Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Two hours later there’s a sharp knock at my door. Babba has sent some of his friends to escort me to the party. What a pleasant surprise, I think, until one of them tells me to hurry: the dining and music can’t start until I arrive. Music?…I didn’t hire musicians.

  The teahouse is packed; the entire neighborhood seems to be here. Babba is king tonight, and he breaks away from his court to greet me. To my relief he reports that the musicians and the special items he has added to the menu cost less than twenty dollars.

  “What’s a party without music, Searcher of the Duck?” he asks.

  All along I’ve assumed Babba to be celibate, a man dedicating the last part of his life to god. But as the night rolls on, his true self is revealed. Instead of walking, he starts sashaying; his hands rove and his skinny legs straddle anything warm and round. When I ask him about this, he stands on a chair to shout, “I love sex.”

  Luckily, only three people brought painted birds to the party. Without much argument, they agree to clean off the birds before joining the festivities. Although many Hindus are disdainful of liquor and drugs, this crowd, the citizens of the fowl market, swig from flasks and light pipes filled with various substances. Off in a corner, near the musicians, people dance, using their eyes and hands to interpret the lively ragas. The party is a success and continues, I’m sure, long after I’ve left. A little after midnight, as I make my exit, Babba stops the music to make a toast. His words follow me all the way to the hotel.

  “To the gods, to us, to the pink-headed duck!”

  Rory Nugent has sailed the Atlantic by himself numerous times and looked for dinosaurs in the Congo. In The New Yorker, George S. Trow said of him: “If the world ended, I’d want to be with my friend Rory because he would find a way for it not to end—up to a point, that is. He’d gravitate to the small part that wasn’t going to end, because of some obscure hitch: a colonial contract that was still in force, perhaps.” This story was excerpted from his book The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck: A Journey into the Himalayas and Down the Brahmaputra.

  Calcutta was born in 1690, nearly a century after that historic launching of the East India Company in London. Job Charnock landed in the village of Sutanati at the mouth of the Hooghly, and pitched his tents to found a city called Calcutta and sow the seeds of the mightiest empire the world has ever known.

  In 1756, the new nawab, Siraj-ud-daula, ascended the throne in Murshidabad at the age of twenty-five. He looked around his mini-empire and decided that the British down south in a strange place called Calcutta were getting too big for their boots. So he embarked on an impulsive attempt to enrich himself quickly by grabbing all those masses of golden coins that the foreigners were rumored to have stuffed in their vaults.

  The nawab decimated the British. Governor Roger Drake fled down the Hooghly in ignominious defeat. Anyone who could, did likewise. The conquering forces of Siraj-ud-daula imprisoned 146 English captives in an eighteen-cubic-foot underground cell with one window, when the temperature outside was over 100˚F. Next morning, on June 20, 1756, when the door to the prison was opened by the warders, there were only twenty-three people still alive. One hundred and twenty three men and women had died overnight, in an episode that would be forever immortalized as the “Black Hole of Calcutta.” At least this is the received version of the incident in British history books. Local historians dispute the veracity of the tale.

  Six months after the tragedy, Robert Clive returned from Madras with an armada of ships, soldiers, and munitions to wreak the most monumental revenge in recent military history. He recaptured Calcutta in one short night and went on to defeat both Siraj-ud-daula and the French army captain Dupleix—who had sided with the Muslim ruler in the earlier battle.

  It was in Calcutta that India was humiliated as she had never been before.

  At about the same time, George Washington was unshackling his country from the British yoke…When His Britannic Majesty had lost both his head and his North American dominions, India was to provide a soothing solace.

  —Sasthi Brata, India: Labyrinths in the Lotusland

  Food for Body and Spirit

  MADHUR JAFFREY

  The author tells us just how big the taste bud spectrum is.

  AS A CHILD GROWING UP IN DELHI, NOTHING EXCITED ME MORE than an announcement by my middle uncle that he had asked the khomcha-wallah over for our Saturday tea. That was akin to telling a Western child that he could have a whole sweet or candy shop for an entire afternoon.

