– I try my best to dissuade her – Paul has completed a degree in marketing but isn’t sure what he wants to do. Irony of all ironies: the marketing department of a university doesn’t market a career in its own subject with any amount of success. I am glad of some British company, yet being with Paul and Sarah I feel like a tourist. Which I am. I’m struggling at this point to know quite how to feel or how to act. I always dislike British Indians who go to India and act like they’re white tourists, speaking English loudly and slowly. They seem to lack any empathy or indeed humility. I’m worried that I might come over like this. Yet, I realise that I am effectively a tourist; I’m from Glasgow.
My waiter comes and I have a thirst on for beer. Cold beer. But this is India. Nothing is straightforward. They can’t serve beer until ‘later on’. ‘Later on’ is a phrase I am to hear lots of this evening, but more of that ‘later on’. Paul sidles over, his empty rucksack on his back and kindly offers to hunt down and bring back beers. I give him a hundred rupees and bid him a swift and safe return. Meanwhile the waiter comes to take my order. There is only one thing I would be eating in this part of India, a dish rarely seen outside the non-Christian south. Pork vindaloo. Given the 120 million Muslims in India, as a sign of secular respect pork is very rarely served in any region where there is a discernible Muslim presence. But the south is so heavily Christianised that this restriction does not apply. The waiter couldn’t be less enthralled by my order.
‘Ready later on,’ he says.
‘When?’ I enquire.
‘Twenty-five minutes,’ he proffers. ‘Pork still boiling.’ He fails to make eye contact.
Very precise, I think and with a reasonably accurate explanation for the delay. This must mean he knows what he is talking about. After all, I am here with time to kill. Twenty-five minutes would be a useful bridge to the next hour I have to spend before my fl ight to Trivandrum.
‘Fine,’ I say.
He glowers at me, as if somehow trying to summon an eloquent English language diatribe. Glower over, he skulks off. He would be back ‘later on’.
As I sit and wait I ponder my vindaloo. Vindaloo relates directly to India’s Portuguese heritage. As I’ve mentioned, it is said the Portuguese brought the chilli to India, and it is this very chilli that forms the basis of the vindaloo. The ‘vin’ prefix refers to vinegar and I suppose the ‘-daloo’ might be a version of a translation pertaining to ‘of water’(I’m guessing that, though). What is so very interesting about the preparation of a Vindaloo is that unlike most other Indian curries, where the onions and spices are fried in tempered oil, the vindaloo grinds the chilli, vinegar and spices to form a paste or masala, which is then added to the fried or boiled meat. This paste reduces and cooks, cooks and reduces, and provides the most complex of astringent, chilli and spiced sauces. A true vindaloo is a million miles away from the unsubtle British version that is served in restaurants on a Friday night, only to be re-served to some pavement or toilet the following Saturday morning.
My Yorkshire hero Paul returns with a rucksack that now clinks with the music of beer. A big bottle of Kingfisher each, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper; not quite cold enough but hey, it is beer and it isn’t warm. The restaurant is not fully licensed so we are offered opaque coffee mugs to drink our beer out of: anything rather than betray the true nature of our beverage. My mug has images of American Football Stars on it, with the word ‘Stamina’ printed on the handle. Little do I realise the prophetic promise of my mug.
A further twenty-five minutes pass, over and above the initial negotiated twenty-five minutes. Still no pork vindaloo. The beer is warm now but thankfully almost finished. I look at the American Football mug. ‘Stamina’. I wish I had more. My surly moustachioed waiter shuffles back almost noiselessly to inform me that there is no pork vindaloo, because there is no pork. There has never been any pork. The restaurant is officially pork free. He has been lying to me, and so early in our relationship. He could have easily crossed the road to one of the many pork-abundant restaurants and passed the dish off as his own. But no. There is to be no spicy vinegar pig for me. I am too tired to fight and his English is nowhere near robust enough for my multi-clausal reasoning and contingent arguing.
Instead I order squid in coconut. And a watery vegetable curry. It comes, I swear, I conquer. This is my first Indian meal in India. It doesn’t augur well for the journey ahead; it isn’t the most delicious of meals, but even so it makes me realise the vast chasm of flavour and taste that exists between our food in Britain and the food of India. If a palate is so very accustomed to spice-tingling sensations, sensations that occur even in the most average of curried squid dishes, it is difficult to promote the comforting warmth of mashed potato and stewed lamb. Sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter will inevitably seem bland when compared to a dish that requires eighteen spices and five flavourings. Even though my first meal on my quest has been a very average Indian meal, would this average meal be more flavourful than even the finest British food that I could conjure? It’s not rocket surgery to work it out. Even if I managed to pull off the finest shepherd’s pie ever to be created outside the western world, with the creamiest, richest mash atop the most delicately cooked and adequately seasoned lamb, replete in its own earthy and enriched sauce, I could still very easily fail. Miserably. I banish such thoughts and haul myself back to the airport. I have a plane to catch, some food to cook and myself to find. It’s time to start my journey in earnest. I have landed but I have not yet arrived.
Food is a massive part of my life. When I’m not cooking it, I’m eating it; and when I’m not eating it, I’m thinking about it. I plan my life around meals. I will schedule meetings in certain parts of London to enable me to slip into a specific café or restaurant for a specific meal. I love food; and for its sins, food loves me. There is no one event, no one occurrence that I can look back on and use to explain the prominence of food in my life. When someone once asked me why I was so obsessed with food, I thought a moment, struggling to find a coherent answer. And then it dawned on me; it had only taken me thirty-eight years to realise that, as a child, the only aspect of being Indian which wider society seemed to celebrate was our food. To say Glasgow likes Indian food is inaccurate; it doesn’t like it, Glasgow loves it. And my experience of this love as a boy in Glasgow seemed to be true of life in every other British city. It’s bizarre when you think about the impact Indian food has had on British culture. The smallest town or village more often than not has a little Indian restaurant or take-away, often run by the only Indian family in the area. Even the racists who hated the fact that my parents’ generation had come to Britain still liked our food. It was the only aspect of being Indian that garnered any positivity.
Ironically, despite this plethora of restaurants around us, we never ate out much as kids. We were the offspring of immigrants. The single biggest expense in my parents’ house was school fees. Still, to this day, I have absolutely no idea how my parents ran a house, fed us, clothed us, took us on holiday and paid the mortgage. And paid the school fees for three boys. Randeep, more commonly known as Raj, is my elder brother. My younger brother, Sanjeev – Sanj, Sniff, Yich, Barbecue Fingers – has a myriad of nicknames and a heart of gold. And I was the tricky second child; the difficult one. The prima donna. They have a phrase for it in Hindi: ‘beech wala’. It translates as ‘the one stuck in the middle’. And I did feel very much stuck in the middle. I was not bestowed with the gifts and love that a first-born son enjoys in an Indian house; neither was I the cute, good-natured baby, the son that they really wanted to be a daughter. I was the misunderstood, James Dean-like presence in the progeny. I was also, admittedly, a right pain in the arse. I was intransigent and eloquent. There’s nothing worse than a snotty child with the linguistic dexterity to give oxygen to his irrationality.
None of my failings, innumerable though they were, changed the fact that my parents would marshal their very limited financial resources and were
