Reading the entrails

I made it back to Sydney and so did all my bags. Waiting in the long queue for customs, an official started chatting and asked me what I did for a living. I told him I taught English Literature and he waved me through the gates. Even though I didn’t have the satisfaction of exceeding the duty-free booze allowance, this struck me as a particularly good omen for re-entry into terra Australopithecus. This blog has been sorely neglected but I’ve managed to get a job and find a place to live since hitting the ground. I’ve also eaten variously formatted trout several times and righteously emptied a number of glasses of sauvignon blanc. There’s ceviche marinating right now and a zillion photos of the Taj Mahal to putter through.
Oh look, here’s one. My guide ran into a friend in the gardens at the back-end of the Taj and they spent half an hour taking winning photos like this. If only I had a picture of the Harbour Bridge to match it.

Incredible India

This just about sums it all up.

Polygraph

‘Madame, did you not see it on the news? The internet is down in whole of India. A cable broke in Egypt late last night. It will take at least fifteen days to fix. At least, fifteen. Until then, I’m very sorry but the internet is out of order, Madame.’

If you’re reading this, it means that I have just been delivered the most audacious excuse ever for a stuffed wireless transmitter.

On the upside, I'm home in a week. Hurrah!

Festival life

Holy cities, I’ve seen a few. It’s a low year for the Magh Mela festival in Allahabad. Here, where the Ganga meets the Yamuna and the invisible, underground Saraswati rivers, the enormous Kumbh Mela festival is held every twelve years and tens of millions of people descend on Allahabad to bathe in the holy confluence under the full moon. The Magh Mela is the humdrum annual festival. It lasts for a month and my guide told me that around 400,000 pilgrims are currently in town. The dusty tent city between the rivers stretches for kilometres . I picked up a discarded copy of the Bulletin a few days ago and read about the upcoming World Youth Day in Sydney; the dimensions of the Sydney event do pale in comparison. Still, a Sydney full of pilgrims seeking not sporting jubilation but spiritual fulfilment is an exciting prospect.

Lost in translation

I’m still not sure what this dessert is called and I doubt I’ll ever know how to spell it.
For a while, I thought it was called manaloo and then my co-traveller Ingrid told me it was called malayoo. Something like that. Whatever it’s called, it’s amazingly good: milk that’s been boiled with cardamon, sugar and orange peel, beaten up with cream, rosewater and pistachios to a texture midway between cappuccino foam and icecream. Apparently it’s a Varanasi special.
Ingrid and I were escorted to this street stall by our friends Raju (in the pic) and Sunil, who assured us that of all the malayoo vendors in Varanasi, this one was the best. The malayoo and some truly amazing lassi were ladled out of bigger vats and buckets into small clay pots.
When empty, the pots got tossed to the gutter and the stall puppies licked the shards clean.

Priorities

A chai stall: kettle, saucepan, glasses, strainer, biscuits. Instant satisfaction.
Most street chai comes in tiny throwaway clay cups but this stall, located somewhere in the Varanasi old city, served such great chai that I offer it as the type irrespective of the atypical glassware. The best chai I drank in Varanasi, and probably in India was at Ashish Café just off Assi Ghat. Ashish might be the loveliest man in Varanasi, a smiling man who cooks delicious food very slowly and serves it on his verandah; his chai is heavy with fresh ginger and served as an excellent antidote to the cold I contracted whilst in town. There’s plenty of air pollution everywhere in India so it’s not beyond my imagination why one might wear a facemask to filter out the gunk. Still, tourists in Calcutta, Bodhgaya and Varanasi prancing around, their respiratory systems protected by clean white masks, did not strike me as particularly dignified or sensitive. It was only when my nose and eyes had been streaming for a couple of days that I realised what a great service the masks might have been.

Ashish’s gingery chai has eased my cold and kept me walking up and down the ghats. ‘Burning is learning,’ a young chap told me on my first day in Varanasi. This line runs through my head each time I walk past the burning ghats where bodies are being constantly cremated. I can’t quite bring myself to watch the duration of a burning (three to four hours, I’m told) or even a funeral, I just rush on by. If burning is learning, I think I’ve learnt that I’m a little uncomfortable with death rites as a tourist spectacle. If the numbers of foreigners hanging out to watch the burnings are any indication, I may not be siding with majority opinion on this one.

