the
pressure of dollars had begun pushing me to make go/no-go decisions about
the men and women whose voices were murmuring into my ears. By the time
Judith, forty-five, had finished saying that she was twice married but young at
heart, I had hit 2 on the keypad. Judith was not my cup of tea, I wanted to know
no more about her, specially at two dollars a minute. On the other hand,
dangerous Erica, in leather and rubber in some room, waiting to give some
grovelling male the most delicious spank he’d ever had, was decidedly forbidden
fruit. Well worth even five dollars a minute. Then again, Cynthia, lost in mushy
rapture about autumn and boat rides, was too dreamy to be real — definitely
not more than seventy-five cents per minute. I pass.
Thus the medium becomes the jury, setting the terms, creating the
context and finally providing you with the escape hatch as well. I could
rationalise myself into innocence by blaming someone else’s credit card and
the steep dollar conversion rate that forced me into taking such casual
decisions about another human being’s net worth. But the truth is as bare
as Erica’s clients’ bottoms — the flip side of America’s marvellous phone
system is that it leads you to measure individuals against a fistful of dollars.
And within seconds, you discover that most people are not worth even that
much. The call is over, and both caller and called are permanently diminished.
Your Own Wordsworth
The author, down on luck and money, tries to
earn a little bit on the side, but encounters
unexpected difficulties
There is a small postscript to my telecom misadventures, and it concerns
a classified ad that I placed in the following week’s Reader. By then my debts
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to Lakshmi had become formidable, and all of them were for phone calls.
Thinking I’d settle them by earning a few dollars with my provenly superior
writing skills, I placed a witty classified in the Miscellaneous Services section
of The Reader.
GET YOUR OWN WORDSWORTH. Highly trained and gifted writer promises
to make you shine on paper. New resumés for old — and in minutes. Just call
252-3220, and I’ll make a new person out of you.
I thought this a rather brainy ad, designed to catch the discerning eye.
It caught, in fact, several discerning eyes. All of a sudden, my Friday
morning was filled with calls from men and women enquiring about my
services. Most of them asked me how long I’d take to deliver the job, and
when we could meet. One girl, called Carol, was a little hesitant.
“Say your name was?” she asked first.
I considered how Gawby would go down, and decided against it. I would
have to spell it out, and the whole conversation would get off to a bad start.
Who wants to deal with a brilliant writer whose name no one can figure out?
I rejected Gopi as being phonetically suggestive and unsuitable. That left
Chitoor Yegnanarayanan Gopinath, which I could scarcely pronounce myself.
“Er, call me Bob,” I said, aware even as I spoke that I didn’t sound like
a Bob of any kind.
There was a pause. “Say your rates were?” she asked me next.
I hadn’t worked out my rates. In India, we work within chaotic variables,
such as urgency of job, ability of client to pay, ability to influence authorities,
and so on. Rates change with the weather. “Uh, I’m sure we can work out
something,” I said. “It really depends.”
“On?” said Carol.
“Well, the number of, for example, words in your resumé. Or the level of
crafting required. Or whether you want it in digital format, or something else.
I can offer you a discount if you’ll settle for a handwritten draft. And so on.”
There was a long, hard pause now. “Excuse me, mister,” said Carol.
Mister. Bad sign. This conversation was going downhill. “Do you write the
resumés yourself? Or do you have them written by someone else?”
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I was stung, but hid it well. “I, me and myself,” I replied smoothly. “I
am your Wordsworth, your muse, your Professor Higgins…”
“You from these United States?”
The conversation was over. I can tell you, with the insight that hindsight
brings, that there is a telephone that separates the East from the West. And
as long we don’t disconnect, the two will never meet.
Rajma
The wine-red bean — rajma — that finally made Chicago feel a bit like home to
me has many avatars in India. The version I had in Chicago was cooked in hot Creole
spices, and given to me in a take-away tub, but my earliest and purest rajma was
as a schoolboy, at a classmate’s house. Though nothing I’ve eaten since quite
matches the country taste of that simple dish, I have come upon two different Indian
treatments for rajma. One, all spiced up, is for royalty; the other, simplicity itself,
is for the rest of us. I give you both.
The Really Easy Rajma
Ingredients:
500 gms rajma
150 gms onions, sliced into rings
150 gms tomatoes, chopped coarsely
Salt to taste
1 tsp red chilly powder
Method:
1. Don’t soak the rajma overnight. Simply put it to boil for 30 or 40 minutes, until
it is tender. if you use a pressure cooker, that’s six or seven whistles.
2. Now in two tablespoons of oil or ghee, fry the onions golden brown. Add the
chopped tomatoes and stir for a minute or so, then add red chilly powder and salt.
Stir some more.
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3. Grind the onion-and-tomatoes mixture to a fine paste. Pour it over the rajma,
and add hot water till you have a medium-thin gravy.
4. Simmer, covered, for another half hour or so. (Or allow six to seven whistles more
on the pressure cooker). That’s it. Do not mash. Do not garnish with coriander.
Do not garnish with anything. Do not add garam masala.
5. Do not speak while eating.
The Royal Rajma
Ingredients:
500 gms rajma, soaked for at least 12 hours, then drained and rinsed
About ˚ litres water
˚ tsp ground turmeric
˚ tsp ground dried red chillies
75 ml ghee or oil
3 green cardamoms
3 whole cloves
1 small onion (about 125 gms) grated
30 gms fresh root ginger, peeled and grated
90 gms fresh tomatoes, skinned and chopped
Salt to taste
250 ml warm water
1 tbsp garam masala
Method:
1. Put the rajma in a deep, heavy-bottom pan, add the water, and put on high heat.
Add the turmeric and chillies, cover and bring to the boil. Boil rapidly for 10
minutes. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30-40 minutes or until the beans are
tender. Strain if necessary. Gently mash the beans with a wooden spoon and set
aside.
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2. Put the ghee or oil in a frying pan and place on high heat. Add the cardamom
and cloves and fry them until they begin to splutter.
3. Add the onions to the ghee and fry until golden. Add the ginger and fry until
it is lightly coloured. Add the tomatoes to the pan, with the salt. Fry until the whole
mixture is well blended.
4. Pour the hot mixture over the cooked beans, mix thoroughly and increase the
heat to high. Add the warm water, cover, and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat
and simmer for about 15 minutes or until it is thick.
5. Stir in the garam masala, cover and remove from the heat. Leave the pan
undisturbed for at least five minutes before serving. Serve with pulao and potato
raita.
CINCINNATI
Dealing with a Real Redneck
“You have imagined the entire episode,” the Fish said to me, after I related
to him the details of my encounter with Perry, the Redneck from Cincinnati.
“It is well known that you are incapable of such sharp wit and repartee. Indeed,
I am astonished that you can tell between Greek and Roman mythology.”
The incident he referred to happened in 1985, on the first evening of
my first day in the USA. It was the eve of my sister’s wedding to a musician
with the unlikely name of Robert Burns, and our entire family had flown
to America for the occasion. We reached New York’s John F. Kennedy
airport, and without pause, boarded a connecting flight to Cincinnati, where
Robert’s home was. Jet-lagged and buzzing with ketones after our journey,
we sat in our room at the Holiday Inn, looking out on an eight-lane
expressway, and awaited the USA.
Americans, it seems, view marriage as a trap for the male. Accordingly,
tradition permits the groom one last wild night out with the Boys, a stag
party at which conversation is dominated by baseball, babes, beer and
baloney. Robert invited me, and I, jet-lagged in a jetsetting land, not wanting
to give offence, acquiesced.
134
It was a clear blue evening in Cincinnati, and the September air was cool
and crisp. This was Superboy country, and I knew it well from my own
schooldays in Delhi. It was full of Johns and Marthas and cornfields and huge
skies and proms and high school romances and soda pop and locker rooms and
cheerleaders and skateboards. There should have been a sense of déjà vu, but
to my disappointment, all I felt was ready for sleep. I was extremely tired.
“It is precisely people like you who give the Third World a bad name,”
the Fish observed afterwards. “And all because you were rendered unsociable
by mild fatigue. No wonder Americans think Indians require iron
supplements.”
The party was in a loft-type apartment, with a huge hall, loud,
incomprehensible music, many copies of Playboy, crates of Michelob beer,
and the loud, twangy voices of the American young. It promised to be a
clear, starry night with a serious moon, and many climbed on to the roof
through the dormer window to get tipsy by starlight. I found myself an
unobtrusive corner, some cushions, some rum — not common in the US,
let me tell you — and some privacy, and tried to see if I could sleep a bit
without appearing to.
Perry arrived towards midnight. He was a pushy, round-faced, slightly
inebriate fellow who clearly knew the details of the American Dream,
including the fact that anything else was a nightmare. For a living, Perry
was a door-to-door salesman of solar collectors. Because of the high price
of his wares, Perry’s job began only after six or so in the evenings, when
the men of the house, the guys with the money, were likely to be about.
Perry looked about, his garrison commander voice hailing strangers and
buddies with equal stridency. Finally, he headed north, towards the bar.
When he saw me.
“Haaaaeeey!” he said, skidding to a halt. “Hiiiiiiii, man! Haidoon? I’m
Perry, you’re shure to be the other side of the wedding party, waaaallll, how
ya doin’?”
Perry, by the way, was a real live Redneck. The world ended for him
where the American mid-west ended. Civilisation existed between the East
coast and the West. Anything beyond could be safely dismissed as possibly
irretrievably distant.
DEALING WITH A REAL REDNECK
135
He got himself a Michelob, and seated himself within hailing distance
of me. It is not often that a Redneck gets himself a real live Brownneck, and Perry was looking for some entertainment after a hard day’s
work.
“Hey Gobby,” he called out, presently. “Whaddaya think of our sexy
American babes, hey? Y’know, the ones with those big Mamas” — his fists
cupped themselves in front of his chest.
“Well, sir,” I said, with some dignity, “ I have not met any sexy American
babes yet.” (This was exactly true, by the way.) “As a matter of fact, I have
not met any American babes at all. The few I have seen did not strike me
as having particularly big Mamas, as you so quaintly put it.”
The Fish’s opinion is that I could not possibly have used such a
devastatingly frosty turn of phrase. It is my opinion that we can leave the
Fish out of this.
“Check that out, maaaan!” crooned Perry, delighted to find a Brownie
who could speak English at all.
There was a sudden slight commotion as 11 p.m. approached. The T.V.
was switched on, and I found myself watching the show called Late Night
with David Letterman. Normally, Late Night is full of sharp wit and selfmockery, but the chunk I saw that night featured some trite and deprecatory
jokes about Greeks.
“What’s a Greek urn?” asked Letterman, and then, after a pause, gave
the answer: “Oh, about thirty dollars a month.”
While everyone collapsed in hysterics, I sank deeper into jet lag. I’d
heard the joke before anyway. Perry, seeing me, was seized by a fit of
concern: perhaps I had not understood the joke. “Hey Gobby,” he asked
me, “Did you get that one? Do ya know what an urn is?”
By now — and here we enter the part which the Fish dismisses as fiction
— by now I was really mad, and I mean really. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
I drew myself up to my full height but almost at once, finding Perry six
inches taller, hunkered down again. What came out finally was: “Do you,
my good lad, know what a caduceus is?”
Brownie had asked a heavy question. Brownie was talking back. The
American mid-West fell silent. Perry must have felt a little like a solar
136
collector himself at that point, with the bright collective gazes of the entire
assemblage upon him. “Hey check that out, maaaan!” he muttered. “Gobby
spoke.”
“What’s a caduceus?” I insisted.
“Hey, what is a caduceus, man?” he said, a little uneasy now, looking
around at the guys.
“A caduceus,” I said slowly, “is what the Greek god Hermes carries. In
the hand that is not holding the urn.”
“You don’t say, buster,” warbled Perry. “What else does Herman do?”
“A caduceus,” I continued inexorably, “is a sceptre with two intertwined
snakes. Like a double helix.”
“That’s intense, man,” said Perry. “Tell me more.”
“I will, my good fellow,” I said. “The caduceus is the symbol of your
very own American Medical Association. Put that in your pipe and smoke
it.”
The devastation was total. Perry kept his Michelob down and wiped his
face with the back of his hand. Some people say his hands were shaking.
“Now isn’t that just incredibly deep,” he muttered. No one remembers him
saying anything beyond this.
The evening passed. I returned home tired but triumphant. I had met
America, but also, America had met me. You’re really something else, boy,
I told myself.
“You can fool your readers,” the Fish told me later, “but you cannot
fool me. You do not know what an urn is. You made a complete fool of
yourself on your first evening in that great country, and now you are trying
to paint yourself as David of the Third World vs the Goliath of Cincinnati.
Well, you can’t fool me.”
But as I said earlier, I feel we can leave the Fish out of this.
P
A
R
I
S
The Paris Connection
It was Paris, in the spring of 1982. The war was over. It had been for almost
forty-five years.
Everywhere the azaleas were beginning to bloom. From the third floor
apartment in the élite Seiziéme Arrondisement where we were lodged, the
Seine River was just a left turn away. I could definitely hear the accordions
playing those sidewalk strains that tell you you are on the continent. The
flat we were in belonged to a princess, and as befitted such blue blood, she
lived in her own château in the French countryside
Now château is definitely a French word. Indeed, there was French to
be heard everywhere. Down on the street, mademoiselles walked their
poodles, people tipped their hats and said Bonjour!, you could buy Le
Monde at the corner tobacconist’s, you could go into the grocer’s a block
away and ask for du frommage, s’il vous plaît, and you would get cheese.
You could even make bold to ask for La Vache Qui Rit, and if you said
it just right, you’d get the famous Laughing Cow cheese.
“I suppose you believe you said Lavashkiri just right, that wonderful
spring of 1982,” said the Fish provocatively.
138
“As a matter of fact, yes,” I replied sweetly. I was not going to rise to
his bait. “You must remember I had learnt a good deal of French at the
Alliance Française. Even unto the French word for spark plug — la bougie,
in case you’re wondering.”
My travelling companions had been openly disbelieving of my claim that
I had taught myself some passable French. The otherwise amiable Parsi
gentleman who had driven us to France from England had roundly abused
me for having muttered, “À gauche, monsieur!” to indicate that he should
take the next left. He had indicated that I should shut the @!$# up. He
had added that he thought I might be a @!$#face.
You can understand how discouraging it can be for a chap who spends
six months and close to Rs.20,000 — the air fare — for a chance to speak
French in France and then finds himself scorned and reviled for it. All I
wanted was some serious French conversation with some serious French
fellows. Or fillies.
