Indian Takeaway Part 3

There are times in one's life when one realises how others live, the bounties that have been bestowed on us and the hardships afforded to others. For me, this is one of those times. Nagamuthu's house is a single room, smaller than his kitchen at the shack. It has a mattress on the floor, a fan and a TV set. The walls have been painted a moss green, the colour now distressed and peeling with time. One room. That's it. Real life. p.r.o.ne on the floor in the midst of watching a Bollywood song and dance number is a woman I later find out to be Nagamuthu's sister. She hurriedly collects herself and some clothes and vacates the room, killing the Bollywood soundtrack as she goes. Nagamuthu pulls up a stool for me to sit on while he sits cross-legged on the floor.

I ask him about his life. His father is a fisherman, his grandfather was a fisherman, as far back as he can remember or anyone else in his family can recall, the men would fish. He too is a fisherman, but less so these days. He devotes more time to cooking and running the Fisherman's Restaurant. The tsunami hit the village hard. Mallamapuram always had a strong tourist sector. The beautiful carved temples saw to that. The fishermen had become used to a ready market for their catch, many opening shacks like Nagamuthu's. On the day itself he recalls that he and his father and a few other fishermen had been out laying nets at 3 a.m. Their routine was to return to harvest the nets some four hours later. This they did. By 9 a.m. they were back on the beach. They saw the wave coming. There was obvious panic amongst the fishermen. They knew this was neither a full moon nor a black moon. There could be no explanation for this tidal wave approaching ...

For seven months they couldn't fish. For that they were grateful; at least they had escaped with their lives while others still searched in vain for the bodies of loved ones. Although they were alive, one wonders about the quality of that life, relying as they did on charity handouts. The restaurant was destroyed. Sitting where I am now it is difficult to imagine the sense of fear that must have overcome those in the colony. India is a highly superst.i.tious country; my own beloved mother has her superst.i.tions that I will always carry with me, as if they were transmitted in the very milk she fed me. But here in this uncomplicated community, superst.i.tion is a way of life. Far fewer men now go to fish, which is in itself a good thing since stocks seem very low. Perhaps another by-product of the tsunami? In the old days, Nagamuthu tells me, regardless of the weather the fishermen would venture out, sometimes for days on end. They felt at one with the sea, attuned to its motion, a human extension of its watery being. Now they harbour suspicions. Should a stiff breeze escalate any further, many refuse to fish. Nagamuthu puts it beautifully. Pointing at his heart he suggests that that is where the tsunami now exists, within the fishermen themselves.

He offers me some lunch before taking me around the temples of Mamallapuram. Of course I accept; I love food. We wander back down to the restaurant. Sitting down at the table closest to the sea I take in the view, concentrating on the sounds of life around me rather than the hubbub of unanswered questions in my head. Mani, the father of Nagamuthu, sits at an adjacent table, noiseless. What thoughts is he pondering? I wonder, as he gazes out to a sea he has gazed out at for half a century. We are joined by the occasional crow whose ugly squawks make mango boy's moaning seem like the sweetest of poetry. So clever are these birds that Mani needs only grab a nearby catapult in his gnarled hands and they are off, with cries of derision.

I am overcome with the complete sensory power of the ocean. The salty taste, the smell of seaweed, the cooling breeze on my skin, the sound of crashing waves and the sight of the metamorphosing seas as they turn from green to wake white and then retire to consider a similar change in a few moments' time. Much as we pollute, abuse and use the seas, we have by no means got their measure. There is a certain self-confidence about the way in which the waves collide constantly into the land, a reminder that the seas control us, not we the seas.

My daydream digression is broken by a cornucopia of seafood. Nagamuthu has been busy in the kitchen: fish curry in a rich tomato and onion sauce tempered with curry leaves, mustard seeds and chilli, cooked to perfection; king prawns in a sweet tomato sauce, finished with a little lemon juice, succulent and fresh; and shrimps, fried in chilli, salt and pepper. All served with plain white rice. It's absolutely delicious.

The only sort of non-Indian fish we had in Glasgow was battered and deep fried. I can only ever remember one occasion when the fish cooked in our house was breaded in the finger form. That was an utter disaster. There are some things that you will have probably realised by now and others that you will shortly learn. I am the way I am about food because: 1. My mum is an amazing cook of Indian food.

