Indian Takeaway (13 page)

‘Do you play?’ he asks.

‘I found them lying over there, by the incense.’

I wonder why I sound so guilty. Of course I play cards. I don’t know any Indian kid that doesn’t play cards. All the best card games I ever learnt I learnt in India and played with my cousins. Back home in Glasgow some of the most fun nights were when my mum and dad had invited friends round. The smoked-glass topped coffee table was pushed to one side and they all sat cross-legged on the floor, a white sheet beneath them, whiskies by the men, tea by the ladies and they all gambled the night way. They played three-card brag, or Flash as they called it. I remember vividly one evening begging my dad
to let me play; I was only thirteen but he succumbed, especially after the insistence of Dr Jugal.

‘Let the boy play. He will be sorely beaten, and then he will learn not to ask to play with the adults.’ Jugal smiled a sinister smile, pretending to the rest of the room that he was joking.

As I collected up the twenty-eight pounds of my winnings some time later that same evening, Jugal was no longer smiling.

‘Do you play?’ asks Jeremy, again.

‘Yeah. Poker.’ I reply. ‘Hold Em.’

His face breaks into a smile. ‘Great,’ he exclaims. ‘I love Hold Em. No one to play with here. Shuffle up and deal.’

So I do.

I would never have thought a spiritually obsessed yogi like Jeremy would be a card player, let alone a poker player. It just doesn’t seem right. I love the game and play often; but not like him. He wants to travel the world and play in tournaments. He reckons he’s got what it takes to be a winner. I don’t tell him that I have played in Vegas and everyone thinks they have got what it takes to be a winner. I’m not sure he wants to hear that. Jeremy reckons that through his yoga he is somehow enabled to look deep into the soul of his opponents and tell what hand they have, or whether they are bluffing or trapping. I’m not sure he can, and after I relieve him of his first one hundred rupees, I think my instincts may be right. He insists we play another hundred-rupee game. I’m not sure I want to alienate my host: I can’t say no, yet I don’t want to take more rupees off him.

Subtly I bring up the subject of money. How does he make a living here? He tells me that he charges each student board and lodging for their stay at the school. He already has savings from the States and those are more than enough to live off.
The money from students he intends to use to buy his way into poker tournaments. He is planning a trip to Barcelona in a few months. This is very strange. I never expected to be playing poker in India, least of all with a yoga freak. I take his next hundred rupees off him and suggest I start planning for dinner. I can tell he is awaiting the next opportunity to win his money back. I will let him try, but after I have cooked; at least then if he throws me out I will have achieved my goal.

This cooking adventure has disaster written all over it. When I’d checked with him, Jeremy had said it would be fine to cook meat. After I’ve lightened his wallet of 200 fine Indian rupees, I ask him where I can source my ingredients. I have planned it all out: Lancashire hotpot. Mutton (you rarely get lamb in India), potatoes, carrots, onions – all readily available. A big, bubbling pot of tender meat and buttery soft vegetables that warm the very soul, much like yoga itself. I could easily concoct a stock in the afternoon with some roasted bones and herbs. It was all going to be a very beautiful food-type thing.

Then the bombshell drops.

‘We can’t have meat,’ he says, rather sheepishly.

‘No meat. OK.’ I try and look hopeful. Lancashire hotpot with chicken might work.

‘And no chicken,’ he continues, as if he had read my mind, a feat he never once managed to achieve during poker. It’s going from bad to worse.

‘Let me just check. No meat and no chicken?’ I ask.

‘No meat, no chicken,’ he confirms.

‘Why?’ I implore.

‘The cook is funny about meat and chicken in the kitchen. She’d rather you cooked vegetarian.’

‘I can’t really cook vegetarian.’

Jeremy is lovely and couldn’t have been more apologetic. I try hard not to panic. Remember, I love vegetables. I adore them. I am not to be mistaken for my elder brother, Raj. Vegetables are great whenever they are accompanied by meat or chicken. However a meal containing
only
vegetables is like a broken pencil; utterly pointless. What is the focus of a plate of food if there is no symphony of flesh in the centre? British food is all about meat and two veg, not veg and two veg (which would be three veg, if the rules of simple arithmetic were to be followed). I would even be prepared to allow fish or shellfish to take pride of place in the centre of a platter. But nut roast? Or caulifl ower bake? Or aubergine surprise? No. Thank you, but no. They are not complete and fulfilling meals. It is with this food-based philosophy in mind that I have never really perfected or indeed bothered my overweight Glaswegian arse when it comes to the cooking of vegetarian food. Life is too short. (Although my doctor suggests it would be considerably longer if I entertained the notion of a vegetarian diet from time to time.)