  A khomcha-wallah, as it happened, had nothing sweet to offer. His normal habitat was the street, usually busy thoroughfares. Here he wandered eternally, or so it seemed to me, a basket balanced on his sturdy head, a cane stool tucked into the crook of his free arm. Whenever the crowd seemed promising, he set his stool down, lowered his basket to rest on it, and then began hawking his wares.

  The basket was a mini-shop, containing a category of foods unknown in the West—hot, sour, and savory snacks known through much of North India as chaat. The food was half-prepared and many permutations—of ingredients, seasonings, sauces, and dressings—were possible. If one asked, say, for dahi baras, the khomcha-wallah would take split pea patties (they had already been fried and softened in warm water, which also got rid of their oiliness) and put them on a “plate” of large, semi-dried leaves. Then he took some plain yogurt, beaten to a creamy consistency, and spread it over the top. Over the yogurt went the salt and one or more of the yellow, red and black spice mixtures that sat in the wide bowls. Those who wanted a mild, cumin-black pepper-dried mango flavor got only the black mixture. Those who said gleefully like I did, “Make it very hot,” also got the yellow and red mixtures, filled with several varieties of chilies. If we had an extra craving for a sweet-and-sour taste, we could ask for a tamarind chutney. A wooden spoon would disappear into the depths of a brown sauce, as thick as melted chocolate. It would emerge only to drop a dark, satiny swirl over our dahi baras. As we ate them, the dahi baras would melt in our mouths with the minimum of resistance, the hot spices would bring tears to our eyes, the yogurt would cool us down and the tamarind would perk up our taste buds as nothing else could. This, to us, was heaven.

  From childhood onwards, an Indian is exposed to more combinations of flavors and seasonings than perhaps anyone else in the world. Our cuisine is based on this variety, which, in flavors, encompasses hot-and-sour, hot-and-nutty, sweet-and-hot, bitter-and-hot, bitter-and-sour and sweet-and-salty; in seasonings, it stretches from the freshness and sweetness of highly aromatic curry leaves to the dark pungency of the resin, asafetida, whose earthy aroma tends to startle Westerners just as much as the smell of a strong, ripe cheese does Indians.

  Our spice shelves often contain more than thirty seasonings. The Indian genius lies not only in squeezing several flavors out of the same spice by roasting it, grinding it or popping it whole into hot oil (a technique known as baghar), but in combining seasonings—curry leaves with popped mustard seeds, ground roasted cumin seeds with mint, ginger and garlic with green chilies—to create a vast spectrum of tastes. It is this total mastery over seasonings that makes Indian foods quite unique.

  When I was growing up in India and there was plenty of help around, most kitchens (and I speak here only of affluent homes), aside from having cooks and bearers, also had a masalchi, an underling to whose lot fell the tedious task of grinding, on a heavy stone, twice a day, all the spices the cook deemed necessary. The masalchi would arrange little hills of yellows, browns and greens on a metal plate, sometimes single seasonings such as turmeric, fresh coriander, and ginger, sometimes mixtures of, say, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and black pepper, all ground in one lot for a specific dish. Once this chore was done, it was the job of the expert—either the housewife or the head cook—to combine different spices for different dishes—ground spices with whole ones, roasted spices with fresh herbs—and to cook them to just the necessary degree. My mother, when asked to comment on a dish (cooked in a house other than her
own, needless to say), might venture the opinion, “Well, it was all right, I suppose, but the spices did taste a bit raw.” For maximum effect, the spices needed to be not only expertly blended but expertly cooked as well.

  As sold in the West, curry powder contains powdered cumin, coriander, cardamom, fenugreek, and turmeric. Traditionally Bengalis have preferred not to use a ready-ground spice mix such as curry powder. Instead they combine different spices for each dish to enhance the unique flavor of the ingredients. Also, if you use curry powder, all your curry dishes, whether chicken curry, beef curry, or potato curry, will taste alike.