2. My dad has a deep desire to experiment and try new things (so long as they don't contain vinegar or tamarind, both of which in his later years seem to bring him out in a coughing fit and generally allergic reaction).

There is no story more indicative of my father's desire to experiment with food and try new things than his rather doomed adventure into the world of slow cooking. As most immigrants can testify, being a newcomer to a country more often than not requires a dual income, since each individual income earned is insubstantial. Yet my father was evangelical about his kids eating good, freshly cooked food every evening of the week. This presented obvious challenges when set within the fiscal context of both parents working. That is when my father's discovery of the slow cooker seemed, for a week in the early 1980s at any rate, to revolutionise the world of food in our house.

The slow cooker was the perfect invention for any immigrant family. I remember the first day it arrived. Dad unpacked it and filled it full of pulses and onions and lamb and saffron and prunes. The excitement was palpable. We all saw this selection of raw ingredients enter the terracotta dish of the slow cooker but we could only imagine the flavours that would result. As dad set the machine to cook through the course of the day, he extolled the virtues of the process of gradual cooking, allowing time to pa.s.s as the juices from the meat mingled with the sun-sweetened prunes and the deep, earthy saffron, in amongst which the pulses were plumping and cooking. We left for school, our heads full of fanciful flavours and our hearts br.i.m.m.i.n.g with hope.

We returned that evening expecting the house to be permeated with the most exotic of aromas, the table heaving under the weight of Dad's new slow-cooked feast. It would have been a feast indeed had he remembered to actually turn the thing on. It was as if time had stood still in that kitchen in Bis...o...b..iggs.

These minor setbacks never held my father back. Knowing how adept my mum was in the kitchen he nevertheless continued his adventurous escapades into the world of food. No single incident combines my father's sense of gay cuisinal abandon and my mother's skill at cooking than the following story.

Every week my father would return home with produce from KRK. KRK was, for all Indian and Pakistani immigrants in Glasgow back when I was a boy, a lifeline of food and produce. KRK was the only place you could get spices and lentils, Indian style meat, fish, chicken and mangoes. I had not visited a traditional Scottish butcher until I was well into my twenties. If you couldn't afford an airfare back to the subcontinent all you needed to do was pop down to KRK on Woodlands Road and buy a couple of mangoes and an eight-kilo bag of rice; it was the next best thing.

You couldn't help but be curious about food in our house. My dad was forever coming home with random produce. I can have been no more than twelve years old but I was already gaining curiosity about food. I remember him on numerous occasions placing yet another bizarre-looking fruit on the counter at home.

'Cook this, Kuldip,' he would command.

'What is it, Ji?' asked Mum.

'No idea,' he would respond as he wandered off.

But my mother would invariably find a way of cooking it. And invariably it tasted delicious. In later life I realised how instinctively talented my mum is when it comes to food preparation. I have witnessed her smelling, sniffing, cutting and chewing the plethora of weird objects my dad has brought back from numerous visits to KRK. I sometimes think they see him coming and bring out their most freaky-looking vegetables and fruits, knowing that Mr Kohli with his indefatigable sense of adventure will purchase it and make his long-suffering wife find a way of cooking it.

This particular KRK trip was perhaps the most famous of all the KRK trips. Or the most doomed, depending on how you look at it. In amongst the uncontroversial staples of tinned tomatoes, moong daal, coriander and the like lurked a rather pungent paper bag. Triumphantly my father raised the bag and handed it to my mother. Somehow, lifting the bag reinforced the stench and we were all forced to take a step back. Mum asked what it was. Bombay duck, Dad replied. It would appear they only had one in the shop and he'd snaffled it. Right then no one could quite work out why he had bothered, least of all my mother.

Let not the name confuse you. Bombay duck is no sort of duck at all. Oh no. It is a fish, and I doubt if it even comes from Bombay. It could be called Bhopal lamb or Dundee cake for all the relevance the name bestows on the produce. And the version he'd brought home was dried; dried and very stinky.

'Apparently,' my father related, 'it's quite the delicacy in South India.'