It’s not all that complicated, French. You just have to train yourself not
to complete what you start, that’s all. You can’t go wrong. Leave out the
last syllables of things, in general, and from time to time, to keep yourself
on your toes, leave out something in the middle of the word. Practise
speaking with a small handkerchief balled up in your mouth, to get a feel
of the stuffy sound of it all. Finally, speak really fast and for God’s sake
try to sound indignant. If it doesn’t sound like you’re complaining, you’re
not even close.
I shrewdly cast my eye about for the right opportunity during the first
two days. I lobbed stray phrases at passers-by to see if they could handle
it. “Quel poodle, vraiment!” I remarked to an old lady at the laundrette.
I began a few sentences with “Eh bien!” the way Hercule Poirot does in
the books. Passing a bunch of streetkids, I debated whether I should
indicate to them that I was privy to the phrase Il y a du monde au balcon,
after reading a feature in Newsweek. Translated literally, this means that
there is a crowd (du monde) in the balcony (balcon). However, those in
the know will smirk, aware that on a French street where a female
endowed in a certain way is passing by, it alludes to the abundance of
her frontage.
THE PARIS CONNECTION
139
One evening, as I sat brooding about the lack of Frenchness in my Paris
holiday, my eyes fell upon the telephone. Gradually a perfect plan formed
in my mind. I had a friend in Geneva. What if I were to book a long distance
call to her through the French telephone system? The trunk operator would
surely address me in French. I would have a captive audience, probably
named Monique. Together, the pretty French lass at the telephone exchange
and I would speak French. She would be charmed and intrigued by my
mastery. Being free on Saturday, as French birds tend to be, she would
accept my invitation to check out the Crazy Horse Saloon. Monique would
be smelling floral, thanks to L’Air du Temps. We would hold hands under
the table and —
I picked up the phone. I kept it down. The damned thing was emitting
an engaged tone.
Five minutes later, I picked it up again. Same tone; still engaged.
Three hours later, one of my travelling companions revealed that the
French had chosen the engaged tone as their national dial tone. I tried again
and this time, I got through. As I had expected, Monique picked up the
receiver. With irrepressible charm and girlishness, she began gibbering French
at me. A tinkling fussilade. I couldn’t follow a word of it. It was too fast.
“Un moment, un moment, s’il vous plaît, ma petite,” I broke in, laughing
romantically. “Ça, c’est trop trop vite. Il faut que tu parles un peu lentement,
tu comprends? Parce que je ne suis pas français, tu pige, je suis tourist, de
l’Inde? Tu connais l’Inde? C’est un pays magnifique, vraiment —”
Monique, bless her Gallic high cheek bones, burst in again, with another
salvo of French, all of it high-altitude. I caught stray words — occupé,
attendez, les lignes, and so on. I imagine the darling girl was trying to tell
me she happened to be occupied on Saturday but that if I could wait a bit,
she would throw me a line.
I interrupted again, good-naturedly. “Tu cours, ma cherie,” I chided her.
“Ça na va pas du tout. Arrêtes-toi. C’est un etranger içi. Sois un peu
poli —” But there she was, off again, like one of those Maglev trains that
France was going in for.
For the next fifteen minutes or so, we batted thus, pretty little Monique
and I. She’d say something breathlessly, I would try to let her know I needed
140
a slightly more controlled burst. And so on. At least you’re speaking French
to a Frenchie, boy, I told myself.
“You might as well tell your readers the rest of the story,” said the Fish
wearily.
“I was coming to that,” I said. “Well, on Saturday, at Monique’s suggestion,
we met at her little apartment on the Rive Gauche. She was wearing next
to nothing —”
“Oh dear me,” muttered the Fish to himself. “It’s going to get risqué
again. Why don’t you tell them first how your phone conversation with
Monique ended?”
There’s nothing much to tell, you know. Like all countries that use
recorded messages to let you know that the exchange lines are busy, the
French too use a tape.
Sooner or later someone has to change the tape. Monique disappeared
without warning just as she was saying Nous regrettons. But I understood.
She deeply regretted.
K
E
R
A
L
A
Kerala’s Secret Treasure
I’d been searching for millionaires all morning, and now I was really
hungry. If you’ve ever gone searching for millionaires in a place like Kerala,
you’ll know that in a state milk-fed on Marx and inherently devoted to the
equal division of property, millionaires are probably few and far between.
You’d really have to search hard, perhaps even under the ground, and God
knows whose property you might be trespassing on. Kerala is a mere fillet
of earth; everything belongs to someone or the other.
As usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back a little, to
the year 1980 I think it was, when a telegram reached me from the New
Delhi office of M J Akbar, then Indian journalism’s boy wonder and editor
of the short-lived but glorious New Delhi magazine. GREEN LIZARD
WHICH REGURGITATES TOPAZ APPARENTLY FOUND IN
KERALA. MANY VILLAGERS TURNING INTO MILLIONAIRES.
PLEASE INVESTIGATE.
The Fish is convinced that I have excelled myself in this telegram. “I
have always known that half your travels are in your mind, and that your
so-called real-life experiences all take place after the event is behind you.
KERALA’S SECRET TREASURE
149
But you can hardly expect anyone to believe that India’s foremost journalist
would have sent a telegram as absurd as that. Really now.”
“I don’t think you begin to understand Indian journalism or telegrams,”
I began. “A scoop often has the most outlandish beginnings. This telegram,
for example. . .”
But I had lost him long ago. He was already formulating another theory
of why I really must have gone to Kerala. “Income,” he said, nodding to
himself. “You are a self-proclaimed writer in a country where journalism
doesn’t pay enough to subsidise an average person’s daily nicotine needs.
It must have crossed your mind that if there was indeed any topaz — or
for that matter, any other semi-precious stone — in Kerala, your life could
change dramatically if only you got hold of some. Go on. Dare to deny it.”
On my first day, I merely walked about Trivandrum, appraising passersby keenly, in case any of them happened to be a secret millionaire. In Kerala,
I ought to add, this sort of people-watching is a particularly fruitless enterprise,
because everyone, rich and poor alike, wears white — which, of course, is
not white at all but a light discoloration caused by innumerable rinses with
powder blue fabric whitener. In the hot season, most males in their backyards
will be wearing only a veshti, a thin white cotton sheet knotted around their
waist and loosely gathered up around their knees. Disguised thus, a minister
would be indistinguishable from the fellow who sells him his murukkan,
betel leaves folded around lime, tobacco, and betel nut shavings.
A wealthier Keralite might starch his veshti, and don a white full-sleeved
shirt, rolled up casually to the middle of his forearms to reveal a burnished
gold Citizen watch. He’d advertise his higher station in life by emerging from
an ivory Ambassador car (whose chauffeur, however, would be dressed
exactly like him sans, of course, the gold-rimmed spectacles and watch).
I noted that the presence or absence of footwear seemed to be an
economic indicator. Toddy tappers, bobbing along the road with pots of
fresh booze hanging from a bamboo stave across their shoulders, were
shoeless. This told me that there wasn’t enough money in toddy tapping to
buy a pair of slippers, though there might be much oblivion in it.
150
It was thus, ambling like a second-hand Desmond Morris through
Trivandrum’s shady lanes, that I stumbled upon the newspaper offices of
one of the state’s more popular publications. Should I enter? Surely I’d find
some journalist who knew about this lizard that spat out topaz? And, of
course, everyone knows how fond journalists are of revealing special
information that only they are privy to.
It was thus that I met the portly and cherubic chief sub-editor called
Jose, sitting briskly, if such a thing is possible, behind his sub-editorial desk.
I introduced myself and explained my quest to him. His eyes showed
immediate understanding. “Ah yes,” he said, as though we had arrived at
his favourite subject. “But it is not topaz.”
“Then?” I asked, with bated breath. Diamonds? Gold ingots?
“Vaiduriam,” he said. “Everybody knows about it.” He himself had
learnt about it from his erstwhile chauffeur, a young man who one day had
abruptly resigned his job and disappeared. Nearly a year later, Jose had spied
him behind the wheel of a taxi at a traffic intersection in Chullimanoor, and
hailed him.
“Driving a taxi?” he asked him jovially. You may rely on a Keralite to
start a conversation with a statement of something obvious; they find it a
safe gambit with little scope for misunderstandings.
“No,” replied the ex-chauffeur pleasantly. “I’m going to the market
to buy vegetables. I have ten taxis besides this one, but I have other
people to drive them.” An astonished Jose learned that the lad had
become a vaiduriam millionaire and had bought himself a fleet of taxis.
Unfortunately, before he could excavate any more details, the signal
turned green.
Quivering with excitement, I asked Jose when I could interview his
chauffeur, but alas, that proved a dead end, for Jose did not even have an
address he could direct me to. I asked him if he himself might be interested
in coming millionaire-hunting with me, but I sensed a certain apathy. “No,”
he said. “I am an old man, and besides, I don’t get excited by such things.
If you are serious in your quest, you should find yourself a committed
communist, one who has the ears and the trust of the common people.
Guided by him, you might penetrate into the heartland of Kerala, perhaps
151
even as far as the misty Brymore Hills, and find poor people willing to tell
you their fantastic tales of overnight wealth.”
For the next few days, I buried myself in the musty Library of the University
of Trivandrum, giving myself a crash course in geology. Vaiduriam, or
chrysoberyl, is a semi-precious stone formed by an infinitely slow saga of
molecular sculpting deep inside the earth. Under Kerala’s fertile red laterite
topsoil, there exists a layer of nearly impregnable granite called gneiss. This,
in turn, sits like a plug over boiling liquid magma. Millenia ago, as the
pressure of the magma mounted, fingers of hot liquid began squeezing their
way up into the gneiss through weak spots. These mineral-rich, molten
incursions cooled slowly over millenia, solidifying into veins called pegmatites.
Within the pegmatites, wherever the vapours got trapped in air pockets, the
elements aluminium, berylium and oxygen combined at certain precise
temperatures to form vaiduriam.
Its English name is chrysoberyl, or cymophane. Cut en cabochon — flat
below and rounded above — by a skilled lapidarist, it reflects its amber light
as a characteristic fine line, a feature that has earned it the name cat’s eye.
Needless to say, chrysoberyls exist only within pegmatites, and the pegmatites
exist within the rocky gneiss — so you will be correct in asking how the
average Keralite villager gets his hands on this stone at all. This is how it
happens:
Over the ages, some pegmatites that were once far below became displaced
to the surface through earthquakes which shuffled and re-arranged the soil’s
layers. To the untrained eye, these outcropping pegmatites might look no
different from ordinary ground soil; but nevertheless, here, among the gravel
and pebbles, there may be raw, unpolished stones of chrysoberyl. Some of
them get nudged downhill by wind and rainwater. En route, they get a
thorough buffing, and finally end up gleaming dully on some riverbed.
So. There was chrysoberyl waiting to be picked up in the mountains and
the riverbeds. Clearly that was where I had to look for millionaires. But
which mountains and which rivers? I read on, and then encountered one
of those utter strokes of luck. In an obscure study nearly fifteen years old,
152
I noticed, with a slight cardiac leap, a section on chrysoberyl. Geologically,
this gem had no right to exist in Kerala’s soil but there it was nonetheless,
the latitudes and longitudes of the precise pegmatite bearing areas had been
pinpointed by photographs from remote sensing satellites. I held my breath
— this meant that the Kerala government must already know that this semiprecious stone existed; after all, mining was a state subject. How come they
weren’t mining chrysoberyl and adding it to the state’s wealth?
I pottered around town looking for the Geological Survey of India, finally
finding it in a palm-shaded lane. The Chief Geological Officer was a grumpy,
swarthy man, permanently ready with a forbidding frown designed to inform
his subordinates that whatever it was they wanted to see him about, it was
no use. I knocked, diffidently because you don’t mess with such important
people, but also because he seemed to be in the middle of reading.
“Yaaais,” he said, in the local way, without looking up.
“Sir, I’m researching the presence of chrysoberyl in Kerala, and —”
That got a rise out of him. He looked up sharply, saying, “Chrysoberyl?
What do you know about it?”
“I don’t know much,” I said. “I want to know whether the state has
managed to mine any of it?”
“State? Mine?” he snorted. “There is no vaiduriam in Kerala. How can
you mine something that does not exist? Besides, I am very busy with
preparations for a Graphites Seminar tomorrow. I have no time for such
foolish things which do not exist. You may leave.”
To have come so far and then leave without even a scrap of information?
“But sir,” I said, “what about the Idukki Hydroelectric Project?”
He looked up at me, as though I was a fly buzzing around his face and
it was time to swat me. “Idukki?” he growled.
“Sir, they say the chrysoberyl-bearing zone is all the way up to Idukki,”
I said, very scared now. “Perhaps you can tell me how many pegmatites the
GSI has managed to count at least.”
He put down his pen, capping it. “You know about pegmatites?” he said
softly, as though I had displayed knowledge that could have me put away
for a long time. “Pegmatites in Kerala? Let me see how much you really
know — define pegmatite!”
153
I fled. Clearly I had become the man who knew too much, and had begun
annoying important people like the Chief Geological Officer. They could
easily have me shot or embedded in concrete cement and dumped into the
backwaters. I thought it might be a good time to find some geologist who
could tell me why the government was pretending chrysoberyl did not exist.
“If it exists, you see,” said Vickramjit, a bright and sombre geology teacher
from the university, “then they will have to either mine it or allow it to be
mined. Nobody benefits except the state. But this way, they can pretend
there’s nothing there, so that when they catch someone at it, they can charge
him with illegal mining, confiscate whatever he has dug up, and then let
him off again after a fine — some gems, of course — and a convincing stay
behind bars. So that he may resume mining. The state doesn’t earn a paisa,
but lots of other people become rich.”
It was Machiavellian. Vickramjit had stumbled upon it when he and a
friend had decided to map potential chrysoberyl-bearing zones along the
river near his house, and stumbled upon a full-scale chrysoberyl dig by the
banks. Young divers were taking deep breaths and disappearing under water
to scour the riverbed. Vickramjit rounded the bend, saw the activity, and
went off to make a phone call to the police. Twenty minutes later, when
he returned to the site, it was deserted.
“Clearly someone in the police department knew about the dig and had
warned them to scatter as soon as I complained,” said Vickramjit. “The
police can thus claim that they had been ready to take action but the culprits
had proven too slippery.”
My best bet, I decided, would be to head into the hinterland’s mountains
and riverbeds and try to track down the actual chrysoberyl millionaires in
their huts. But for that I needed the services of a good, unreformed, still
smouldering communist, one who rejoiced each time one of the toiling
masses hit a pegmatite.
“I’m looking for a good Communist with some free time,” I began
tentatively, to Vickramjit.