  —Bharti Kirchner, The Healthy Cuisine of India: Recipes from the Bengal Region

  If the choice of seasoning gives one kind of variety to Indian foods, regional traditions give it quite another. India is a large country. Its size came home to me for the first time when I was still in school. But it was not in the classroom. Our official school atlases (India was still a British colony then) had the British Isles on one page, India on another. To a child, they looked just about the same size. Then, one day an older cousin brought home an “underground” book distributed secretly by Indian freedom fighters. There was much excitement as we poured over its illicit pages. One of the pages showed an outline of India and, fitted neatly inside it, as in a jigsaw puzzle, was not just the British Isles, but all of Europe except for Russia. We were very impressed.

  The country is vast, and, rather like Europe, it is not homogeneous. Before independence, it consisted of about six hundred semi-independent kingdoms ruled over by Hindu maharajahs and Muslim nawabs under British supervision, as well as large tracts of land ruled directly by the British, land that the British had divided, as and when they acquired it, into governable provinces. There were about fifteen major languages spoken across the land, as well as 1,652 minor languages and dialects, and the people belonged to at least five major faiths.

  With independence, the princely kingdoms were “coaxed” into merging with India. When the Indian government began the task of dividing this huge land into states, it wisely followed the line of least resistance and divided the country up on a linguistic basis. Each area with a major language and culture was given its own state. The idea of forcing a common language on the country has been shelved time and time again. The people are just not amenable to being herded into a melting pot. They are proud of their separate cultures. Many have traditions (as well as poetry and literature) that go back a thousand years, and they are not about to give them up. This is true of foods as well, which are as different from one state to the next as, say, French food is from that of its neighbors, Italy and Spain.

  India is, in that sense, very similar to Europe, with each state rather like each European nation, having not only its own language, culture, and foods, but its own history, its own unique geography, and its own set of dominant religions. There are, of course features that link all the states. We do, after all, have one central government. The entire country was influenced by Muslim rule, which began in earnest around the eleventh century, and later, by British colonization. And, where foods are concerned, the whole country has in common the total command over spices and seasonings.

  But these foods are quite different from state to state. It is a pity that most of the Indian restaurants scattered across the world do not reflect our richly varied cuisine. They could have been the perfect showcase. One can hardly blame them, though. India has had no long tradition of fine public dining such as exists in France or Japan. Upper-class Hindus, who rarely crossed the “seven seas” for fear of losing caste and whose meals had to be cooked and served by freshly bathed Brahmins, could scarcely be expected to dine in public places where the food had been prepared and touched by God knows who. Even in my family, where we were quite liberal, I never took a sip from my sister’s glass or a bite from her apple. At least not without my mother’s disapproval. Any food eaten by someone else was considered “unclean” or jhoota.

  With such taboos, fine restaurants did not get going until after Indian independence in 1947. It just so happened that the first few were owned and run by Punjabis. The food they served was vaguely Punjabi, vaguely North Indian “royal.” The menu stuck. Restaurant after restaurant copied it. Home-style foods were never served, as it was felt, quite rightly I suppose, that no Indian would want to go out and pay for something that he could get in his own house. Regional foods were never served, because no one wanted to risk altering a successful formula.

  While Indian restaurant food can be quite good, it is a world unto itself. India hides its real food—and the best of its food—in millions of private homes, rich and poor, scattered across its provinces. In the temperate state of Kashmir, tucked into the highest mountains of the world, I have eaten a wonderful dish of dried turnip rings cooked with sun-dried tomatoes. Snow covers much of the land in the winter so, come autumn, everything that can be dried is festooned around rafters, ceilings and roofs. The local tea, a green tea similar to some Chinese teas, is served sprinkled with almonds and cinnamon, ingredients which are known to warm the body. In tropical Tamil Nadu, where the needs of the body are quite the opposite, I have dined on superb crabs poached in a tart tamarind broth. Tamarind is cooling. Much of the South uses its temperature very cleverly to take care of some of the culinary details. Many staple dishes here require fermentation. No yeasts are used, as the mean temperature of about 80°F (25°C) does the work quite effortlessly. Idlis, small savory rice cakes, made faintly sour by an overnight fermentation, are served up for millions of southern breakfasts. They rely almost entirely on the weather to change a batter of ground rice and split peas into a light froth which only requires a quick steaming to become a deliciously light, highly nutritious and very digestible breakfast dish.