I’m humped, as we say back home on the Byres Road. Failure had to come at some point; I’m sanguine enough about that. But so early, when it all looked so promising? And to cap it all I feel dirty; deep-down dirty. Twenty-four hours ago I was charging up and down the platform at Chennai station looking for a non-existent train seat; I spent a sleepless night on that selfsame train; followed by the better part of a day bending my unsupple body and watching men breathe. I feel in need of some commune with warm, cleansing water. Surely every yogi would approve of such a desire? I excuse myself and head for a bath.

In Britain there is only one type of bath. You fill the tub with water and take a bath. Uncontroversially straightforward. In our family we call this a ‘fish bath’, so named by my Aunty
Pavittar, my dad’s younger sister. I assume, though have never had it verified by Pavittar, that a fish bath is so called because it is the sort of bath a fish might enjoy, allowing them to swim in the open waters of a full tub. But this form of bathing, whilst wholly uncontroversial to the British psyche, is a complete anathema to the Indian way of being. A shower they could understand. But a fish bath? Indians do not understand how cleanliness is achieved by lolling around for hours in a pool of your own dirt. We advocate a different approach to the art of bathing; this we call the ‘bucket bath’. Let me explain.

Bucket baths are great. Great and very Indian. As opposed to a fish bath which is also great, but very unIndian. Our house, like every Indian house in Britain and probably across the world, was geared up to the bucket-bath scenario, a washing technique I still love to this day. A bucket (known in Punjabi as a ‘balti’
*
) would be placed in the bath and subsequently filled with water. The said water would then be manipulated, by crafty use of a small jug, over the bather’s body. A pause would occur in the water-pouring process while soap was administered to the body. The water manipulation step would continue until all soap had been washed away. Finally, and this was the
coup de grâce,
the remaining water in the bucket that could not successfully be manipulated into the jug was poured over the bather in a single motion. The very essence of refreshment. It was both beautiful and simple.

As we grew up and became more experienced in the way of the bucket bath, new, subtle variations would be introduced. Simultaneous soaping and water-pouring. Left-handed water-
pouring, solo hair-washing (bearing in mind we were a houseful of long-haired woman and men) and latterly, shamed as I am to admit it, masturbating and water-pouring. Try it; it’s great. Whatever way you look at it, the bucket bath is a triumph of humanity over dirtiness. As I wander down the stairs and back to my room, I stop for a moment on the terrace and enjoy the twinkling view over the scattered and uncluttered city. Within the crazy, mixed-up cosmopolitan influences of Jeremy and Suresh and the Americanisation of yoga and the rest of it, I am, somewhere deep down inside, very much at ease with my place here in Mysore. I feel very Indian. I still feel Indian when I notice that the bucket for my bucket bath resides in a tiny bathroom. I would struggle to swing a kitten in it, let alone a cat. I let the water run; it’s cold. I start to get undressed. I suddenly realise that I need a bath so badly that even I find my own smell offensive. I’m impressively malodorous. I check the water. If anything it’s getting colder and colder. I could cry.

I ask little of life, really. A nice meal now and again, a well cut suit, the music of Van Morrison and hot water for a bucket bath. With the shower or bath scenario the crucial difference with cold water is that you are able to completely immerse your body in the cold experience, shocking it instantly into acceptance. With the bucket bath it’s an altogether more gradual experience. The warm and dry part of your body wonders why you are pouring cold water on the other parts of your body. This makes the recently made cold parts of your body feel colder still. While this is kicking off, civil war breaks out as the as yet unmolested parts of your body get wise to the imminent coldness. It’s confusing and bloody hard work.

I don’t want a cold bath. I really don’t. But I have to. I can’t wait until Bangalore.