'That's great,' my mother muttered. 'But we live in north Glasgow.'

But, such was the patriarchal system she'd married into, Mum tugged her metaphorical forelock and put the deep fat fryer on the stove. Now, I'm not sure if she was going to fry the Bombay duck because that was how you were meant to cook it or if years of a Glaswegian culinary lifestyle had rubbed off on her to the extent that her default with all things fishy was to deep fry; but frying deep she was. We had to leave the kitchen to escape the smell of the dried fish. The lounge was no better as the acrid aroma permeated its way through the house.

Basic rule of cooking no. 1: A thing that smells before you cook it rarely smells better after you cook it. It's self-evident. The heat accentuates the smell. Fair enough? Good.

Our house stank for months after my mum cooked that b.l.o.o.d.y Bombay duck. And I mean months. The curtains, the sofa, the carpets; no doubt even we had more than a faint whiff of the duck from Bombay about us. It was really bad. Much as I am p.r.o.ne to the occasional comedy hyperbole, really and truly we were constantly reminded of that fateful afternoon well into the next calendar year. To top it all, the Bombay duck didn't even taste nice. It was rank.

Basic rule of cooking no. 2: A thing that smells foul generally tastes foul. The single and notable exception is the Malaysian fruit durian. My favourite cousin in the whole world, Teji, loves durian. He admits it smells of a teenager smeared in rancid seal oil, but if you can get beyond that, the white flesh is sweet and unctuous.

Bombay duck-gate aside, my experiences with homemade fish dishes were generally positive. Fish curry was one of the first Indian dishes I ever learnt to cook. There's no great tradition of seafood in Punjabi households. There is of course Amritsari fish, but I have never seen that anywhere beyond a west of Scotland Indian restaurant. But what I am about to share with you is a dish borne out of economic necessity, a dish behind which is the story of a work ethic and of running a family on a limited budget. The story of Glenryck mackerel fillets in tomato sauce.

Glenryck mackerel fillets in tomato sauce did exactly what it said on the tin. They were precooked fillets of mackerel in a tomato sauce; and they were made by a company called Glenryck. Per se they were nothing special. But when my mum made her special masala and then added the fillets, the mackerel was somehow elevated to another place altogether, to a taste nirvana. I loved watching my mum cook. To this day I doubt there is anything that woman cannot rustle up. Show her how to pan fry foie gras once, and she will improve the recipe and manage to feed eight more mouths from the same helping.

I loved watching my mum cook because I loved eating. And it's the only time she never told me to do my homework. For this dish she would slice onions, which was unusual because she almost invariably diced for every other curry. A fine dice allowed the onions to fry away to nothing and form the curry sauce. But, in this case, the slice made a feature of the onions. She would temper the oil with whole c.u.min, waiting till they stopped popping in the hot oil; she would then add her other whole spices: cardamom, cinnamon, bay and whole peppercorns. A little turmeric, a pinch of salt and a touch of paprika. A finely chopped chilli joined the pot and then the moment of truth: I would get to open the tin of mackerel. Always Glenryck, always fillets, always a tomato sauce. They would be poured into the pot and once the fish had heated through, dinner was served. Mackerel curry on a bed of white rice. I seem to remember that by the age of twelve I was cooking it myself. My mum always told me to experiment, to try more of one spice and less of another and work out how it tasted. If you ever asked her for a recipe she would be at a loss. She had no idea what she was doing until she was doing it. And every time it was delicious.

Life seems to have turned full circle; the first curry I learnt to cook was fish in an onion and tomato sauce and here I am, thousands of miles from Glasgow, hundreds of meals later, decades forward in time, and I am eating fish curry in a tomato and onion sauce on a bed of white rice as I watch the waves of the Indian Ocean crash against the sun-beaten sands.

Dusk is descending. It is time to prepare dinner. I thought fishcakes would be the thing to do, given the preponderance of them in the area. I always think of fishcakes as very Scottish. I suppose anything in breadcrumbs that is fried has an innate sense of Scottishness about it. Fishcakes with a parsley sauce. Smoked haddock fishcakes. Salmon fishcakes. Fishcakes are great.