154
“I could put you on to the fellow who took me around,” said the geologist
at once. “His name is Mohan.”
Mohan and I got along very well, though we hardly spoke. He was full
of anger against the inequities of life, and his blazing eyes were always
focused on a distant revolution. To him, those who had broken out of
poverty thanks to vaiduriam, were the blessed few — and there were far
too few of them, in his opinion. We drove to Aruvikkara in Mohan’s jeep,
then beyond, and then further beyond, through endless corridors lined by
murukkan shops and wandering toddy-tappers, and green little ponds where
elephants splashed in slush.
Along the way, Mohan told me the stories, in broken English mixed with
Malayalam. A fellow in Chullimanoor was one day told by the government
that his oil mill would have to be razed because it was obstructing a planned
road expansion. Unfortunately, because funds were limited, they could offer
him only token compensation. “Poor Madhavan was devastated,” said
Mohan, his voice aquiver at the memory of the injustice. “When the
bulldozers flattened his mill, he watched from his hut across the road, tears
streaming from his eyes.”
Then, through the tears, Madhavan saw something gleaming in the fresh
soil dug up by the machines. The bulldozers had brought a gem-bearing
pegmatite up to the surface. Madhavan lives in a modest bungalow today,
and has sent his sons abroad to study.
Not everyone was so lucky. Many villagers, hearing of Madhavan’s
jackpot, began burrowing into the ground beneath their own huts. They’d
disappear down the tunnel after dinner and dig downwards till dawn. After
descending a certain distance, they’d branch off laterally. “Unfortunately,
there was no particular science or reasoning behind their digging,” regretted
Mohan. “They just hoped they’d find something. But many never returned
home in the morning.”
The communist watched with some satisfaction as the local wing
of a national political party, hearing about this hidden source of
possible campaign funds beneath the state’s soil, imperiously annexed
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a kilometre-long stretch of the river, pitching tents and moving in like
sheikhs, while local tea stalls, snack shops and canteens were also set
up in their vicinity.
“They hired local lads to dive down and dredge up the riverbed soil in
Dalda tins, for teams of women to sift with colanders,” says Mohan. “They
searched desperately for a month or more, but to everyone’s great delight,
they found not even one gemstone.”
However, of those who became rich, no story is perhaps more memorable
than that of the areca farmer called Karim. He lived up in the dark green
hills of Brymore, and that was where Mohan took me.
Karim’s routine had not changed for years. He’d trek up into the Brymore
Hills alone to harvest areca nuts. After a month or two, he’d return to the
plains and sell the nuts. He had no family anyone knew of, and he seemed
to have no great needs. Then one day, he heard about vaiduriam from
Eachen, a Kanikar tribal.
“Big money in the hills,” said Eachen. Eachen had found a shiny pebble
which the tattan, jeweller, in town had confirmed as low-grade chrysoberyl.
Eachen had earned the small fortune of Rs.101 for the stone.
Karim remained impassive, though he must have felt a quickening of his
pulse. “Doesn’t sound likely to me,” he replied sceptically. “I’ve been going
to those hills for years. No treasures there.”
But as soon as he’d put together a little money from areca sales, Karim
bought a spade and shovel and headed straight for Brymore, this time
looking for a different harvest. When he returned empty-handed to town
a few months later, people started joking about ‘Karim’s treasure’. “Looks
for gems, finds only areca nuts,” was the jibe.
But Karim had nothing to lose, so he kept trying. Seven years later, he
found one solitary stone that was assayed as vaiduriam. The tattan did the
standard test for chrysoberyl: he tossed the stone into the bottom of a paper
cone and lit a flame on the other side. If the fire showed through as a pale
honey-gold colour, then it was chrysoberyl. Karim earned Rs.1001 for his
first treasure, and immediately diversified by hiring seven labourers and
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delegated, like a good manager. Within a month, he had hit a larger lode,
a fistful of chrysoberyl. Which he sold for a few lakh rupees.
I met him in his unauthorised shack at the foot of the Brymore wilds.
He was tall, whipcord thin, very tough and very mean, dressed in just a
lungi. A small pouch tucked into the hip of his lungi contained some thirty
honey-coloured stones. “The rest are buried under the ground somewhere
around here,” he said to me. “Only I know where.”
Inside his shack, powered by stolen electricity from a public cable, was
a National Panasonic stereo system, an electronic razor, a wide screen
television set and several such appurtenances. The wind whipped around
the richest villager in Kerala; I shot a few photographs, and then walked
a small distance away to stare at the mountains while Mohan the Communist
renewed his acquaintance with the poorest of the poor.
Of course I was enthralled, but I must confess that I was also rapidly
losing interest. Certain unignorable events were occurring in the
neighbourhood of my lower oesophagus.
“A triumph of gluttony over greed,” pronounced the Fish. “I was waiting
to see when your natural sense of porcine equity would overtake your cheap
dreams of instant fortune through illicit gemstones.”
“That’s rather impetuous of you,” I muttered mildly. “It was way past
lunchtime, you know…”
“As soon as you realised that your sweaty little hands would not be
holding any of those pretty little cymophanes, you lost interest,” he
bulldozed ahead. “Your gastric juices began to overcompensate, and all you
could think of was food. Any food. You’d turned into a serial pig. Pray
continue.”
The sun was low on the horizon, the western one. The walk up to
Brymore had been long, and my stomach was saying clearly that it would
have preferred vadas to vaiduriam. I hesitated to bring the matter up before
Mohan, because it is a well-known fact that Marxists have a low opinion
of food. Finally, when I could bear it no longer, I said to him. “Feel like
some food by any chance?”
He broke into a broad smile, the first of the day. “I thought you were
never going to ask,” he said. We were negotiating a narrow embankment
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through a field of tapioca growing tall on either side, My boots were already
clayey with mud. I nodded eagerly, to indicate that I was ready if he was.
This is how I discovered the real treasure that grows beneath the soil
of Kerala. It is not vaiduriam, but an ugly-looking root called tapioca.
During the Second World War, when rice went into shortage, tapioca came
into its own in Kerala as a suitable substitute.
I sat on a dry spot on the embankment while Mohan set forth towards
a thatched hut. A bent-backed farmer, sun-darkened and squint-eyed came
out, looked me over, withdrew — and barely five minutes later brought out
lunch, wrapped in a plantain leaf.
There was steaming tapioca, unpretentious, unadorned, honest and hot
from the tureen. I knew that my first bite of it would be soft, sweet and
chunky — but incomplete. Like rice, tapioca acquires character only when
in company. In this case the company was a chutney of such exceptional
character that it took me clean by surprise. It featured the thin and volcanic
ushi (or needle) chilli, ground to a coarse paste with fresh grated coconut,
curry leaves and some shallots, sprinkled with rock salt and touched by millground coconut oil.
My soul howled in delectable agony. My eyes streamed tears of
appreciation as tapioca tangoed with chillies down my gullet under the hot
sun by that field near the Brymore mountains. The treasure was mine.
The Syrian Christian Coconut
Once upon a time, long ago, in the enchanted part of Kerala known as the
Backwaters, there lived a simple villager named Mohan. Thin but wiry, with jet
black hair and intense eyes, Mohan had one great passion — cooking. It was widely
acknowledged (or at least undisputed in the stretch of the Backwaters where the
Onam Boat Race is held annually) that when it came to wizardry in the kitchen,
there was nothing even Mohan’s mother could have taught him.
Whenever there were visitors to his part of the waters, Mohan would brusquely
shoo away the womenfolk and take over their kitchen. The women, who knew they
would never be a match for Mohan, would outwardly mutter and groan and feign
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inconvenience as they left. Later, after he had conjured up a perfectly magical feast,
Mohan would summon them to serve the food. He himself would modestly retire
to a vantage behind some coconut tree, probably to study the expressions on his
guests’ faces as they ate.
The thing that I do not know about Mohan is whether he was capable of
cooking up recipes in his head as well as in the kitchen. Some cooks are like that,
you know. They can effortlessly imagine into existence a dish that perhaps no one
could possibly ever make.
And this is why today, nearly six years after I met Mohan, I still do not know
if the Syrian Christian Coconut is for real or something Mohan dreamed up to make
me smile as I left Allepey.
It was a film shoot. It was a hot and humid day, with bright, clear sunlight
and sweat glinting on foreheads and knuckles of the unit members. Lunch,
when it was finally served on plantain leaves in a shady backyard, was a
welcome break.
As the women bustled about, tittering courteously and serving, I began
to wonder who among them had created such amazing food. There was a
dish featuring mussels and yams in a coconut gravy; another featuring
jackfruit and tiger prawns; a sort of spicy sambar; Kerala’s typical olan,
with red pumpkin and colocasia swimming with black-eyed beans in
coconut milk; crisp fried tapioca wafers. And that was when I was
introduced to the cook: Mohan.
Mohan spoke no English, and I barely understand Malayalam, but when
people are united by affection for the craft of good cooking, words hardly pose
a barrier. In the boat on the way back to Cochin, I used an interpreter to probe
Mohan’s love of cooking.
His answers, it seemed to me, were somewhat distracted, as though he had
some more urgent mission. Suddenly he asked me: “Shall I tell you about the Syrian
Christian Coconut?” And that was how it unfolded. Once a year (said Mohan),
just after the paddy harvest, certain families of land-owning Syrian Christians go
through the ceremony of parboiling the rice in ancient stone vats in their backyards.
During the several hours that the grain boils, they take advantage of the extreme
heat within the vats to have a brief and passionate extra-marital affair with the
coconut. The result is an exotic, lyrical dessert that you will be lucky to find only
once a year, provided you are in the right Syrian Christian home at the right time.
The coconut should be well-chosen, neither so tender that the inner flesh is pulpy
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and loose, nor so mature that the white has hardened into a shell. Once such
coconuts have been selected, a slice is neatly removed for the top, and the sweet
water drained through the opening. Each coconut is now stuffed with a delicious
mixture featuring flattened rice (aval in Kerala), jaggery, a few cardamom pods,
some jeera and a spoon of clarified butter). The coconut’s lid is now replaced, and
the entire works bound up tightly with cloth — and tossed into the vat where the
rice is boiling.
Here, in the intense heat of the cauldron, the treasure within the coconut is
transformed by a process that is neither boiling nor baking nor entirely pressure
cooking nor anything else. For a few hours, the coconut dances about in the water,
like an impatient egg in an incubator. When the rice is finally parboiled, the coconut
too is all set to deliver.
If you’ve done it right, according to Mohan, then you should be able to
tear away the outer husk of the coconut, which would have turned loose and
fibrous. Sitting within it like a nearly perfect pearl, should be a hot, white
ball filled with a heavenly sweetness. Through the hole in the top, you’d
probably get wafts of cardamom, cumin and butter. You merely let it cool,
and then serve it.
Mohan disappeared into Kerala’s dusk, and I never met him again. Back in
Mumbai, I valiantly tried to recreate the Syrian Christian Coconut at a friend’s
house, using a pressure cooker instead of a stone vat, but all I got was a misshapen
pulp and a demolished coconut. Since then, I have collared many a Syrian Christian
and asked them to tell me yea or nay about the Syrian Christian Coconut. They
have all heard me out patiently; some have shaken their heads sadly; others have
smiled tolerantly.
They didn’t say it, but I could tell they thought I was nuts.
Olan
For me, olan is an instant evocation of Kerala, and I think it has to do both
with the coconut milk and the dribble of hot coconut oil that ends the cooking.
The olan below is a standout because of its adventurous use of cucumbers and
red lentils, instead of the usual squash/pumpkin/yam combinations with blackeyed beans.
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Ingredients:
50 gms red lentils
300 ml coconut milk, well stirred, from a can of thick fresh milk
450 gms cucumber, cut crossways in 2.5 cm/1 inch pieces
4 fresh hot green chillies, cut in half lengthways
1 tsp salt
8–10 fresh curry leaves
1 tbsp coconut oil or any other vegetable oil
Method:
1. Wash the lentils in several changes of water, until the water runs clear.
Then soak them in enough hot water to cover by 4 cm for 3-4 hours. Drain.
2. Put 100 ml water in a medium-sized pan. Add the lentils. Bring to a boil.
Turn the heat down, and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Add the cucumber,
chillies and salt. Cook over low heat for 3-5 minutes or until the cucumber
is tender.
3. Meanwhile, heat the coconut oil in a small pan over medium-high heat.
When hot, add the curry leaves, into the pan with the lentils and cucumber.
Add the remaining coconut milk to the cucumber and lentil mixture. Stir
and cook on higher heat for 3-4 minutes, until the sauce is medium-thick.
Dribble a teaspoon of hot coconut oil over the prepared dish just before
serving.
The author furtively
separates the stems
from the galangal in
a five-star hotel
Real galangal at
a Thai bazaar
Readymade spice pastes
at Pak Khlong market
The Thai language cannot easily
handle consonants at the end of
words. Guest, for example, would
simply be gues, pronounced perhaps
‘gas’. Be my gas. Even more
terrifying to the average Thai are
words ending in ‘x’, such as, say,
wax or flux. From the Thai
tongues, these would emerge
truncated as wak and fluk. You can
readily imagine the problems that
the word sex created.
The heart of Bangkok’s
thriving sex industry,
Patpong
Putting the vegetables
into the suitcases
B A N G K O K
A Planeload of Galangal
“I suppose you fancy yourself a connoisseur of Thai cuisine by now,”
remarked the Fish blandly. “After your last trip to Bangkok, I mean.”
“Well,” I demurred modestly. “I suppose you might say that. After all,
I have beheld truckloads of galangal with these very eyes. I have even coined
the term ‘Old Man Ginger’ for it.” I permitted myself a modest chuckle
here.
“I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that there may be more to Thai
cuisine than galangal,” said the Fish.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “Oh, I daresay there’s lemon grass,
Kaffir lime leaves and all that stuff. But galangal is where Thailand marches
ahead.”
“You didn’t discover in the course of your travels that it’s actually called
galingale in certain quarters, not galangal?” remarked the Fish, blandly.
“Well, the truth, if you want to know -” I began, but he was already
ploughing ahead to my doom.
“And you claim you brought, how much, 200 kilograms of galangal back
from Thailand? This is what I’m supposed to believe?”
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I kept quiet. No point telling him that we brought back 350, not 200,
kilograms; or that they included an array of Thai vegetables. Or that Thai
ginger is called neither galangal nor galingale. In fact, that’s where our
problems began.