I emerge from my non-specific wet-soaking none the wiser as to my cooking challenge. And to compound an already fairly compounded situation Jeremy, in his sweet, mild-mannered and measured way points out other limitations to my meal. Anna, a surly Spaniard from Lanzarote who does not like spicy food. Suresh’s twenty-one day fast which may permit him to only eat a mouthful, out of politeness no doubt. And then there’s the lovely old Karnatakan cooking and cleaning lady who Jeremy has never once seen eating for the entire year he’s been here. Great.

So let’s sum up the position: I have no ingredients to cook, no idea what I am going to cook and should I somehow, by divine karmic contact, devise the most complete plate of British-European food ever created by a Scotsman in India, I have only Jeremy to eat it.

I must look like panic personified because Jeremy offers to help me regroup by taking me on the back of his motorbike to the shops to see what would inspire me. I haven’t been on a motorbike since I was a kid. And that story doesn’t have a happy ending …

We were in Ferozepure, at my grandfather’s house. I was about twelve at the time. Our trip was coming to an end and we had to take the bus from Ferozepure back to Delhi before jetting off back to Scotland. You may have noticed from your time in airports/railway stations/bus depots that Indian families like nothing better than descending, mob-handed with their kith and kin when it comes to despatching someone on a journey. Often eighteen or twenty cousins, uncles, aunts and neighbours’ children will accompany two travellers to ‘see them off’ at the station. It was the cause of much embarrassment to us as kids, but it is something I have come to love. Even if it
does make for the lengthiest of goodbyes and the occasional missed fl ight.

Anyway, in the best traditions, my family had picked up some cousins and the neighbours’ kids to see us to the coach station. So tight were we for space my Channi Chachaji, my dad’s handsome, enigmatic, slightly deranged brother to whom I am very close, had decided that I would get to the station with him, riding pillion on his bike. Channi is a renegade. You need to know this. He can charm all the birds out of all the trees; he has an indefinable joy for life, a childlike energy and an utter lack of linear time-keeping. This meant that some time after the rest of the family had left for the coach station, my young uncle and I were still drinking tea in the house. It was delicious tea but I had to be on that coach; if we missed that coach, we missed our flight; and if we missed our flight …

So finally Channi got his act together. He realised the time and panicked. We bolted downstairs and onto the Norton motorcycle and soon we are cutting our way through people, bullocks, carts, people on bullocks, bullocks pulling carts; lots of bullocks. You get the picture. Channi knows no fear; he’s an ex-captain from the Indian army and has seen active service. He was hardly going to be frightened by pedestrians, bovines and walls. I had no idea where we were going and how long it would take. My knuckles were white, which given my skin colouring was a fairly strong indication of the fear I was experiencing.

All I remember is that we accelerated, swerved left and then right. My uncle swore quite vehemently. The next thing I knew I was flying through the air and landing on a vegetable cart, narrowly missing the tomatoes but definitely damaging some early season marrows. It transpired that Channi had braked hard to avoid a leper on a bike. Since I was a child and
thanks to something Newton explained, I was unable to offer any force to resist the braking and consequently flew marrow-ward. Channi picked me up, slapped the vegetable vendor, an innocent in the situation, and wiped the marrow from my shirt. He looked me in the eye and told me I was never to mention this incident to my father. I promised not to. I got the coach and the secret remained safe with me for nearly three decades. Until now. Sorry, Channi Chachaji.

What a sight we must look, me in my full-length pink kurta riding pillion to a long-haired hippy-type and we are off to buy the groceries together. It’s very sweet that Jeremy is so keen to help me in my quest. I am however wondering about his relationship with India. You see, I have a dual identity when it comes to India. I feel free to be critical of the country, but will also jump to its defence should I hear anyone else speak against her. And I’m not sure Jeremy likes India terribly much. It suits him to be here. India is a Hindu country and Hindus are famous for their laid-back attitude and general sense of welcome. That’s probably why the Moghuls were able to invade, and then the British. Hindu India indulges people like Jeremy; it lets them come and suck what they can out of the country before leaving. Perhaps I’m being harsh, but I am definitely getting the impression that the single most important thing in Jeremy’s life is Jeremy. He may be taking me shopping but he has expressed no interest in my journey thus far. He hasn’t really asked anything of where I have been or where I am going. He hasn’t even asked the logic of my cooking escapades. Interesting. I mull this over as we roar off towards the shops. I try very hard not to get my pink kurta caught in the mechanism of the bike.