  The South does a great deal of its cooking over steam, as a result of which every single home is equipped with large and small steaming pots. The North, where I come from, does not do any steaming at all, though it does use a technique learned from Muslim rulers known as “doing a dum.” For this, half-cooked rice and meat dishes, usually liberally sprinkled with aromatic flavorings such as attars, saffron, garam masala, and browned onions, are put into a pot and the lid clamped shut with a seal of dough. The pot is then placed over a thin layer of smoldering ashes. A few embers are placed on the lid as well. The dish “bakes” thus, slowly and gently. When the lid is removed, the foods are not only cooked through, but quite impregnated with haunting aromas.

  The pulp of the tamarind fruit, an important source of vitamin C, is a popular ingredient in the curries and preserves of South India, a region known for its punishingly hot summers. Valued as an antidote to heat stroke, tamarind pods are often preserved in salt and sold by weight so that they can be mixed with molasses and water to provide a sherbet which is both cheap and capable of lowering body temperatures. Mixed with salted water the pulp makes a laxative so gentle it is even administered to children suffering from stomach disorders.

  —Naveen Patnaik, The Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India

  Even within states, some foods are common to most of the people while others are cooked only by special communities. In Tamil Nadu, for example, I have been served foods preceded by remarks such as “this is a typical Iyer Brahmin dish,” or “only we Chettiyars [a trading community] make this.” The Muslim Mopals of Kerala serve stunning rice pilafs, as most Muslims do throughout India. Pilafs, after all, came to us from the Middle East. Even the Indian word for pilaf, pullao, is a corruption of the Persian polo. But, as with everything in India, the Keralites have modified the pilaf to suit their own tastes and conditions. On this coastal strip, the most favored pilaf is studded with fresh Arabian Sea prawns, subtly flavored with coconut milk!

  All Indian food is served with either rice or bread or both, following each other in succession. In the North, it is whole-wheat breads, such as chapatis and parathas, that are commonly eaten, and in the South it is plain rice. The traditional Indian bread
used to be flat, baked on cast-iron griddles rather like tortillas. The Muslims introduced ovens where sour dough and plain breads—such as naans and shirmals—could be baked. Those with natural yeast managed to rise almost an inch. The Europeans (Dutch, French, Portuguese and English) outdid the Muslims, coming in with fat, yeasty loaves. The first Indian to set his eyes on one must have been left quite stunned. The Indians called this new bread dubble roti, or “the double bread,” and happily used it to mop up good juices of many spicy stews. No foreign food was discarded. It was just made Indian. I remember that one of our favorite treats as children was to come home from school, kick off our restricting shoes and socks and pad in our loose Indian sandals to the pantry, where an obliging oven kept the leftovers from our parents’ lunch warm for our after-school snacks. Sometimes there were chapatis, into which we would roll up some sookhe aloo, dry, well-spiced potatoes, and then gobble them up. At other times we would slice off about two inches from an end of a crusty dubble roti. The soft, fluffy part of the slice would be dug out and discarded—usually fed to the parrots in the garden. The hollow that resulted was filled with meat koma or whatever dish happened to be in the oven. A little mango pickle was sprinkled over the top. We then carried this treasure over to the study. Homework suddenly became almost bearable. Of course when my mother yelled out, wanting to know who had cut off both ends of both loaves of bread, we just giggled hysterically and buried our heads in our books.