The Search for Green Curry
In which we discover how difficult it can be to
discover authentic Thai ingredients if you don’t
live in Thailand
It started innocuously enough, in Mumbai, when a friend gifted me a small
plastic tub containing something called, simply, Green Curry Paste. My
heart did a quick little flutter: about the only Thai dish I could ask for by
name then was Green Curry Chicken. I had met it for the first time in, of
all places, Chicago, and fallen deeply in love with its lemony, spicy, piquant,
coconutty gravy.
I read the instructions on the tub carefully. Simplicity itself. Take 200
grams of chicken or beef or prawns. In a wok, using no oil, stir fry fifty grams
of Green Curry Paste, until its inherent oil begins to separate from it. Add
a litre of coconut milk, throw in the meat, and allow it to simmer until the
meat is done. Presto.
Shilpa and I tried it at home that evening, and Chicago paled into a
mediocre memory rightaway. This was not some careless American variant
made from tetrapak ingredients; this was the real stuff. Jubilant, we invited
a gang of friends over that weekend and served them a Thai dinner.
“I don’t imagine you had the integrity to tell them that the curry paste
came ready-made out of a plastic tub,” said the Fish.
“No one asked,” I shot back.
“Typical of you,” he said witheringly. “Want the fruits without the
roots.”
He was wrong. I wanted the roots and the fruits. Within days, I had
grown obsessed with the idea of making my own Green Curry Paste. I
bought a quick and dirty book on Thai cuisine, and raced to the recipe for
A PLANELOAD OF GALANGAL
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green curry. My heart sank. It needed at least three ingredients that I knew
for a fact I would never easily find in India: galangal, Kaffir lime leaves,
and lemon grass stems.
Galangal, the noble ginger, is less pungent, more ceremonial, more
dignified. Kaffir lime leaves, which grow in thick, glossy, dark green pairs
along thorny stalks, are dramatically aromatic. As for lemon grass, the leaves,
used for flavouring tea, are available without ado from roadside vendors in
Mumbai. But Green Curry Paste requires the stalks, close to the roots, and
those could not be bought. Not in India anyway.
Meanwhile, Thai cuisine was undergoing a sudden surge of popularity
in Mumbai. A film star sent his Nepali servant to Bangkok for a three-month
course in Thai cooking, and launched a hole-in-the-wall Thai home-delivery
restaurant called Songkran at Juhu. An instant success. I checked it out:
on a shelf within, there were ready-made curry pastes, tetrapak coconut
milk, dried lemon grass, various sauces, and so on; just outside the door,
in a large concrete pot, an experimental galangal plant struggled valiantly
to take root.
President Hotel, which had opened a lacklustre Thai restaurant many
years ahead of the wave, now relaunched it, and it became a runaway hit.
I met their chef, claiming to be on a journalistic quest to learn where they
obtained authentic Thai ingredients, but secretly hoping he would offer me
a few samples so that Shilpa and I could make some Green Curry Paste later
at home. He surprised me with, “We grow all the ingredients ourselves, right
here.”
I cautiously looked around the hotel’s plush lobby. “Here?” I muttered.
“In Pune,” he continued, lowering his voice. “An agricultural institute.
We have an arrangement with them. It is all a secret.”
I held my breath. “I have personally been involved,” he confided darkly,
“in detailed experiments to replicate Thai galangal in India. The soil is not
the same, you know. I spent many months in Thailand, studying the soil
conditions. There is a lot of salt there.” I listened awe-struck as the images
built up in my head, of a tall, dignified chef dedicated to perfecting Thai
food in India, knee-deep in Thai mulch, sniffing fish, fingering mud, smuggling
back gunny bags full of precious salty, shrimpy, slushy Thai soil, and then
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toiling by candle light on some godforsaken patch in a secret agricultural
institute to coax galangal and Kaffir lime out of the earth.
“Was it a success?” I asked.
“Total,” he said softly. “A grand success. We are the only restaurant in
India that makes its own curry pastes and spice mixtures using authentic
Thai ingredients grown on authentic Indian soil.”
This was my moment. I emitted a Level 3 snicker, sharp enough to
register skepticism but not emphatic enough to give offence. “I’m afraid,
as a journalist, that I couldn’t really take your word for it. I’d need a sample
to judge for myself, you know.”
The chef gave me a quick look, as though he’d just caught a whiff of
Bombay Duck. “We don’t normally give out ingredients,” he said. “Our
competitors could plant them.”
“I’m not a competitor,” I pointed out. “Besides, I don’t have Thai soil
at home.”
He regarded me for a while, and then sent for a small assortment of
galangal, Kaffir lime leaves and lemon grass, cling-wrapped on a styrofoam
tray.
That evening, we made Green Curry using ‘authentic’ ingredients. But
alas, like every other Green Curry Paste we have tried at home, it did not
come out quite right. Each recipe for Green Curry Paste is subtly different.
One book called Step-by-step Thai Cooking suggested including bay leaves
and cloves, which so dominated the dish that it emerged more Punjabi than
Oriental. Another required an additional ginger variant called krachai; I
returned to my research and discovered that krachai is a mild root, beigecoloured and shaped like a small, slender carrot. A third recipe needed
coriander roots, but did not indicate the quantity; the result was a delicious
paste where the coriander drowned out everything else.
Then our third wedding anniversary came around, and we went to Goa
for a week, where we stayed at the Taj Holiday Village. Their Thai restaurant,
The Banyan Tree, had been highly recommended, so we had our anniversary
dinner there, after which I asked for the chef to compliment him. A soft,
charmingly diffident, cottonball of a man, fully Thai down to his toes,
appeared. His name was Tannin, and he was learning Ingris. A painfu, sro
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procé. Still, drawn by our mutually compatible affinities, we were soon
sitting in my room, discussing Green Curry Paste and its secrets.
“Chimpay,” he said, at one point. I let it pass. A little later the same word
passed by again, and then yet again, I decided to risk offence and ask for
a clarification.
“Chimpay?” he said, puzzled that anyone could possibly not know what
it was. He looked around at the room’s walls, as though he had scribbled
the full definition there earlier in Thai script. “You know chimpay? Chimpay?”
“I think he means shrimp paste,” said Shilpa gently. We proceeded. Soon
he was haltingly revealing his mother’s home recipe for Green Curry Paste,
while I took down every word, not daring to breathe. When it was over,
I asked, “No salt?”
“Thailand no saw,” he said gravely. I waited. “Feeshaw,” he added. In
Thailand, he seemed to be saying, no salt is used. But what was feeshaw?
“Feeshaw?” I ventured delicately.
“Use feeshaw only,” he said, losing interest in this inquisition. We
wouldn’t learn until weeks later that he had been referring to fish sauce,
the strong-smelling yet indispensable liquid brewed from anchovies and sea
salt that Thais substitute for salt in all their dishes.
Chef Tannin had risen and seemed to be inviting us to accompany him
somewhere. And that was how we found ourselves standing in a garden of
Thai herbs. On a thitherto wild patch on the Taj grounds, the Thai chef
had planted, in separate beds, galangal, basil, Kaffir lime, and lemon grass.
The galangal shrubs stood lush at about chest height. The basil was stronger
and more aromatic than any local shrubs I have seen. And an entire row
of Kaffir lime. I decided to show no self-restraint.
“May I have some cuttings?”
A month later, on my window sill in Mumbai, I had two mediocre
outgrowths of galangal, one burgeoning lemon grass shrub, one krachai, and
a bush of basil. The only absentee was Kaffir lime, which does not, alas,
grow from cuttings. As soon as my little nursery matured, perhaps in a year,
we would finally be ready to make genuine Green Curry Paste, using nearly
genuine Thai ingredients. I would multiply the patch, start a crop. Perhaps
we could package the harvest and become a one-stop shop for Thai herbs.
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Perhaps they would call me the Father of Thai Cuisine in India. Perhaps
they would rename Green Curry Paste after me.
“Get on with the story,” said the Fish, stifling a yawn. “Tell them how
you went to Thailand and discovered that no one there makes Green Curry
Paste.”
The fish has a way of simplifying chaos with a few passes of his hand.
One throwaway sentence, and he has created a short story in your head
— CYG boards a plane, reaches Bangkok a few hours later. There, he
vainly asks everyone he meets about Green Curry Paste, but everywhere
gets the same answer: Sorry, no have, no make. Returns heartbroken, a
shattered man.
The truth, I’m afraid, is a great deal more complex. To start with, I had
neither plan nor dream of going to Bangkok. I was inveigled into travelling
there by my good friend ‘Engine’. A hearty, hyper-energetic man who
eternally treads the blurred line between fact and fiction, Engine runs a
successful seafood restaurant in Mumbai, and had decided it was time for
a Thai food festival. For which he needed hundreds of kilograms of ingredients
and pastes. By the time it dawned on me that I was meant to carry the bags,
it was too late to back out.
Secondly, I realised shortly after reaching Bangkok that the only language
spoken there was Thai, a musical language with sixty-one consonants, no
conjugations, five tones and pitches, and nearly infinite scope for imaginative
miscommunication. For days we didn’t know how to ask where the market
was, nor how to order lunch. We were surrounded by some of the finest
food on earth, but had no clue how to ask for it. We starved. It was pathetic.
Needless to say, no one had heard of Green Curry Paste. Or galangal.
Thirdly, once we found the ingredients we wanted, we would have
to spirit them past Thailand’s agriculture laws and baggage regulations
to Calcutta. There, we’d have to somehow whisk a veritable jungle of
Thai leaves and vegetables past Indian customs, and reload it onto a
plane to Mumbai. It was Engine’s suave conviction that he would
somehow achieve all this without facing either taxes, excess baggage,
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customs duty or capital punishment. He also carried an inner certainty
that his cargo would not be impounded, nor he himself clapped into
jail for violating quarantine laws.
You will readily understand, then, why I emitted a short, sharp yelp
when Engine proposed that I fly with him to Bangkok on a vegetable
shopping binge. He thought it would be a journey of gastronomic discovery.
I balked, muttering something about the high cost of foreign travel.
“Don’t be trivial. Cost is not the issue,” he said. “It’s opportunity.
Thailand’s economy is in shambles. The baht is dying. Korea is plummeting.
Indonesia is a wreck. In fact, the Asian tigers are turning into pussycats while
Japan watches helplessly. We’ll never get such cheap vegetables anywhere
else in the world. We can loot and plunder Thailand.”
At the airport, Engine introduced me to a close friend of his, a stunnedlooking Bengali gentleman. “We’ll call him Gofer,” Engine said to me
confidentially, with the air of an uncle apologising for an autistic nephew.
“He’ll help us carry the bags in Bangkok. He has never been outside
Calcutta, poor fellow. Just a simple chap with a heart of gold. I thought
I’d give him a treat.”
Turning to Gofer, he said, with a broad false smile and a wink, “You
will never forget Bangkok, my friend. All the girls will want to have sex with
you. In Bangkok, they love having sex.”
And with that, Engine, Gofer and I boarded the plane to Thailand.
The Secret Life of Hawkers
After losing himself in the wonderland of
Bangkok’s roadside food, the author briefly sights
Green Curry, but then blows it
Bangkok in 1998 was not the gentle, unimposing capital I remembered
from my last trip there a dozen years earlier. The sky then had been larger,
no building higher than fifteen or so storeys. But Bangkok has grown taller
since then, and the people have perhaps shrunk somewhat. From just about
any high hotel window today, you may behold the thrilling sawtooth skyline
and winking signals of a megalopolis on the move.
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Everywhere, there are signs of a berserk economy hurtling into globalism.
Monstrous billboards featuring the products of Sony, Samsung, Daewoo,
Mitsubishi and their ilk stand watch like alien sentinels over highways.
Construction cranes posture with their heads in the clouds, lowering girders
in slow motion onto some Olympian storey of yet another skyscraper.
Streaming expressways, flyovers, underpasses and skyways festoon the city
like ribbons. On Thanon Silom, the commercial heart of Bangkok, every
evening is Christmas, a festival of neon, bargain stalls, eating out, and
shopping plazas ablaze with lights and commerce.
“Somewhere here is a vegetable market where we will get all the galangal
we want,” I said to Engine, looking dreamily out upon the lapidary glitter
of downtown Bangkok from the nineteenth heaven of the Monarch Lee
Garden Hotel. The question, of course, was how we would find it.
Roadside food hawkers, I thought, would be a good starting point. I
simplistically assumed that one selling Green Curry Chicken would direct
me to the market where he obtained his ingredients. On my very first
morning, I quietly set out on an expedition to locate such a vendor. To the
left of the hotel stretched the lights of Silom Street, with its malls and
department stores; to the right was a tree-lined avenue, but the lanes, or
sois, leading away from it were abustle with all sorts of vendors and hawkers.
I walked slowly, trying to make sense of the jungle of strange colours, smells,
shapes and textures that make up Thai food.
As far as I could discern, there were at least six kinds of hawkers, whom
you could broadly divide into the mobile sort and the rooted sort. The
simplest among the mobile kind sported glass cases in which cut fruits like
papaya, pineapple, honeydew melon and red wedges of watermelon were
artistically decked out on beds of crushed ice. For about ten baht, you could
take away an assorted plateful of cold, succulent fresh fruits.
Another kind of vendor surrounded himself with a colourful array of
glass jars containing cold fruit juices and infusions, as well as a range of
preserved fruits, sweets and jellies. A large vat of crushed ice would always
be at hand. The dark brown liquid will probably be longan juice, made by
boiling longan fruit in water. The light green liquid in bottles is almost
certainly sugar cane juice. The translucent, pale liquid will be sweet coconut
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water; for only ten baht, it will be ladled into a plastic bag whose mouth
will be cleverly knotted to yield both an opening to stick the straw in and
a loop to hook your finger through as you walk.
The more exotic of these frozen snacks include ‘rubies’, made by rolling
diced water chestnuts in reddish flour and boiling them in water. Before they
are served, the rubies will be doused with syrup, coconut milk and crushed
ice. Another do-it-yourself dessert is concocted by choosing from a variety
of ingredients, such as lotus seeds, dates, boiled red beans, sago, palm seeds,
and water chestnuts, neatly displayed in glass bowls. Just point to the ones
you want and they will be served to you topped with syrup and crushed ice.
At several streetcorners, I found vendors working over charcoal fires,
next to glass cases in which chicken, beef and pork were arranged neatly.
I readily recognised the meatballs skewered on barbecue sticks as satay,
borrowed from Indonesian cuisine. There was also a simple and inexpensive
snack made by grilling hen’s eggs on the brazier, and served with a little
soy sauce. One of the more exotic barbecues featured dry squid, flattened
paper-thin in a squid press, and then grilled. The result was sticky, rubbery
and bland but when set afire with a sauce of mixed chillies and peanuts,
very popular indeed.