I’ve had to get used to it though as I need to pass Harishchandra Ghat, a burning ghat, to reach Mansarowar Ghat from where I’m staying. The Lotus Lounge is located at Mansarowar and I’ve been able to satisfy my dumpling cravings there. I was initially a little reluctant to patronise the Lotus, it being so obviously a retreat for foreigners from the Ganges-side trials. Everybody wants to pretend they’re being intrepid and doing it like the locals and places like the Lotus – with a shiny pink and green and white balcony over the Ganges, clean low tables, a snazzy, well designed sign painted all over town, menus in proofread English and, each time I’ve visited, an Indian-free clientele – don’t really help to sustain the illusions. On the plus side, the food is cheap and delicious, the cushions are comfortable, and there is a happy absence of marauding children. Sitting on the balcony, I couldn’t help thinking of the Lotus in Potts Point and, had I a 2011 resident on hand, I would have offered for discussion the contention that the Lotus of Mansarowar Ghat is Varanasi’s answer to the Lotus of Challis Ave: really rather lovely once one has discarded the notion that one should be languishing in slightly seamier surroundings. The PP Lotus may have charming wallpaper and a bewilderingly lengthy cocktail menu but it doesn’t have the dumplings offered on the shores of the Holy River. Up there on the balcony, one more dazzling success was registered for the Tibetan veg momo, the dumpling of 2008, as far as I am concerned.
Stuffed with a gooey, garlicky mix of softened veges, steamed and lightly fried like gyoza, these dumplings are a stunning riposte to any existential angst. Is life worth living? With dumplings like this, most certainly, yes. Any doubts can be quelled with reference to the sauce. Someone has taken handfuls of garlic, chilli and tomato (raw), thrown them in a blender with a dose of salt and pressed pulverise. From my rheumy perspective, this sauce embodies the qualities some people seek in a guru: healing powers, charisma, certainty, sex appeal. I have always been easily lead.

Alas, I fear that whilst I live within reach of such delicacies, my spiritual well-being will lag. I have been to two Buddhist holy sites in the last week, Bodhgaya and Sarnath, and have been sleeping in one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. Whatever it is that is in the air in these sacred places, it has given me a cold and I find myself, as ever, bound to earthly cravings.

Holy holy holy

Holy cows, holy city, holy river.

Optimism

Varanasi warrants the following adjectives: dignified, ancient, holy, captivating.

Adjectives which will never be stuck to the City of Light include: neat, clean, and tidy.

The air is heavy with dust and the ground is stained red with paan juice. Walking along the ghats means dodging piles of goat, cow and dog droppings and keeping your feet out of the toxic water that sluices across the path now and then. Backstreets become open latrines. Kids scavenge anything reusable, street sweepers valiantly mill around with brooms and hoses, goats nibble on whatever they can, but there’s still a vast amount of rubbish and, well, filth lying around. In the face of all this muck, this cheery penguin shaped bin at Dasaswamedh Ghat struck me as a brilliantly, crazily hopeful civic installation.
The next time I walked past it, a mouthful of paan juice had been spattered across the penguin’s plastic belly, making a mockery of this sturdy little receptacle’s function.

Here and there

I missed the biggest barbie day of the year in Sydney without too much regret. Last year on Straya/Invasion Day I traversed the city twice on public transport. The buses and trains were for the most part full of bright-eyed youngsters keeping alive the great Australian tradition of getting tanked and affectionate in public places. They wore Aussie flags and Southern Crosses on their backs and green and gold stripes of zinc on their cheeks; peel-off flag tattoos from the Tele emblazoned many surfaces. The kids seemed to have been pulled from every shelf of the demographic pie shop and I wondered how they had come to accept and express so apparently uncritically the true blue lamington dogma. If the holiday was just a pretext for social interaction, why all the nationalist paraphernalia? Mostly though, I just wished they’d stop singing Waltzing Matilda. Things got a bit uglier later in the day: flags turned into drunken superhero capes; off-key singing turned into shouty aggro incoherence and corpses began to cover the pavements of the Cross. Waterside picnics con vino (chardonnay the tipple for special occasions like Australia Day) aside, I wasn’t devastated to pass it up this year.

