Away from the crowded streets.
Using all the resources available to me, I sought out the so-called good restaurants but, quite frankly, you will probably eat better in Southall or Birmingham, and that is not to mention how hard it is to put up with the inexorable poverty and squalor which gives birth to begging and harassment. So then you have to ask yourself, if you are finding this so offensive, why are you here in the first place. Well, the fact is the cooking in India can be one of the great experiences of life but it is best enjoyed at the home of Indians, no matter how rich or poor they might be. They treat their produce with such love and such care. They prepare their masalas with the same sort of love with which Van Gogh must have mixed his oils.
I spent some time at a magnificent palace where a family of four or six people were attended by over two hundred staff. The dichotomy lies in the fact that the poor can’t afford to eat in restaurants, so there are just absolutely fundamentally basic squalid soup kitchens, while the rich are so well off they can afford to have cooks at home, so no matter what you read in the otherwise absolutely essential Lonely Planet Guide to India, take their restaurant entries with a pinch of chillies.
If you do eat in the streets of any of the big three cities, Chennai, Calcutta and Mumbai, and you choose a place which is very, very busy, you will usually eat well for a few pennies, cents or dimes.
However, if you are in Chennai, make a point of eating at Hotel Saravana Bhavan. This is the ultimate in Indian fast food restaurants. They have a menu of over three hundred different dishes, mostly vegetarian. They serve up to 4,000 meals a day (by the way, it is not a hotel, the word ‘hotel’ in many parts of India means restaurant or canteen). You get a tray on which are eight, nine or ten little dishes, savoury, sweet, hot, sour. It is called a thali and the first person who replicates this brilliant concept (in many ways not dissimilar to Spanish tapas) in London will make a fortune and change the gastronomic mindset of a nation already obsessed with Indian food. Anybody prepared to put several million quid into my idea can buy not only my expertise, my knowledge and my passion but they will also have the exclusive rights to the name of this amazing chain of eateries and, with due apologies to Paul Scott, it will be known as ‘The Last Days of the Floyd’.
We ground out of Chennai through the appalling traffic to the village of Sriperumbudur where, from a distance, you can see water buffaloes bathing and high-rise ancient temples which, if you squint, remind you of Gotham City. We saw the ancient reservoirs, so-called tanks, where the lepers cleanse themselves and the locals do their washing, but it ain’t like a visit to Salisbury Cathedral!
It was quite funny on the day that we all went there to film what is actually a very beautiful and fascinating place. On the way my beloved director, Nick, somehow got it into his head that the Indians grow a lot of rice and we should acknowledge that fact in our telvision programme. You have to remember, however, that there is nothing real in television land. Some 30 or 40 hapless Indian women were planting rice in a paddy field but, quel horreur, on the shady side of the field. This is, of course, totally unacceptable; for television purposes they must be in the sunshine to avoid shadows, so that the colours are bright and vibrant. To make matters worse, it was impossible to get a shot of these people from the road because the camera angle would not be correct. So, at the behest of Nick, our long-suffering researcher, Raj, was instructed to tell the semailleurs — which is French for seed sowers–to move over to the other side of the field and replant what they had already planted for the benefit of our camera. In the meantime, Stan, my manager, on this day dressed in combat kit, drawing on a cigar and for all the world looking like Stormin’ Norman, hijacked and occupied the adjacent hospital. He stormed the operating theatre, where bewildered surgeons were bullied into allowing him–in mid-operation–to place the camera on the roof so that the world could see something that they have probably never seen before, since the dawn of television, a load of women planting rice.
Sriperumbudur Temple and Tank.
Above left to right One of the many temples at Kanchipuram. Bogged down at Muttukadu.
Interlude at Kanchipuram
Some 40 or 50 minutes out of Madras there is a splendid Taj hotel called Fisherman’s Cove at Covelong Beach, near Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu. The beaches are unspoilt, there are spectacular views, regular rooms in the hotel complex and utterly enchanting guest bungalows on the beach. Here, with Tess, I spent six magnificent days as the guest of Sarabjeet Singh, the general manager. During that time I learnt how to make some exquisite dishes, including the subzi poriyal (crunch spicy beetroot with coconut) and kathirikai kara kulambu (a spicy aubergine dish) on pages 153 and 156, from the hotel’s executive chef, Fabian. I seem to remember he had a couple of hits in the charts in the late fifties. (Joke! Rock-’n-rollers know what I mean.)
Kanchipuram is the Golden Town of 1,000 Temples, one of India’s seven most sacred cities. Nowadays only 126 temples survive, but five of these are considered outstanding. They are closed between noon and 3.00pm and are best visited in the afternoon. On the same stretch of coastline as Covelong Beach is the famous Shore Temple at Mamallapuram, probably the best-known sight in southern India.
A Bombay market.
So, on a high from the Fisherman’s Cove, our culinary circus rolled on to Bombay (or Mumbai as it is now known), birthplace of Rudyard Kipling in 1865, and a city famous for its red double-decker buses. Home of the wealthy and glamorous, Mumbai is the commercial hub of India. Here there is a huge contrast between the rich and the poor. The city claims more millionaires than Manhattan, and there is indeed an almost ostentatious display of wealth, and yet two million people in the city do not have access to a toilet, six million go without access to drinking water and over half the city’s population of 16 million people live in slums or on the street.
The huge natural harbour is the reason why commerce blossomed in Mumbai, helped by the opening of India’s first railway line which started in Mumbai. Elephanta Island in the middle of the harbour has magnificent rock-cut cave temples, one of the city’s main tourist attractions, and in February a festival of music and dance is held at these cave temples.
Mumbai is also the home of Bollywood, the Indian version of Hollywood, which produces more films than any other city in the world — 120 feature films per year. In Mumbai you can still savour the glamour attached to the notion of going to the movies at one of the glorious art deco cinemas.
The Gateway of India.
Above left to right Lunch box delivery.
The city also has over 50 laughter clubs. Members gather in parks all over the city each morning and laugh themselves silly, in the belief that happiness and health are connected