A type of vendor seemed to specialise in slow-steamed or simmering
dishes. These, typically, had larger stalls where you could see woks and
steamers bubbling with aromatic gravies. A popular one, apparently of
Chinese origin, featured pigs’ trotters cooking in an energetic red gravy.
This red-stewed pork is served with rice, some boiled greens, and also a
hard-boiled egg dipped in the gravy for several minutes.
The three-wheeled carts sporting little green parcels tied with straw
strings were selling Chinese glutinous rice wrapped in ti leaves. Each parcel
contained a portion of sticky rice along with ingredients such as dried
shrimps, peanuts, Chinese sausages, mushrooms, salted eggs and pork.
In certain stalls, I saw small steamers with conical covers. Within were
doughy tapioca balls wrapped around minced pork and peanuts. Once
steamed, they are served along with coriander and lettuce leaves.
An entirely distinct category of vendor deals in quick fried and deep fried
items, such as mussels in batter, Thai fried noodles, spring rolls, fried
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wontons and fried fish cakes. The most riveting of these offerings was
outside the weekend market of Chatuchak, where they say you can get
anything on earth for half the price if you bargain well enough. A chap was
deep frying what I mistakenly assumed was a wok full of cockroaches. Much
later, I learnt that quick-fried locusts became a popular snack after Thailand
suffered a devastating invasion of these pests some decades ago.
I finally found what I was looking for in a soi five minutes away from
our hotel. A creased old Thai sat expressionless by a stall full of steaming
hot food in pots. I surveyed the lot, recognised nothing at first pass — and
then spotted, with a quickening of the pulse, the tell-tale lime green of the
Green Curry. Some basil and Kaffir lime leaves floated on the surface, and
I could see generous chunks of chicken as well.
“Is that Thailand’s famous Green Curry Chicken?” I asked.
The old man stared at me unblinkingly.
“Sorry,” I laughed. “Quite forgot that you fellows don’t speak English.”
I pointed close to the surface of the dish and repeated, slowly and explicitly,
“Green Curry Chicken?”
No response.
“Gleen Cully Chicken?” I tried again, the smile by now beginning to
congeal on my face.
Then inspiration struck. I raised my head to the skies and, fanning a palm
behind my head like a coxcomb, called out, “Cockeracoco-o-o-o-!” in
imitation of a cock crowing at dawn.
The old man’s face suddenly cracked open and a giggle escaped; his eyes
danced momentarily. From deep in the shadows behind him, two girls who
had been following our exchange laughed sharply before suppressing
themselves. Clearly I had been very memorable. Abandoning my attempts
at diplomacy, I continued in deadly earnest: “Okay, you gimme that Gleen
Cully.”
One of the giggling nymphs backstage sang out what sounded like,
“Mymee, mymee.” If only I’d known that mymee meant “No have.”
“Gim-mee,” I enunciated, one last time before giving up.
I pondered my predicament for a moment, and then made a wiping
motion in the air, as though I was cleaning a blackboard, to indicate that
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I was starting afresh. The two girls, apparently mother and daughter, had
emerged into sunlight and were watching with open fascination by now.
Behind me, two or three passers-by had paused, perhaps to restrain me in
case I showed any signs of becoming violent. The Thais are a very peacable
people.
“I am looking for galangal,” I said slowly. “Gal. An. Gal.”
He nodded, as though understanding at long last, and then flashed both
open palms twice before me. “Yeesip baht,” he said. This was easy, even
for me. He was willing to sell me galangal at twenty baht. Suddenly exhilarated,
I leapt ahead. “Also makrut,” I said. “Mak. Root.”
Again he flashed a twenty. Beaming broadly, I looked around, perhaps
to see if Engine might have somehow turned up to witness my triumph.
Galangal and makrut for twenty bahts each.
Unstoppable now, I shouted, “Lemon grass!” Again, twenty baht.
“Basil!!” Twenty baht.
“Gimmee!!” I cried.
The old man made an imperceptible signal towards the rear. The two
girls hurried forward with plate and fork, and while one ladled steaming
rice onto it, the other smothered it with Chicken Green Curry. The dish
was courteously placed before me.
“Twenee baht onee,” said the old man. “You sit. Eat here. Be my gas.”
Gofer Sees a Chekcho
An evening of good eating is followed by
something the Thais call chek
By the end of our first day in Bangkok, we were no nearer to galangal than
we had been at Mumbai. We returned to the hotel tired and dispirited only
to discover that Gofer, who had spent his day watching adult video on the
hotel’s pay channel, was equally despondent. He was sitting before a blank
T.V. screen, pointlessly clicking the remote at it and shaking his head. “It’s
a hoax,” he kept saying. “I was fooled.”
After several drinks, he was no less pliable. “Are you homesick?” Engine
asked him solicitously. “Do you feel like eating some hilsa fish?”
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Gofer smiled mirthlessly, as though Engine had no idea what he was
talking about. “You told me everyone would want to do it,” he slurred.
“You lied.”
After his seventh whisky, a soft, languorous look settled over his face.
He stood up, stretched luxuriously, and said dreamily, “Now we will go
for dinner. Then chekcho. I want to see sekwaka.”
I knew exactly what he was talking about. Sex.
I have perhaps not mentioned that the Thai language cannot handle
consonants at the end of words. Guest, for example, would simple be gues,
pronounced perhaps gas. Even more terrifying to the average Thai are
words ending in ‘x’, such as, say, wax or flux. From the Thai tongue, these
would emerge truncated as wak and fluk. You can readily imagine the
problems that must have been created by the word sex, which emerged as
a staple Thai offering during the Vietnam war. Indeed, for most tourists,
Bangkok is nothing without its Patpong, the famous street where sek is
attractively showcased and sold.
Patpong 1 and 2, the two lanes named after the Chinese millionaire
Khun Patpongpanit who once owned them, were products of the American
soldier’s need for R&R, or Rest and Recreation, away from the gruelling
ordeals of the Vietnam war. Bangkok was just a hop, step and jump away,
and many soldiers struck up arrangements with local farmers. For a
reasonable dollar fee, the family would make an attractive daughter available
as concubine. The Yankee, in turn, would set her up in a house, and pay
a small dollar sum towards the family’s needs. The only condition was that
she would be at his disposal whenever R&R struck.
When the war ended, the soldiers went home to their America, leaving
behind an entire generation of young Thai women as social outcasts in their
own communities. The families that had sold their daughters fell into deep
disgrace, and the girls themselves became virtually untouchable. Patpong,
it is said, sensed opportunity, and rounded up a corral of such rejected
women, and put them to work. With their gamin schoolgirl looks, these
demure and hospitable girls became the foundation of a thriving sex
industry on these two lanes.
Deafening go-go bars sprang up, with nymphets dancing under blue
spotlights on mini-podiums. Narrow staircases between eateries lead up to
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sex shows where you may behold riveting genital gymnastics. On nearby
Soi Silom 6, a more discreet homosexual culture is available for the
interested, and Soi Taniya features hostess bars catering mainly to Japanese
clients. Outwardly, Patpong’s sleaze is well masked by a forest of roadside
stalls selling garments, fake curios and souvenirs. Through the seventies,
Patpong earned itself the reputation of being the world’s most notorious
red light district.
When the doom-laden, HIV positive eighties arrived, they hardly
affected business in Patpong, except that the women there were
honourably renamed ‘sex workers’ (“Sekwakaa!!”). The sex shows
remained checkchos.
Gofer had obviously sneaked a walk down Silom and stumbled upon
Patpong. Now he wanted blood. “We will see sekwaka,” he hissed, grinning
fiercely. “And then chekcho. After dinner.”
The dinner was our first taste of something originally Thai that was not
based on the elusive Green Curry. Indeed, it was our first experience of
genuine Bangkok seafood, and we couldn’t have picked better. Somboon
Restaurant is not listed in the tourist guides, which perhaps explains why
it is so popular with locals. In ferociously bubbling glass tubs outside swim
mackerel, lobsters, cuttlefish, squid, stonefish and others. On a large tin
table alongside, crabs trussed up with string twitch sluggishly when a shadow
passes too close. Within, the functional decor signals that food is serious
business here. Understanding that the middle-class gentry who frequent
Somboon might not wish to blow hard-earned money on alcohol, the
restaurant permits you to bring your own booze along; they supply the
glasses, sodas and ice.
It was at Somboon that I had my first encounter with the classic Tom
Yam, nearly Thailand’s national soup, so delectable that it has been
appropriated by any community that sampled it. Its extraordinary flavour
comes not only from its fish stock, richly textured with herbs, but also the
Kaffir lime leaves, galangal and lemon grass stalks that it is simmered with.
The meat within would be your choice of prawns or chicken, which would
make it a Tom Yam Goong or a Tom Yam Gai. It is perfectly acceptable
in Thailand to eat it with rice as though it were an entrée. Following local
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tradition, I ordered a bowl of rice with my soup, and won a small smile of
appreciation from the steward.
The second dish that enchanted us was Shredded Chicken with Basil,
an exquisitely pungent composition in which crisp, minced chicken was
orchestrated with sweet, fiery hot, sharp and sour and then overlaid with
an aromatic blanket of basil. We ate in silence. Then, after some burps and
the bill, everyone was ready for sek.
We boarded a taxi, and because it was already past ten, the taxi-driver
initiated the discussion by asking, “Patpong?”
Engine, who had already misunderstood some bad Thai, confidently
said, “Mymee, mymee.”
“Chekcho?” asked the driver.
“Chekcho,” said Gofer happily, and off we went, through the avenues
of the night, through one-way bylanes, past deserted parking lots, and late
night, open-air seafood cafeterias, until finally we stood before a dark
building patrolled by eager bruisers jabbering to foreigners about chekchos.
If you asked, you’d be shown a small card listing the dozen or so events
of the world-famous show:
Pussy play ping pong
Pussy eat banana
Pussy smoke cigarette
Pussy sing song
Pussy drink Coke
… and so on.
“What’s Pussy?” asked Gofer, all sorts of unnamed apprehensions
clouding his face. Engine shot him a sharp look, enough to cause a brief
recession in Gofer.
Twelve years after I last saw it, Bangkok’s famous show of sexual
gymnastics is still performed without a single change or addition. You
seat yourself in a large, darkened hall, facing a small well-lit stage about
eight feet square. The only other lights emanate from the bar. Sleazy
music thumps out while a succession of glassy Thai girls listlessly dance
and strip. Between two of these acts, the stage is taken by a remarkably
well-maintained middle-aged gymnast whose speciality is the minute,
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ligament-by-ligament control she wields over her vaginal, perineal and
gluteal muscles.
Her awesome freak show is performed briskly and professionally; she
has been through these moves every night since she was a lass. If the smile
does not seem forced, it may be because, in her waning years, she has
actually begun to feel a sense of pride in her performance. While a boozy
crowd gawps at her innermost truths, she studies their faces and learns about
the things that matter in today’s world.
She will gyrate, as required by her contract, for a few nominal minutes,
and then she will abandon her few garments. She will touch herself a few
times like an old lover who feels no affection any more, and then she will
extract a banana from her duffel bag. Lying on her back, she will insert this
fruit, duly peeled, in its entirety into herself. She will then arch her back,
aiming her secret weapon forward like a cannon, and expel the banana at
high velocity into the air. The missile will fly some ten or fifteen feet, straight
splat upon some delighted customer.
“Ooo re father,” said Gofer, calling out to his ancestors in rural English.
For her next trick, she drops down, belly to heaven, like an inverted crab
on palms and soles, inserts a lit cigarette where the banana had been just
a moment earlier, and proceeds to energetically puff on it. The smoke
billows out from all sides, as the lit end glows angrily at each inhalation.
She does a full clockwise crawl in this position so that everyone can see how
much she enjoys a good smoke. For the pièce de résistance, she removes the
cigarette — using her fingers — and blows a perfect smoke ring.
“Bolish na,” whispered Gofer, awe-struck. Say no more.
The climax of her show is the cola act. She first passes around a bottle
of Coca Cola to establish that it is tightly sealed. She then reaches down
and, using herself as a bottle-opener, pops the cap. The drink fizzes and
foams. She now extracts a straw from her duffel bag, sticks one end into
the bottle, and the other end where cigarette and banana have been, and
slurps. The Coke drains away into her. Holding her drink perfectly, she
gyrates awhile.
To end her act, she sticks the straw back into herself, and proceeds to
put every little bit of Coke back into the bottle, without spilling a drop.
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Quickly patting herself dry, she acknowledges the applause with a bow, and
then scampers off into the wings clutching her undergarments.
Gofer seemed to have lost his tongue. There was a glazed look on
his face as he faltered to the taxi and collapsed onto the back seat. He
lay in this near comatose position for the rest of the ride back to the
hotel, his eyes vacant and staring away. At some point, his broodings
brought him to an inner decision. He sat up a little, and cleared his
throat to speak.
“From today, no more Coke,” he announced. “It’s Pepsi or nothing.”
It wasn’t till our fourth day in Bangkok that we began to understand why
the Thai, who loves nothing more than eating, has such a low opinion of
cooking. The one who opened the window for us was Vivek Pathak, known
to himself as Pat. A valued senior officer in ABN Amro Bank, Pat had been
living alone in Thailand for nearly four years. He had put himself through
a course in spoken Thai, and though he claimed that working till past nine
every evening left him no room for the social life, he had a detailed savvy
of local customs and etiquette. We arranged to have lunch at the British
Club, a short walk away from our hotel.
It was there that I noticed how unorthodox a host our Pat seemed to
be. No sooner did his lunch of hot, steaming soup arrive, than he started
to tuck in. My own order of Green Curry Chicken with rice, and a Papaya
and Mango salad, was nowhere in sight. Pat seemed oblivious to this, and
made no more than a few feeble attempts to attract the stewardess’
attention. She, in turn, would acknowledge him from the distance with a
formal little bow, as though he were somehow familiar, and the matter
would rest at that. When Pat was nearly through with his lunch, I ventured,
“Maybe you should be a little more emphatic with her. After all, you’re
paying for the meal, aren’t you?.”
“Oh no,” said Pat, mouth full. “That would only ensure that she brings
your food even later. Or perhaps not at all. The Thais look down upon any
display of impatience or temper. It is treated as a mark of a poorly brought
up person who has no control over himself.”
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“You mean you can do nothing about it if the food never arrives?” I
asked, seeing a hungry afternoon looming up.
“Oh no,” said Pat. “The Thais can’t resist a polite person. If you don’t
get service, try extreme politeness. Convey helplessness, personal tragedy,
deep distress, and make them feel that you depend on their hospitality.