The 26th January 2008 began far too early in the morning for me. I rose at 3.30am in order to catch a train from murky, menacing Gaya station. The train was late and I huddled in my blanket feeling very cold and cranky. Eventually the train shunted in and out with me aboard and I arrived in Varanasi, the most ancient city I’ve ever visited. Here in Shiva’s city, I discovered that the 26th January is also India’s Republic Day, this year celebrating the 58th anniversary of the establishment of the Republic of India. More people milled on the streets and ghats of Varanasi than in Sydney but the milling was a little more low-key.
Lots of sari-strolling, marigold wreaths, floating candles, paper flags (none worn as capes) and perhaps a bit more tooting and beeping on the streets.

As far as I know, Varanasi isn’t a dry city but I haven’t come across any booze vendors thus far; perhaps this is why I also didn’t happen upon any marauding clusters of Antipodeans thronging with nationalist fervour. Varanasi may be one of the few cities in the world not under sharia law where you can pass Australia Day under such conditions.

Plumdingers

Momos in soup at the Tibetan Om CafÈ, Bodhgaya, a locale particularly favoured by out-of-town spiritual questers dropping by that holy city. Not only is it a fabulous spot for the sceptical eavesdropper, it is a fine, flea-free, low fee place to eat. The soup was full of garlic, green chilli and some kind of leafy weed, a hearty, nay, pugilistic counter to the chilly, depressing situation outside and, indeed, to the drippy sanctimony of the clientele.

Barely visible in the background is an excellent glass of strong milky filter coffee. The Om crowd stopped comparing meditation stories for a few moments as it was brought to me, the punchy aroma of coffee in the morning briefly obscuring the incense burning in the corner. As their eyebrows fell and their gazes turned from my glass and back to their own, full of chai, hot ginger and lemon, Tibetan tea and lassi (salty, no doubt), I wondered whether the mild stimulus afforded by coffee drinking was viewed with some chagrin in this sacred place. Was mine a paranoid reaction? Hard to say, but in the half second before the puzzled, slightly disapproving glances stopped and the dharma chatter resumed, every demon in my chart urged me to yell out, Dudes, it’s my karma, right?, like some obnoxious precocious adolescent diva in a coming of age film set in Northern California. I kept the noise down and concentrated on broadcasting the vibes via my cosmic ham radio instead.

Hail the Dumpling!

A friend of mine proclaimed 2001 the Year of the Dumpling on the first dawn of that very year. Early in the morning after the year before, steamed dumplings struck the assembly as extraordinary entities: delicious misshapen orbs, miraculous in their very manifestation and the rapidity of their transition from freezer to steamer to plate to belly. As it has turned out, 2001 wasn’t the Year of the Dumpling, rather, its first dawn marked the beginning of the Decade of the Dumpling. It may even happen that we happy beings are living our lives in the Century of the Dumpling.

Anyway. I love dumplings: I can’t remember ever being seriously let down by dumplings. A little bit of stodginess, over-frying, under-steaming, gloopy filling, chewy pastry, none of these misdemeanours ever defeat the goodness of the dumpling experience. The Global Dumpling League admits a broad range of foodstuffs into the category of dumpling: something carbohydrate-y wrapped around something else and steamed, boiled, or fried. Gyoza, ravioli, frozen Chinatown dumplings, pelmeni, gowgees, dumplings homemade with Laura, samosas, dim sum, won ton, Chinese Noodle House and Silk Road fried dumplings, Mavis’ golden syrup dumplings, tortellini…all these take their place in the pantheon of dumplings.