Once a Thai’s sympathy is aroused, he or she will do anything.”
“I see,” I said. Pat had nearly finished eating. I looked once more
towards the club’s kitchen, but there was no service staff in sight. “I see.”
Pat suddenly caught on. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “You must be
thinking it very rude of me to have finished my lunch when yours is showing
no signs of coming.” Apparently, one of Pat’s favourite local habits was
tucking into food as soon as it reached the table.
“To the average Thai, food is an interruption, however much he may
enjoy it,” explained Pat. “Generally, he likes it hot; and he can’t wait to
finish it and get back to his office. I think I’ve absorbed some of this habit.”
This simple observation can put much of visible Bangkok life into
perspective. The status-conscious Thai is a workaholic; by the sweat of his
brow, he will earn enough money to finally buy a big Honda or Toyota
or Lancer or Audi, which will win him envious looks at traffic lights, and
mark him as a successful man. “The middle-class Thai defines himself by
his car,” said Pat, “not by his home or lifestyle. In fact, home is usually
a hovel. It is not a place where he will ever invite friends over or throw
parties.”
The working day begins early, and most Thais, men and women alike,
will be inside their air-conditioned steeds, cellular phone in hand, by 7.30
or 8. Breakfast, lunch, and all in-between snacks will be at some favoured
roadside stall. By the time they head homewards, bushwhacked and ready
for some Singha beer, nothing will be further from their minds than
cooking. Accordingly, dinner will be at some other roadside stall, either
taken home or else consumed seated at a tin table along the pavement, with
aromatic automobile exhaust for starters.
“But what about mothers with schoolgoing kids?” I asked. “Surely they
would be cooking?”
“Roadside,” said Pat, shaking his head. “All the answers are there.”
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“You mean a Thai will never have fond memories of the delicious
Green Curry Chicken his mother lovingly cooked for him when he was
a child?”
Apparently not. In a country where eating is bliss but cooking is a deadly
chore, the elaborate shopping and preparations that precede the making of
Green Curry Paste can cause systemic overload in the average Thai housewife.
She prefers instead to nip down to a local paste-vendor, and pick up
whichever mixture she needs that day. There are such vendors in every Thai
market, displaying bowls of Green Curry Paste, Yellow Curry Paste,
Mussaman Paste, Red Curry Paste, Tom Yam paste, and a plethora of other
readymades.
It dawned on me that the average Thai probably did not even know how
to make Green Curry Paste. I felt deeply let down.
“Where do you suppose we could find some fresh ingredients for Green
Curry Paste?” I asked Pat, determined to show more dedication to method
and authenticity than Thais did.
“You could do worse than make a trip to Pak Khlong,” replied Pat.
“They say you can get every vegetable under the sun there.”
This Little Pig Went to Market
After searching through most of Bangkok for a
root, we find what we’re looking for in Asia’s
largest vegetable market, Pak Khlong
The galangals at Pak Khlong market must have felt a slight stirring of
unease that morning, almost a premonition of the whirlwind that was about
to shake up the wholesale serenity of their lives. Engine stood snorting like
an impatient bull, in an alley leading into what is probably one of the largest
vegetable, meat and grocery markets in the world. He had no idea that we
would be searching in an area roughly the size of five football fields for a
few leaves and vegetables whose Thai names we did not know, directing
our questions at peaceable Thais who resorted to polite smiles as a matter
of policy if they found you bizarre in the slightest.
The entire market began smiling as we entered.
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Engine stormed ahead shouting at Buddhist vegetable vendors whose
lives till that moment had known only peace. I fell behind, swept off my
feet by Pak Khlong. Everything was fresh, having arrived from the Thai
countryside in the early hours of the morning; everything was heaped in
small mountains, and every vegetable was large, healthy and firm, without
blemish or bruise. The market was cool and, unexpectedly, not cacophonous.
Coolies busily trundled trolleys down the gangways between galleries,
calling ahead to clear the path, but there were no shrieking vendors or
haggling customers. And there was virtually no vegetable here that I had
seen before.
There was the bell-like Chinese cabbage, pak-choi, with dark-green
leaves and broad, juicy stalks with a mustardy flavour; yellow soccer balls
of vegetable spaghetti, so-called because the flesh separates into long,
spaghetti-like strands upon cooking; mango-coloured courgettes; straw
baskets of coffee brown, finely textured cloud ear mushrooms; the delightful
kiwi fruit, like sandpaper outside, succulent bright green inside, with a
sprinkling of grainy, crunchy seeds; orange longan fruit; the so-called pea
aubergine, really neither pea nor aubergine, which you will encounter time
and again in curries; fat, light-green pods of silky squash; lotus root; palm
hearts; carambola, the star-fruit; mangosteen, whose hard, nut-like outer
conceals a yielding, sweet pulp; long green stalks of Chinese chives, topped
with a kiss of little white flowers; bitter melon; mountains of snow peas,
which are more beans than peas, and so sweetly crunchy that they need
hardly any cooking.
By the time I bumped into Engine again, it seemed he had found what
he had been looking for. He was authoritatively intimidating two young
brothers whose stall stocked baskets of fat ginger. “Twenty kilos,” said
Engine. Spotting me, he flashed a triumphant smile. “Found it,” he said.
“This isn’t galangal,” I said quickly. The galangal I remembered was
paler, with pink markings and leg-like protuberances: a sort of Old Man
Ginger. “This stuff is ordinary ginger, just a lot healthier than what we get
in India.”
“Sure?” asked Engine, almost rhetorically. Turning to the vendors, who
had already weighed an entire basket, he said, “Not galangal?” The brothers
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smiled in unison, as though he had just knighted them. Engine picked up
a big ginger and shook it under their noses, nearly shouting, “I want
galangal. Where?”
This caused a small conference, some observations, probably, I thought,
about Engine’s and my collective lack of breeding. Then one of them turned
to us and pointed somewhat in the direction we had come from. “Kha,”
he said.
And that was how we finally heard the Thai word for galangal. Kha.
Retracing our steps, we saw a dark alley that led out to a cobbled lane
between two of the market’s buildings. It was here, at the back of Pak
Khlong market, that we discovered galangal heaven: a stretch devoted to
the very vegetables we had traversed a subcontinent and an ocean to find.
Everywhere there was galangal, heaped in baskets, like some pink
deep-sea fish, each with its three or four stilt-like legs sticking out.
Engine bought thirty kilograms rightaway, to make up for the previous
disappointment. He suggested I buy at least fifty, for one never knows;
I cautiously bought two.
Engine swivelled around to the stall selling leaves of Kaffir lime, known
there as makrut. In adjacent baskets, there was the unprepossessing, gnarled,
deep green lime itself which, if pressed, would grudgingly yield a few drops
of victoriously aromatic juice. The leaves, with their thorny stalks, perish
easily and are kept iced in bunches. “Twenty kilograms,” said Engine,
pointing to the limes. “Thirty,” indicating the leaves.
“Do you have any idea how many leaves you’ll get in thirty kilograms?”
I exclaimed, appalled. “You’re buying a forest of makrut, man!”
But Engine was beyond recall. I watched helplessly as he bought up sacks
of krachai ginger, basketloads of fat-stemmed lemon grass, enough fiery red
and green bird’s-eye chillies to reduce an army to tears. He had enough
already to be swimming in Green Curry Paste for the rest of the millenium.
His breath was coming in spurts, and a certain feral look entered his eyes
as his purchases multiplied. There is an exquisite pleasure in shopping for
rare vegetables, and Engine was in the throes of it.
His eyes fell on a stall of cloud-ear mushrooms. “What are those flakes?”
he commanded. “Give me twenty-five kilos!” He briefly contemplated
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Chinese chives, then dismissed them as being too close to grass.
Muttering vaguely under his breath in his native Bengali, he now began
to rampage through Pak Khlong. Vendors fell away as he approached
snorting and exhaling. He espied dried shrimps and picked up some fifteen
kilos each in three different sizes. A grocery was selling Tom Yam soup
cubes; about 300 of them disappeared into Engine’s trolley. Another shop
sold powdered kha and chillies. Engine picked up a load.
Finally, he stumbled upon a shop selling dried versions of every ingredient
he’d bought thus far, and reordered ten kilos of everything. “If the fresh
ones die by the time we hit Mumbai, we’ll run with the dry versions,” he
said craftily.
Just when I thought his shopping energy was finally sputtering out, he
spotted a small shop selling ready-made curry pastes, and his wallet emerged
strong and gusty again. Here was everything he’d hoped to concoct in India
using original Thai ingredients: Green Curry Paste, Red Curry Paste, Yellow
Curry Paste, Mussaman Curry Paste, Tom Yam Paste, Roasted Chilly Paste;
Panang Curry Paste; and at least a dozen others, arranged in bowls within
a covered glass case.
Five kilos each of red, green and yellow curry paste were swiftly readied
for export to India. “If my chef can’t handle the dry ingredients, we’ll sack
him and use the readymade curry pastes,” he announced.
When we finally reached the hotel, smuggling in our little forest-worth
of shopping through a back door and up the staircase to our room, we had
bought up nearly 300 kilograms of Pak Khlong.
The Fish has a home-grown theory, based on hydrodynamics as propounded
by the Greek bather Archimedes, that we could not possibly have bought 300
kilograms of vegetables. “Simply a matter of volume,” he said airily. “It is as
obvious to me as anyone else that when you divide the weight of a consignment
by the unit weight of its individual items, you will get —”
“The number of those items in that consignment,” I completed.
“Right. Now proceed to step two and multiply the number of items thus
deduced by the volume of each of those items, and you will have —”
“The total volume of that consignment,” I completed once again. I knew
where this was heading.
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Wading into ballpark weights and volumes, the Fish eventually concluded
that the ingredients for our Green Curry Paste alone would have required
a physical space of 456 cubic feet. “Converting it into layman’s terms,” he
said patronisingly, “it is the equivalent of filling a room nineteen feet wide
and twelve feet across to a depth of two feet with vegetables. You and I
know that the typical hotel suite, excluding furniture, mini-bar, extra bed
and desk into account, would not be this size.”
He allowed this to sink in for a moment, then continued. “In other
words, there is simply no way you could have stored all this, this, greenery
in your hotel room. Let alone cart it away the hell to the airport, and have
any airline officer in his right mind agree to put it in the cargo hold.”
He went for the carotid. “Your story is interesting, but it is clear that
you have been caught out. You might as well complete the fiction now, and
tell your audience how you managed to carry your loot to Mumbai without
paying any excess baggage or customs duty.”
A Morning at the Airport
In which a cargo officer overlooks a few vegetables
and demonstrates what friends are really for
Engine, of course, never had a moment’s doubt that he would leave Thailand
smiling. “In every airline there is at least one reasonable officer,” he fantasised.
“He will understand that we are not smugglers but lovers of good honest
food. He will not find it in his heart to, you know, penalise us.”
The next day, we loaded twenty-two cheap HDPC bags stuffed with
vegetables into an endless Toyota van and left for Bangkok airport. Once
there, we stacked the goods mountain-high on two wagons and steered them
slowly into the airport’s passenger check-in area. There, ignoring my
protests, Engine parked them in the middle of the concourse, directly in
the path of oncoming passengers, janitors, airline crew, security officers and
ground staff.
“If you try to hide something so enormous in a corner, it will attract
attention,” he explained. “Someone hoping to advance his career will decide
it needs checking, because it might contain explosives. They will discover
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the leaves and vegetables, and this will provoke them even further. Before
you know it, we will be in a jail in Thailand. Even Mahajan will not be able
to get you out.”
Mahajan was a public relations officer a year away from retirement whom
Engine had unearthed through some grapevine contact just a day earlier.
He was convinced that this man was our key to a painless exit from Thailand.
He’d already phoned him and briefly mentioned excess baggage.
We found Mahajan finally at the other end of the sprawling airport. He
was a moody man with watery eyes and the air of one remanded to custody.
Engine chatted him up expertly, carefully avoiding any mention of
excess baggage or any other problems. I kept glancing anxiously at my
watch. If we did not return within twenty minutes, the check-in counter
would close. We would miss the flight, find ourselves aground in a strange
country with 300 kilograms of rotting vegetables.
“My friend, Thailand is not the end of the world,” Mahajan said, seemingly
addressing himself. “There is more to life than Bangkok.” He lapsed into
a troubled silence. I don’t know how Engine had charmed the officer into
this wistful mood, but it seemed that Mahajan had somewhat forgotten
about us.
“I agree,” said Engine attentively. “I have often said there is more to
life than Bangkok.” A pause. “Like what, for example, Mr Mahajan?”
“Like friends,” said Mahajan, his eyes growing unfocused. “Everything
else in life is an illusion. Even my wife may be an illusion. But friends are
real. A friend for life is a friend till death. A good friend is hard to find.
A friend in need is a friend indeed. A friend is a friend is a —”
“Do you by any chance know Mr. Singh?” interrupted Engine. The
Singh Gambit was one of his best ones, proven by trial in India where
everyone knows at least one Singh. I knew that Engine was in peak form
now, his every sense attuned to any cue he could cash in on.
“Which Singh?” asked Mahajan, momentarily diverted from his rhapsody
on friendship. “You mean the one in Accounts or the one in Secu -”
“Security Singh,” said Engine. “The one they used to call —”
“Lathamar Singh!” exclaimed Mahajan, delighted, sitting up in his
swivel seat. “You know Lathamar? Actually? He is my best friend from
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thirty years ago, when I used to be in Delhi. Wonderful fellow. Of course,
now he’s —”
“Retired,” Engine guessed correctly. He paused to ascertain that he was
still in the running. “Wonderful fellow. How many times I’ve visited him
in his house in —”
“A2D2 Noida!” cried Mahajan, awash in his own memories. Somehow
Engine had managed to echo “A2D2 Noida” closely enough so that it
sounded like he said it at the same time. The game was clear now, the prey
was up and running, all that remained was to move in for the kill.
Engine said sincerely, “Mr Mahajan, if there was ever a true friend, it
was Singh. It is Singh. What a man! What an officer!” Turning to me, he
said, “Remember, I told you about Singh once?” I nodded as though the
moment was still fresh in my mind. “I tell you, he was a gem of a person.
Principled. And a perfect gentleman too.” Engine turned away, as though
his eyes too were getting wet at the memory of Singh. His face averted,
he sniffled in a manly sort of way.
“A perfect gentleman,” repeated Mahajan, his eyes misting over. “That’s
a very good way to describe Singh.”
The link had been made. Engine knew Singh of A2D2 Noida, so
did Mahajan, both were grown men whose eyes had become moist at
the thought of this outstanding officer, both valued friendship above
all else.
There was a longish silence. Then, with perfect timing, Engine rose and
said, “Sir, it is a pleasure to meet someone like you in a scumbag place
like Bangkok. I hope we will meet again. Thank you.” He extended his
hand, Mahajan took it, there was a charged moment of nostalgia.
Then Mahajan snapped out of it. “All set for departure? No excess
luggage or any problems like that?”
Engine, who had been waiting for exactly this, said, “Oh, I nearly forgot
about that. A few kilos excess, I think we have. Nothing we can’t manage.”
“How much excess?” persisted Mahajan.
Engine pretended to consult a chit of paper. His eyes widened. Eyebrows
rose sharply. “Good God,” he muttered. “Sir, I’d be ashamed to tell you
our excess. This is very embarrassing. Let’s just forget about it.”
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“How much? I’m sure we can handle it,” said Mahajan, bent on
hastening to his doom.
Engine gave it just the right pause. “Three hundred,” he said shamelessly.
“Three hundred kilograms.”
I thought Mahajan handled it rather well. His face went blank for a
moment. He then looked out of the window, pursing his lips fiercely. His
face underwent several changes of expression, ending with a savage
humourless grin which he directed at me. His fingers drummed pointlessly
on the table for a moment, and then he crossed his arms, as though they
needed disciplining. Finally, he let out a deep sigh and looked at Engine,
with the look of one who has just met an old friend.
“Why don’t you,” he squawked, “tell me if you have any real problems?”
And that’s how we got 300 kilograms of vegetables into-plane from
Bangkok to Borivali.
Green Curry Paste
Much of my interest in Thailand is rooted in its Green Curry Paste, the search for
which has driven many of my days in Bangkok. When I finally began to learn about
its ingredients and recipes, I was dismayed to find a plethora of them. The Green
Curry, it seemed, was ubiquitous and variable. The one given here yields the taste
nearest to the original.
NOTE: Galangal may, at a pinch, be substituted with amadrak, the mango-like
ginger, but I warn you, it won’t be anywhere near the real thing. Also, be sure not
to substitute coriander leaves for the stronger and earthier smelling coriander roots.
And if you don’t have lime leaves, don’t even bother. Buy a tub of the ready-made
paste from an imported goods shop.
Ingredients:
2 long green chillies, chopped
10 small green chillies, chopped
1 tbsp lemon grass, chopped
3 shallots, chopped
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2 tsps chopped garlic (about 4 cloves)
1 inch piece of galangal, chopped
3 coriander roots, chopped
1 tsp ground coriander seed
˚ tsp chopped Kaffir lime skin OR finely chopped lime leaves
2 tsp shrimp paste
1 tsp salt
Method:
Using a pestle and mortar or a grinder, blend all the ingredients together until they
form a smooth paste. These amounts will yield about 3 tablespoons of paste, enough
for a meal to feed four.
Green Sweet Chicken Curry
(Gaeng Keow Wan Gai)
This is the dish I romanced in Chicago first, then in Mumbai’s restaurants, then
in Goa where Master Chef Tannin made it for me, and finally at a roadside stall
in Bangkok itself. Considering the merry dance it has led me, the dish is relatively
simple. Almost impossible to ruin.
Ingredients:
2 tbsps vegetable oil
1˚ tbsp Green Curry Paste, bought or homemade
1 fresh green chilly, finely chopped
4 Kaffir lime leaves sliced
3 cups (750 ml) coconut milk
1 tbsp fish sauce
2 tsps sugar
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500 gms chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces
30 gms drained canned bamboo shoots, sliced zucchini (courgette) or eggplant
(aubergine)
30 gms pea aubergine (or fresh or frozen peas)
1 tbsp fresh basil leaves, mint or young citrus leaves
Method:
1. Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Briefly stir-fry the Green Curry
Paste, chilli and Kaffir lime leaves. Add coconut milk, fish sauce and sugar.
2. When the coconut milk begins to bubble, add the chicken pieces and bamboo
shoots. Turn down the heat and simmer to reduce to sauce. If it becomes too thick,
add a little water or more coconut milk.
3. When the chicken is cooked and the sauce has reached the desired consistency,
add peas and whatever other vegetables you wish. Cook them briefly to retain their
firmness, and remove from heat. Stir in the basil leaves, leaving a few for garnishing
just before serving. Serve with rice.
Rice Soup With Chicken (Khao Tom Gai)
This dish is Thailand’s addition to my medicine chest. It’s a mild soup eaten by
Thais at breakfast or any time of day when they’re feeling a little off colour. They
say it’s a great antidote for hangovers, and a wonderful late-night supper.
Ingredients:
100 gms uncooked rice
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp chopped garlic
1 tbsp fine sliced ginger root
200 gm lean chicken, cut into bite sized pieces
1 tsp white pepper
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3 tbsps fish sauce
˚ a small onion, sliced
1 tbsp chopped fresh coriander leaves
1 tbsp chopped shallots
Garnish:
Crisp fried noodles
Fresh herb leaves
Sliced chillies or capsicum
Chopped spring onions
Method:
1. Rinse the rice several times. Place it in a saucepan with water and bring to the
boil. Simmer slowly, adding a little more water if necessary, so that the rice becomes
like porridge and there are about 6 cups of stock.
2. In another large saucepan, heat oil and stir-fry garlic and ginger. Add the chicken,
pepper and fish sauce. Stir-fry until the chicken is cooked. Add onion, rice and rice
stock, stirring well. Cook for another few minutes.
3. Just before serving, stir in chopped coriander and shallots. Add garnishes of your
choice. I prefer the touch of colour added by sliced red and green chillies.
Istanbul stands at
the divide between
East and West
“This here is the famous place
where my grandfather used to
stand when he spoke to
people,” said the grandson,
stamping on a dusty patch
near a lamp-post. Presently a
sad ass trotted past, provoking
my guide to say, “That is the
sixteenth nephew of Nasretin’s
personal donkey, which used to
be tied to this iron railing.” I
looked at the railing and the
guide. The ass had gone
towards the grass.
Another day begins in Çannakale.
Fresh hot fried fish with
lemon and parsley at
Istanbul’s Galata bridge
T
U
R
K
E
Y
Tosun Goes to War
“I’ve seen the film, my dear fellow,” said the Fish patronisingly. “I know
how it’s pronounced. It’s Topkapi. Like Top-Cawpee. When there’s an i
at the end of a Turkish word, always pronounce as in pig.”
“Top-Cawpuh, not Top-Cawpee,” I insisted gently. “Please observe that
there’s no dot over the i. You have to pronounce it like i in birth.”
The Fish sniggered into his sherry. “When you don’t dot your i’s, that’s
called a spelling mistake. You don’t invent a new alphabet to justify the
error. Next you’ll tell me that the Turks don’t cross their t’s.”
“Sometimes they don’t,” I said wittily. “That’s pronounced like l.”
“Very cute,” muttered the Fish. “So is the i in Istanbul dotted or not?
Is it Eestanbul or Uhstanbul?”
“It’s Eeshtanbul,” I said. “The letter s is pronounced like sh, as in sis
kebap. And g, by the way, is not pronounced at all.”
“Then why bother having it?” demanded the Fish. “You mean Galipolli
is actually Alipolli?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “If g is the first letter, then you can go ahead and
pronounce it. If there is a line over the g, then you can say it in the normal
way. Every rule has exceptions, you know.”
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“And what are the other exceptions?” asked the Fish. His face had that
sharp, predatory look I had learned to beware: he was arriving at an overall
theorem to explain my behaviour.
“Well, the letter c is pronounced as though it were j,” I said, “provided
it starts the word. If it’s in the middle of a word, then you should treat it
as a ch. Then u is oo, but ƒ is yew, while ö -”
“Enough,” said the Fish, raising a hand. He had arrived at his Grand
Unifying Theory. “I have caught on to your game. You are trying to make
it seem as if whatever mishaps befell you in Turkey were the result of a
complex language. In truth, you made a complete fool of yourself in Turkey
because you couldn’t wrap your tongue around their wonderful, lyrical
lingo. On the other hand, since English is not even their second language,
they couldn’t understand you.”
I waited.
“You were unable to order food, buy bus tickets, appreciate local culture,
or make friends,” he said. “You went all the way to the land of Helen of
Troy, the place where Noah’s Ark stands, where Mark Antony wooed
Cleopatra, a country choked with centuries of exciting history, and you
made a complete, excuse me, turkey out of yourself.” He chuckled at his
own wit. “Right? Or right?”
The average Turk meeting the average Gopinath on the street in Turkey
will generally recognise him as Indian, and I have not figured out how. A
small, always identical, conversation will ensue:
The Turk: You India?
CYG: Yes. You Turkey?
The Turk: India!! Indira Gandhi.
CYG: Yes, quite a lady. Our erstwhile Prime Minister.
The Turk: India!! Raj Kapoor!! Awara!!
CYG: Yes, the late Raj Kapoor. One of our great film makers, and that’s
one of his great movies. Surprised you know about it. We call him The Great
Showman.
TOSUN GOES TO WAR
195
The Turk: (breaking into song) Awara hoon, awara hoon…
CYG: Very nice, very nice. You sing very well. Which is a good place
to eat around here?
This would usually be when the conversation broke down completely
into well-meaning, foolish smiles. Goodwill would prevail but no further
transactions would be possible, unless you knew German or, failing that,
French. These are the nation’s second and third languages, and English
follows, but as a distant fourth.
Fortunately for me, the fifth language of Turkey is food. The first aromas
that wafted through to me in Istanbul, once I was past the automotive
vapours of the journey from airport to town, were of bread baking. Istanbul
has over 900 bakeries, producing nearly four million loaves of soft, heavenly
ekmek bread daily. Ekmek is classified by the kind of flour used — wheat,
rye, corn, barley, chickpea and so on. Further classifications are based on
how it is cooked (hot stone, concave iron plate, pan) or baked (charcoal
oven, gas oven, electric oven). Anything over one day old is not considered
worth touching.
From my room in a small hotel in a backstreet of Istanbul, if I looked
downwards, I would usually see everyday Turks and everyday Turkish cats,
as ubiquitous as dogs are in other cities, as much at ease as sultans of yore,
and as demanding as the chief concubine in the harem. They enjoyed
freedom of access wherever there was food, and seemed to know it. I never
got quite used to their sudden appearance right in the middle of some of
the finest meals I have ever eaten, east or west.
If I looked up, I had a superb view across the Bosphorus, and could
clearly see the small juts of land at either end. Across the water was East;
this side was West; Istanbul was where the two met. And this little historical
imposition was, as far as I could discern, the chief problem of the average
Turk. Turkey has never quite been able to decide if it is meant to be oriental
or occidental, traditional or modern, blond or brunette, orthodox or liberal.
Women here do not hide behind burqas but instead wear skirts and business
suits; many go to work, their hair dyed blonde; some even smoke. Men do
not dress in djellabas and headgear; they wear suits and seem to have
Western spit and polish. It is, on the face of it, a pleasant and civil society,
196
with friendly people, openness to most things and a desire not to get
embroiled in regional squabbles. It has the casual grace of any metropolis
that has lived with itself for thousands of years and been host to monarchs
and madmen. But along the way, somewhere, somehow, the Turks have
developed a fine sense of the quality of life that could shame most other
cities in the world.
I think I spent most of my time eating something or the other. Early
in the morning, I would stop at some utterly wayside cafeteria and have
a hefty breakfast of çorba mekimek, a thick and aromatic lentil soup with
floating chunks of lamb in it. If that seemed too filling, I would settle for
a breakfast tray with a generous helping of black olives, a hard boiled egg,
some feta cheese, soft, still-warm bread, and a demi-tasse of thick dreggy
Turkish coffee, which, inexplicably, the Turks seem to think is the best
coffee in the world.
In the evening, I’d walk down to the Galata bridge, where a ferry can
carry you across the water from west to east if you don’t feel like taking
the bridge. I didn’t feel like either ferry or bridge, so I stood at the edge
of the pier, and thus noticed the fishermen with charcoal braziers in boats
just six feet down on the water. For a foolishly small price, you could choose
from their fresh catch of mackerel, stonefish, bluefish, groupers and salmon.
Your selection would be grilled on the brazier, salt and pepper sprinkled
over it, a wedge of lime squeezed on top, then packed between two pillows
of heavenly bread and handed up to you.
Food has always meant more than mere consumption in Turkey; it has been
a political statement. Even as far back as the days of the Ottoman Empire, in
the heyday of Topkapi Palace, pronounced Top-Kaw-Puh, a good biryani
could be a powerful tool for communication. Especially if you were one of the
emperor’s élite bodyguards, the eunuchs known as the Janissaries. Like pit bulls
that no one could really quite control, not even the king, they generally loitered
about the palace grounds, waiting to be fed and, one presumes, looking for
good fights and waiting for their lunchtime cauldron of biryani to arrive. If they
disapproved of the king’s regime in any manner, they had the habit of overturning
the cauldron of biryani in anger, scattering the rice all over the lawns. When
this happened, they say, it was usually a signal to the king that his time was up.
TOSUN GOES TO WAR
197
I travelled in a loop over certain northwestern and central areas of
Turkey. I can tell you straightaway which ones did not prove worth my time,
and foremost among them was Troia, home of the legendary queen Helen,
whose beauty, it is said, could launch a thousand ships, and certainly
launched the passions of the Trojan prince Paris. At Troia today, you can
certainly see the meticulous excavations of German archaeologists which
unearthed city upon city, a total of seven different Troys. Great fun, I
suppose, if you’re stimulated by that sort of thing. I wasn’t, so I bought a
few T-shirts depicting Trojan Horses, a poster featuring ditto, and left.
Another town where they show you nothing of significance, but do it
with greater style is Hortu, the birthplace of the Sufi mystic Nasretin Hodja,
better known in India as the Khoja Mulla Nasruddin, whose hilarious
exploits have made many a reader first laugh, then retreat into a thoughtful
silence.
Having always been a great fan of Mulla Nasruddin’s deliberately foolish
fables, I got very excited when, on the highway between Eskisehir and
Ankara, the bus passed something called Nasretin Hodja Restaurant and
Service Station. Some enquiries revealed that we were not far from the
Turkish Quixote’s birthplace, the village of Hortu. There was no question
but that I had to make the pilgrimage to the home of God’s wise clown
on earth.
At Hortu, you may actually have the unique experience of being led all
over town by an experienced local lad, called Necmi, and being shown just
some basic atmospheric air. Nasretin was a man who understood that truth
and falsehood both lay in the perception of the listener and beholder, and
so felt free to make up reality as he went along. In brief, he was a formidable
fibber. It will not surprise you that the villagers at his birthplace seemed
to have this skill in abundant measure.