On the streets of Kolkatta, I discovered a new variant: the Tibetan momo. Momo are small dumplings stuffed with spicy, super-garlicky vegetables and served with a chilli sauce. The street stalls in Kolkatta served five dumplings with a dollop of chilli sauce and a little bowl of peppery soup sprinkled with shallots for 10 rupees (about AU$0.30). Momo are ubiquitous in Bodhgaya as there is a huge population of Tibetan refugees here.
These may not look like anything special but they were dynamite: the best momo I’ve yet tasted. They exploded with hot golden curry veges – I love it when garlic is treated as a vegetable! I could hear the salsa in the centre being prepared as I waited – dice, dice, dice – raw onion, garlic, tomato and chilli in equal proportions. I think if I ate salsa like this every day, my immune system would be a stronghold with Death Star defenses. Mutton dumplings are also on offer but I haven’t tried them for several reasons: I’m wafting through a vego phase; I’m convinced that meat is the cause of all food poisoning; Indian mutton is goat.

I’m committed to eating plenty of momo before quitting North India in the hope of figuring out what’s in the filling. Are there any Tibetan restaurants in Sydney?

The Middle Way

Bihar province, in which Bodhgaya is situated, is one of the poorest in India. If I was shocked by the poverty in Kolkatta, I am more so here. I left Kolkatta with warnings ringing in my ears about Bodhhgaya and Gaya, where the train arrives. People will cheat you, I was told. Don’t accept any food and drink, it might be drugged. Watch out for thieves. A friend of mine was drugged and had all her gear stolen in terrible circumstances around here a few years ago so I was a tiny bit nervous about arriving in Gaya at 5 in the morning. The train arrived late so it was light by the time I arrived. Stepping over bodies to exit the station, I got mobbed by taxi and rickshaw drivers wanting to take me to Bodhgaya. I made my decision and got abused by all of them except the one I elected to drive me. It’s been raining here and the whole area is cold and strikes me as a bit sullen.

Bodhgaya is where the Buddha attained enlightenment after sitting under the bodhi tree for six weeks. There’s a descendant of the original bodhi tree still growing here, the Mahabodhi temple, first raised by Ashoka in the 2nd century BC, and temples built by the communities of Buddhist countries. Chinese, Thai, Burmese, Tibetan, Sri Lankan, Vietnamese and Japanese temples sit side by side nearby; there’s also a mosque and a Hindu temple. Bodhgaya is an important Buddhist pilgrimage town and so the foreigner population is slightly different to that in the cities. Sitting at a café drinking tea, I watched a busload of Japanese Zen Buddhists in white pyjamas turn up as Thai monks swished by in saffron and burgundy robes and Westerners wearing prayer beads and windbreakers looked on. Tibetan ladies in bakus and aprons walk past quietly as Indian women hitch up their saris to keep clear of the puddles. You can attend dhamma talks and sit in on Zen instruction and buy tea and Free Tibet t-shirts from the refugee market. A zillion vipassana courses are on offer but as I’m not due for a karmic tune-up just yet, I’m here strictly as a voyeur.

People are watching me too. As a SWF, I’m some kind of target for small grotty children in ragged silks and dirty knickers: they chase me up the street, grabbing my hands and trousers, yelling Money, Madame!, No food!, You buy!, Very hungry!, Nice lady!, Small baby! until one of the street stall holders who wants my custom snarls at them and they move away. I share my coins amongst them and those who miss out start yelling. I realise that I gave the girl with a baby coins earlier in the day and refuse her entreaties, giving them to someone else instead. You have a bad heart, she shouts after me, a very bad heart. It’s a little difficult to maintain equanimity under the circumstances. The kids are more tourist savvy and persistent but they’re by no means the only hungry ones. The quiet hum of chanting around the temples is interrupted by the clanging of beggars’ bowls pushed through the fences as I walk by. Refugees from Tibet who’ve undergone who knows what kind of hell to get here, gaunt locals, hordes of yelping dogs, desperate rickshaw drivers who make you feel like a heel for walking, polite schoolboys hoping you’ll purchase books and cricket bats for them… I can see the benefit of a meditation program here as two-fold: the first, to reckon with the Buddhist concept of life being rooted in suffering; the second, to cloister oneself from the immediate evidence of how wretchedly true this is for the people of Bihar.

Big Little Britain

There are reminders of the British presence in Calcutta everywhere and most of them hark back to Victoria’s England when, give or take a Lucknow style rebellion or two, the imperial shop was in order. The biggest piece of Victoriana is the monumental Victoria Memorial, a huge building in the middle of town raised after the boss lady’s death. Victoria perches on the edge of the dome, leaning out to tend her flocks; she’s figured, it seems, as a voluptuous, modest Grecian mother goddess: a chastely dressed Saraswati meets a mellow and munificent Hera. Outside, drivers wait with horses and carts to take a mainly Indian clientele on rides around the Maidan, the biggest park in the city. It’s very strange.

I’ve walked up Waterloo St and Middleton Row and Shakespeare St through the decaying carapace of the colonial dream. I’m staying in quite a fabulous hotel owned by Brits who’ve been in Calcutta for generations and still call Blighty home. There are faded posters of London tourist attractions on the walls of the dining room; to the collection of family portraits hanging in the stairwells is added a photograph of the Windsor family in the Diana years. Felicity Kendall, staple funny girl of late 70s and early 80s BBC serials, grew up here and her visage adorns the walls of the stairwell too. Yes, very strange indeed.

Traffic report

Spending half an hour outdoors in Delhi induces a coughing fit; an hour in an auto-rickshaw in Chennai traffic left me choked up for the rest of the day. The pollution in Calcutta is different, somewhat less onerous as far as the respiratory system but still the daily harbinger of a thick, unglamorous sheen of cuticular filth. I thought I’d arrived in Calcutta on an overcast day. The sky was silvery grey and, out of the glare of direct sunlight, walking wasn’t uncomfortable. A few days later, I realise that the perpetual gloom is composed of polluting gases and that the heaviness in the air is not that which precedes a storm, but the filtered fallout from those celestial pachyderms.

Vast anarchic columns of vehicles belch out ominously dark fumes: yellow Hindu Ambassador taxis, autorickshaws, rickety old lorries, brightly painted buses, Enfield motorbikes, all swerving and weaving Stravinsky style. There are cooking fires and makeshift waste incinerators on every street and piles of rubbish and building materials throw up dust at the slightest provocation. My feet are sticky with grime from walking around the city for hours today. I managed to dodge the piles of ordure and dubious looking puddles but even so, the air down there clings to my feet more tenaciously than it does to my arms and face and neck. It’s quite amazing. Still, when I arrive back in my hotel room and slough bucketloads of dirt off my exposed skin, I can breathe easily enough.

In spite of the grime, I’m quite taken with Calcutta, quite sorry that I’ll be jumping on the overnight train to Gaya tonight. It’s the first big Indian city I’ve visited which it’s possible to wander around and experience at street level. So for hours these last few days, I’ve been tramping up and down avenues lined with enormous dilapidated colonial buildings.

The pedestrian experience of Calcutta’s architectural record of monumental imperial aspiration, its decline and transformation is tiring, not least because of the effort of figuring out how the hell to respond to the extremely visible grinding poverty. I’ve been confronted by various manifestations of poverty and inequality around the world but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a concentration of people living dreadfully tough lives on the street. Walking and driving past slums is one thing but walking over and through people’s lives as they sleep and wash and shit on the streets is quite another. Pushed into my path by their parents, children grab my sleeve and sing out ‘Madame, Madame, ten rupee’ again and again as they follow me along the path. Often, my motives in giving them coins have less to do with charity and more to do with irritation and embarrassment. Who knows where the money goes? I’m sure the right-headed would chastise me for responding to persistence rather than need. Each time I give money to a beggar, another equally needy person pops up and stakes their claim.

Anyway, anyway, it’s always enough already with the liberal guilt, n’est-ce pas. Back to the views, back to me. Keeping clear of the traffic, staying out of puddles, declining invitations into shops selling men’s underwear, deciding who to follow across the road, not getting lost, trying to imagine the transformations within and without these extraordinary buildings over the last couple of hundred years, it’s all hungry work. Fortunately, Calcutta street food is delectable and thus far I haven’t been struck with the gutrot.