“As a matter of fact,” said Necmi, as though revealing a well-known fact,
“they call me Hodja’s grandson in the village.”
We walked along in silence for a while past ramshackle old huts and
dry gardens, until we reached a lamppost.
“This here is the famous place where my grandfather used to stand when
he spoke to people,” said the grandson, stamping on a dusty patch near a
198
lamppost. We walked on, and presently an ass sadly trotted past, provoking
my guide to say, “That is the sixteenth nephew of Nasretin’s personal
donkey, which used to be tied to this iron railing.”
I looked at the railing and the guide. The ass was chewing grass.
Presently, we passed a battered stone slab lying outside a deserted
building. “This is the elementary school,” said Necmi, “and that is the very
stone that used to be in the bathhouse run by Hodja’s father.”
We passed several more such stones-from-the-bathhouse, and I became
curious about the bathhouse itself.
“Further ahead,” said Necmi.
We moved on, passing a pretty but deserted cottage with potted plants
outside the windows. “This is Nasretin’s ancestral house. All his ancestors
are dead, but there may be a donkey tied at the back. We should now move
to the end of the village and see the memorial statue erected in Saint
Nasretin’s memory.”
He ushered me along with haste towards the end of town, and I found
myself on a sort of low plateau, with a few shrubs and a lot of wind. Like
a historical site waiting to be hit by history. A solitary jackass grazed a few
feet away. After a few minutes of silence, I thought it appropriate to ask
my guide, “Well? Where is the Nasretin memorial?”
My guide, said, without hesitation, “Well, they are yet to build it, and the
way things are in Turkey, it could happen next week or next century. Nasretin
doesn’t mind and his jackass’s nephew doesn’t mind either. Do you mind?”
I realised that I was the punchline of an enormous Sufi shaggy dog story,
with a hidden spiritual message about the perils of tourism. I left by bus
once again, destined for the small coastal town of Çannakale, about which
I had heard so much. If I have affection for the Turks, it is largely because
of a peaceful, bear-like fellow called Tosun, who made Çannakale come alive
for me.
Tosun the Turk had been watching the Indian from the shadow of his
doorway for a while now. Again the thought scuttled through his mind: He
probably speaks English.
TOSUN GOES TO WAR
199
Now this was a major thought. In Turkey, the second language is German,
and there is no third language, unless a smattering of French counts for
anything. If your interest is in something unheard of, such as English, then
you have to wait like a spider for the arrival of unsuspecting foreigners with
whom you may practise.
Tosun needed practice: he had picked up a few dozen common English
phrases, which he used promiscuously and recklessly. Surely he would learn
something new from this gangly fellow — like the phrase for example, which
still served him so heroically.
Tosun looked at the Indian tourist again: he must have strayed from some
package tour. Else why would a visitor to pretty Çannakale choose this
miserable mohalye called Fevçipasa, where only poor and noisy people lived,
drinking tea all day and discussing the meaningless hardship of life? The
man was now pointing his camera at the various mad people and goingson of Fevçipasa.
Just a moment earlier, he had grown terribly excited at the sight of the
doomed lads from the Fevçipasa football team. The big match was the next
day, and here they were singing and hollering as though they’d already won
it. The Indian had jumped up from his chair, nearly knocking his tea over,
and danced about behind the would-be sports stars, trying to get a good
photograph. But by the time he got his frame right, the boys had drained
away into one of the alleys radiating from the square, leaving behind only
the tinny sounds from the television.
Now that television: around seven in the evening, with the sunlight
turning pink, the brothers Hayati and Hayal would put the cafeteria tables
and chairs out, and switch on the old box. A Turkish film was showing
today, featuring a bare-breasted woman in an argument with a depressedlooking man. The Indian was watching with some absorption.
Go on, Tosun exhorted himself. Why this sudden shyness about meeting
new people? Is your name not Arslanoglu? Does it not mean Son of the
Lion?
It was thus that Tosun finally strode out towards me, hands outstretched,
and introduced himself, disastrously as usual.
“For example,” he said, “I am Tosun Arslanoglu.”
200
It was my first day in Çannakale, the Turkish town in the sun by the
Dardanelles straits. I was already a willing captive to this unexpectedly goodlooking and warmhearted country where nothing is as you dreamed it. I had
walked past the waterfront bars and the military museum, seduced by
disappearing alleycats and my own emerging curiosity, until I strayed into
the bylanes of Fevçipasa, and then its meydaniye, or main square.
You must not forget that we are standing on soil that has been romanced
by gods and temptresses, and then vandalised by wars. Everything is controlled
theatre. Even a normal morning by the Dardanelles waterfront can feel like
the beginning of a grand opera. The characters (the baker, the soldier, the
fisherman, the all-night drunk, the aged couple that runs the teashop,
etcetera) will stroll in one by one, each with prepared movements and cameo
introduction. Then the lights will swell as the new sun floats up from behind
a distant hill and the story, or at least a story, will start.
By the way, someone has carved a poem on that hill, in letters so large
that they are legible even from Çannakale’s military museum across the
water a mile away:
Traveller, halt! The soil you tread
Once witnessed the end of an era
Listen! In this quiet mound
There once beat the heart of a nation.
Turkey’s heartbeat has always been a battledrum, and its fiercest, most
decisive battles have been fought on these very waters. Turkey’s enemies
have known that to control Istanbul you must first conquer the Dardanelles,
but the Turks have defended this waterway with their lives every time.
The World War I naval engagement to which the hillside poem pays
tribute is depicted on a canvas in Çannakale’s war museum. In it, the blue
waters of the Dardanelles are spiked with torpedo strikes, and panic-stricken
warships are wobbling in mad disarray. It was 1915, when Winston Churchill,
first Lord of the Admiralty, sent a Franco-British fleet to try to capture these
straits. It failed.
The next month, British, Australian and Zelanian troops stormed to
Gelibolu, which they called Gallipoli. The French landed cross-water from
TOSUN GOES TO WAR
201
Gelibolu, near Çannakale, but their nine-month assault, enshrined in history
as the Gallipoli campaign, was another outstanding failure. The Allies
suffered 200,000 casualties, of whom more than 36,000 died. Half a million
or so Turks fought them, and of them one in every two was a casualty. Over
55,000 died.
The victory belonged almost exclusively to a fearless Lieutenant Colonel
called Kemal Mustafa. Though stricken with malaria, he fought in plain view
of the enemy and, like some mythical god, seemed unkillable. A piece of
shrapnel once tore through his breast pocket, destined for his lionheart, but
was deflected by his pocket watch. That watch found its place in Çannakale’s
military museum, while Kemal Mustafa, better known as Ataturk, was
promoted to general and then went on to find his place in history, as the
father of modern Turkey.
“For example, my father died fighting at Gelibolu,” said Tosun.
You must not feign surprise to discover that Çannakale is a city of
sleeping soldiers with memories only of the wars their fathers and uncles
died in. Tosun, with gunsmoke in his blood, could hardly resist joining
Turkey’s submarine division twenty years ago. He saw no wars, but travelled
ready to fight through times of peace. He finally reached Western shores,
the UK, the USA, and then Philadelphia somehow, on the way learning
to love but never fully understanding English. Now, poor like the rest of
Fevçipasa and with no wars left to wage, he drives passenger buses through
Turkey highways, hoping to meet unsuspecting English-speaking tourists.
Tosun, to me, is an important part of Turkey: poor, proud and warmhearted, living at the bottom of the barrel, with a paradoxical smile on his
face. He has two married sisters and four brothers, Yasar, Kudret, Hikmet
and Bulent. None of them owns a house. They earn a pathetic 50,000
Turkish lire a day — enough for about eight cups of tea. This was not the
battle God made them to fight, but it is the one that engages them, the
one through which they regard the world wryly, bidding it welcome and
farewell.
“Here now comes Dinçer Çelikkol,” announced Tosun.
202
He was Tosun’s friend, swarthy and bull-necked; within a few minutes,
his war was out in the open too. Dinìer had fought the Greeks, who hate
the Turks who hate the Greeks even more, in the 1974 war at Kübrüz. Now
he commands twenty-five peaceful men as captain of Çannakale shorebound
ship-station. Dinçer had not very much to say, so we all twirled our fifth
teacups about and thought of Turkey’s dead warriors.
Travel books warn gravely that Turks are born fighters, with fearful
tempers they cannot control. If two Turks should begin arguing, it is said,
passers-by will try to pacify them and draw them apart before one of them
gets really angry, because then the situation would become irretrievable. The
Turk’s pride would prevent him from withdrawing, and one of the two would
have to die. It is a man’s land, according to the smart travel guides printed
in London and New York. Women might appear more emancipated than in
other Islamic countries, but it is an illusion. Their place is really quite welldefined: it is at home, in the kitchen, in their warlords’ bed. So the books say.
Well, they must have missed out Fevçipasa’s anomalous men and women.
They definitely missed out Mehmet, the drunken old soldier there who earns
hardly any living now as a schoolteacher. Today, he is broke as usual, and
is trying to cadge some credit from Zeynel Yemanel, who is telling him to
drag his no good carcass back to his no good grave. Their voices are rising,
flamboyant with insults to heritage and pedigree, and I am thinking that
one of the two is going to die and it will probably be the drunk.
Mehmet, his face red with anger, alcohol and aggravation, lurched out
to the middle of the square, like an aging star in a black-and-white film,
nearly empty bottle in hand, and began to rail against that useless dog Zeynel
Yemanel who did not have the generosity to help an old soldier in his hour
of need. He raised his voice to the heavens to ask someone there about
justice, but then, realising that it was a good position to pour a few more
drops down his throat, lifted his bottle as well.
Meanwhile, the opera had reached its comic high point. Mehmet’s wife,
large, brisk, toothless and humourless, a cigarette dangling from her lips, had
materialised behind Mehmet, who was by now in the full flower of his
diatribe. For a long while she stood there, nodding her head ominously at his
foolishness, amusing the crowd beyond tolerance. Then she began beating
TOSUN GOES TO WAR
203
the hapless Turk about the face and ears. He dodged and ducked remorselessly,
not once breaking the flow of his harangue against Yemanel, until she finally
grabbed a tuft of his hair and dragged his unresisting body away.
His voice, swearing eternal revenge against Yemanel, was the last to leave
the square.
I left battleworn Çannakale the next morning, by bus. I’m afraid Tosun
cannot have learnt much English from me, but I learnt from him the true
meaning of the Turkish farewell Güle güle — Go smiling. So important is
it to Turks that their visitors and guests depart with happiness on their faces
that they often go to some trouble to ensure it.
Tosun was waiting for me at the bus-station. “For example, I hope you
will write,” he said, flashing a winning smile, his eyes crinkling at the
corners. It was impossible not to smile back. As the bus sped away towards
Anatolia, his figure retreated, diminishing, still waving, still smiling.
Finally, like all old soldiers, he too faded away.
Sultan’s Delight
(Hunkar Begendi)
You wouldn’t find Hunkar Begendi in your average Turkish restaurant because,
like all royal dishes, it requires attention and time. I stumbled upon the recipe in
India, after my Turkish holiday had fully aroused my interest in their cuisine. I’ve
served it at several dinners as the entrée, and each time I have noted how it stops
conversations. For me, Hunkar Begendi, with its loving treatment of good lamb
and its accompanying aubergine puree, is Turkey’s cuisine in a nutshell.
Ingredients:
800 gms boneless lamb shoulder
2 tbsps butter
2 onions, chopped
3 medium tomatoes, diced
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
204
2 cups hot meat stock or water
2 medium-sized eggplants
6 tbsps butter
3 tbsps all-purpose flour
˚ cup hot milk
˚ cup grated cheese (Roquefort, Romano or Gruyere)
Method:
1. Cut the lamb into 3/4-inch cubes and saute in 2 tablespoons butter for 3 or 4
minutes. Add the onions, cover, and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently,
until the meat releases its moisture, reabsorbs it, and browns in its own juice and
fat for about 20 minutes.
2. Stir in the tomatoes. Turn heat to low. Add some salt and pepper. Stir in 3/4
cup hot meat stock or water. Cover and simmer for 1 to 1˚ hours, until the meat
is tender. As it cooks, check the liquid occasionally. Small amounts of hot water,
1/3 cup at a time, may be added if needed. The meat should be moist and in ample
sauce, but the mixture should not be runny and watery.
3. Place the unpeeled eggplants directly over a high flame or over a charcoal fire.
Turn frequently to cook on all sides. They are done when the skin is charred and
black and the eggplants are thoroughly soft when pierced with a fork. Cool slightly.
Peel them, carefully removing all the burnt black skin. Wipe the eggplant clean with
wet hands. Place the interior pulp in a bowl.
4. Melt 4 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan and blend in the flour. Stir for 2 to
3 minutes over medium heat. Take small pieces of the eggplant by hand and squeeze
out all the water, and stir into the butter and flour mixture. Finish adding the
eggplant and beat with a fork over low heat until smooth. Gradually add the hot
milk, beating briskly with a wire whisk until smooth and bubbling. When the
mixture becomes a smooth paste, stir in the cheese. Correct the seasoning. Remove
from heat, Keep warm.
5. Transfer the meat mixture to a platter and serve the eggplant puree next
to it.
TOSUN GOES TO WAR
205
Pirzola
At a restaurant in the hill-town of Kutahya one evening, I rediscovered the lamb
chop, what the Turks call pirzola. It came as part of a meal that included a bottle
of excellent Turkish Doluca white wine, a succulent green salad of tomatoes, lettuce,
parsley, cucumber, mint and lemon, and lots of their bitable bread. The pirzola was
a paean to lamb chops, a sublimation of the essence of lambness with the essence
of Turkish cooking. My teeth sank into it, and the juices and the aromas that were
released cast a glow over the rest of that evening.
Ingredients
1 medium onion
1 tsp salt
2 tbsps olive oil
8 lamb chops
1 tbsp thyme leaves
A few sprigs of parsley
Method:
1. Grate the onion into a bowl and sprinkle some salt over it. Leave for about 10
minutes.
2. Squeeze the onions between your palms to extract the onion juice, and add it
to the olive oil.
3. Lay the lamb chops on wax paper, and rub the onion juice/olive oil mixture on
both sides. Sprinkle thyme leaves generously. Cover with another piece of wax paper
and leave for two hours.
4. Broil, preferably over charcoal, taking care to place the chops at least 3 inches
away from the coals, which should be red hot but not flaming. Broil 5 minutes on
either side, and then serve, garnished with sprigs of parsley.

Introducing the Fish

Transcription

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