The ubiquitous snack is the roll, Calcutta’s answer to the felafel, I guess. Fresh flat bread is cooked on a griddle, sometimes with egg, and rolled up with onion, chilli sauce, lime juice, spicy paneer or veges or chicken. They’re fantastic. I’ve made a solid commitment to the roll and the best I’ve found is at Kusum’s. Follow this sign a few metres down a little lane off Park St at the Maidan end, just before Oxford Books. Order a paneer roll and you will encounter happiness. I was by far the most conspicuous customer on my visits and so couldn’t quite bring myself to take a photograph.

Affirmation in Pondicherry

As one of four sisters who were allowed to see the light of day all those years ago, this sign warmed my heart.

Aren't we all. Is it cheap to make mileage out of public health warnings against the real and awful phenomena of female infanticide? Possibly. Oh well. Here’s another dose of le charme de Pondicherry in compensation.

And, oh, why not. Here’s a poor old leukodermic Pondicherruvian temple elephant, a model of miserable stoicity and placid dignity, getting fed a dose of what looked like protein-enriched mashed potato.

Superficialities

‘I had always maintained that in the choice of an itinerary one should always be guided by the sound of names, and that in doing so I had never been disappointed.’ So wrote Edith Wharton in her splendid, archly refined memoir A Backward Glance. I confess my presence in Pondicherry has more than a little to do with the allure of the name Pondicherry, a name that has since childhood sounded the promise of multicoloured seaside larks, magicians and sundry exotica.

Now arrived, what do I think of Pondicherry?

I wasn’t even slightly disappointed by Pondicherry and so hold Wharton’s axiom true. Pondicherry is quite splendid, an odd little Gallified pocket of India, all town squares and balconies and greenery dripping down walls. The streets are broad, shady and clean and the guesthouses are full of French people. Whether their journeys are spiritual or secular, it has been my experience that the more French tourists are clustered in a particular destination, the higher the likelihood of finding drinkable wine, salty bread and satisfactory coffee. Insofar as these essentials were concerned, Pondicherry delivered.


The festival of Pongal, a fertility celebration for the New Year in Tamil Nadu, was in full swing when I was in town; so the beaches were full of picnicking families and the roads were sealed off to make room for painted bulls to amble around. The streets and paths were all decorated with chalk images like this, touched up every day of the festival. Admittedly, this is not one of Pondicherry's cleaner by-ways.

Enfin, the slogan emblazoned outside the local tourism office – ‘Pondicherry – you can check out but you can never leave’ – proved, happily, to be false. Even though my reprehensible backpack alienated many people, I made it back to Chennai on the local bus this afternoon. Next stop, Calcutta.

I Yam what I Yam

In Pondicherry, I heard a tiring number of variations on the following theme: I have come to India to find myself. Of course, as someone who entertains extreme doubts about the integrity and singularity of anyone’s self, let alone mine own, I have not the slightest hope of finding my lost totality in India.
When I spied this stack of crates in Mamallapuram, the force of self-recognition was thus quite a shock. I want this on a t-shirt. Maybe I do have a spiritual side after all. Fruitniks of the world, unite.

How do you ladoo?

This is an everyday Chennai streetscape. The fact that it is dominated by a large sweet shop advertising ghee and honey sweets is no coincidence. Invitations to gorge oneself on outrageous sweets are everywhere. I don’t normally define myself as a sweet-tooth but I’m changing hats here. My saving grace might be that my memory has reached saturation point for new food names and I can’t actually seem to remember the names of the tastiest treats. Still, pointing and smiling seems to produce good results and fill a paper box with delicacies for about the same price that paper bags were filled with mixed lollies back in my sunstruck Riverina jeunesse. Wherever I find to live for the duration of my Sydney sojourn, I’m thinking that Maya sweets will seem like a long way away and, at the same time, not too far at all.

Monomanual monomania

Try as I might to shove the punt down into the backwaters of memory, the process whereby I learnt to eat with a knife and fork has not been quite washed away from my conscious mind. A high premium was placed on manners at the family table; maladroit as I am, correct use of utensils was a lesson it took me a long time to pass. Now, however, I’m quite comfortable with cutlery. Knives, forks, spoons, I can use them all. A little too well, perhaps. Here in India, I’m discovering that after my long and arduous struggle against instinct, I’ve forgotten how to eat with my hands. Pleased as my parents would have been with this breakthrough, it’s causing me some problems in restaurants where there is simply no cutlery to be had.

The proliferation of breads on Indian menus is making more and more sense. Roti, chapatti, naan, paratha, even pappadums, they all help to scoop up rice and curry. Eating rice and curry without bread in a public place is still pretty much beyond me, I must confess. The thing is, not only are you deprived of a knife and fork when you tackle your thali, your left hand should also stay off the table. Try tearing a piece of naan big enough to use as a scoop with one hand. It is a very difficult business. Using it then to grab and sop up slippery pieces of curry is still more challenging.

This is where the dhosa comes in. Pancakes are far more malleable than bread and the dhosa arrives already wrapped around the filling. A good dhosa is soft and crisp and thus easy to tear and manoeuvre. Last night I managed simultaneously to devour a masala dhosa one-handed and to chat to the mother and daughter who sat down opposite me in matching pink saris about engineering courses in Australian universities. The masala dhosa was a gorgeous dish, eyeball and tastebud-wise but as, alas, the photo didn’t work out I’ll note that it was served on a banana leaf, stuffed with spicy yellow mashed potato, accompanied by a little bowl of sambar and a dollop each of coconut pickle and unidentified green goodness. The meal was made only more delectable by the fact that I was able to eat almost all of it with my left hand on my lap, proud as a spoon-enabled four year old.

I selected my dhosa-house on the recommendation of my Madras correspondent’s father (both, sadly, out of Chennai now) and his appraisal that it was a very clean place. Rightly so. I’d add that it is also cheap and delicious and further, that pomegranate juice, that extraordinarily restorative beverage, is on the menu. If you are in T.Nagar, Chennai and just happen to be walking down Bazullah Street, go to Sangeetha’s and don’t expect a fork.

The Prawn of a New Era

Arch and buckle, o, fractured temporal plane. We’re back in Kerala, last week. Life slowed down amazingly there.

Wait for an hour and a half at the Baywatch restaurant on Cherai beach, and this is what you get. Tiger prawns as big as kittens, split and rubbed with oily garlic and spiced and grilled. Marvellous and messy with the sea rolling away just behind us. The only time I’ve ever otherwise seen prawns this big is at Doyle’s at the Sydney Fish Markets, one of my favourite places in the world. The tiger prawns stuffed with chutney ingredients and pine nuts have been on the menu there for donkey’s years; unlike the spicy grilled prawns at the Baywatch, they are a dish I’d advise nobody to order. The consumption of prawn heads has recently been a theme of both my reading and correspondence. Delicacy these may be, I’ve been lead to understand; the sisters Pike nevertheless left the prawn heads untouched.

While we’re on the subject of Keralan cuisine, cooks there use coconut oil rather than ghee as their fat of choice. I, however, was rubbed with spiced ghee and put into a steam cupboard to cook whilst in Kerala. Ayurvedic healing takes you to some strange places. The strangest place I’ve found myself in quite some time is sitting locked in a nineteenth century style steam cabinet with only my head poking out, wearing a cotton loincloth, dripping with aromatic, therapeutic ghee. True story.

The titular allusion to new eras provides a flimsy pretext for a reference to a new era in French presidential romance. I’m behind the times and I’m shocked. I just found out that Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni have become encoupled in a maelstrom of love. It’s way too late for l’esprit de l’escalier. I’m shocked. I know that I’ve intoned loudly in the past that the private lives of public figure should not be the topic of hysterical response and scrutiny. Still, smiling, nip, tuck, slash, burn, all in the name of progress sharks like Sarkozy and quasi-bohemian guitar strumming supermodel heiresses like Bruni should not even be allowed to meet. Je n’aurais jamais cru…