Nagamuthu seems nonplussed by the idea, but I have to push on and open his mind to the new possibilities of food. Having said that, he caters for an international tourist crowd, so he's not exactly limited in his applications of seafood. Mani, the father of Nagamuthu, is at the sink in the kitchen, cleaning fish and prawns in preparation for our culinary adventure. A lone couple sit outside, not eating, just drinking a little sweet lemon and soda. That can't provide much of an income in the low season.

I get down to peeling and boiling the potatoes. Nagamuthu says I am his guest and that I should sit and instruct him as to what needs doing. I succ.u.mb at first, but it seems unfair and not quite in keeping with my journey that I have him sous for me. I let him peel one potato. He then has to rush out and get more lemons for the sweet lemon soda couple. I peel the other potato and both are chopped and put in the water. Ideally they should be left with skins on to keep the moisture out of the potato. I rifle through his herb selection. Mint, coriander and the ubiquitous curry leaf. I'm tempted by the curry leaf but am also aware that it is a big flavour, akin to adding sage: it has a tendency to overpower a dish if not offset by similarly strong flavours; strong flavours I wish to eschew in favour of sweet seafood and fluffy potato. I opt for some mint and coriander; the mint isn't too minty and the coriander is equally mild. I can't resist chucking a chilli in. When in India ...

I chop them up fine with a small onion. I might soften the onion at home, just to take the fierce edge off it, but the onions here have a certain sweetness and the bite will be a familiar flavour for Nagamuthu, son of Mani. Nagamuthu returns and he asks me how I would like the seafood prepared. I notice that there are some crabs sitting on the table, looking spare and useless. They are in fact spider crabs; small and delicious but next to impossible to remove the flesh from. But they might be lovely to eat alongside the prawn fishcakes. The prawns are huge and juicy. And there is also a fish called a coconut fish. It's a scale-free, shiny-skinned fish that, like the crabs and the prawns, was in the Indian Ocean some hours ago. So fresh. The flesh is a cross between mackerel (coincidentally) and grey mullet. It's firm and looks like it should taste good. I decide that we will have prawn and coconut fish fishcakes. I'll boil the crabs and they can act as a garnish. Decadent or what?

Mani fillets the fish beautifully, effortlessly, instinctively. As he sh.e.l.ls the prawns and cracks the crabs I realise that these wizened, tired hands have been filleting, sh.e.l.ling and cracking for over half a century. He could do it in his sleep. He hands me the prepared seafood. I cut the prawns and fish up into the requisite chunks. I'm sweating so much. It's eight o'clock in the evening and it's still in the thirties. The potatoes are done. I combine the chilli, herbs and onion mixture with the mashed, salted potatoes. I throw the fish in. I ask Nagamuthu what he uses for breadcrumbs. He produces two bags of sweet rusks, the sort of thing my dad loves to dip in his tea and chew on. I crush a few up and add them to the mixture. He crushes a few more as I start forming the patties. Egg dip followed by the smashed rusks. Onto a pan of oil. I throw together the tomato and mango salad and before you know it Nagamuthu and I are sitting at a table with our fish and prawn cakes in front of us.

I think he likes it because all I can hear is the sea crashing against the beach as he chews on the last crab claw.

Tonight seems like a million miles away from Kovalam and my crisis of confidence with my chicken stuffed with pesto. I want to phone my dad and remind him of the Bombay duck story and the incident with the slow cooker; I want to hear him laugh. I want my mum to roll her eyes the way she does, a half smile on her face letting me know that she loves my dad in her most Indian of ways. I feel that they are with me on this journey. With Arzooman in Kovalam I had no idea who I was and how I felt. On paper you would think that Arzooman and I would have a great deal in common. He is a middle-cla.s.s Indian, skilled in English having travelled the world. We conversed fluently about food and shared a few jokes. But here I am with a man with whom I have very little intersection, a man whose life could not be more different to mine. Yet we sit in happy silence. What binds us is the fact that we are men. Ordinary men. And as ordinary men we sit and crack on crab bones and let the darkness envelope us.

I had found some genuine solace in Mamallapuram in the most unexpected of places. Nagamuthu, son of Mani, seemed happy to accept me for who I was. He accepted my food for what it was, although it wasn't perhaps the most authentically British of dishes. On the golden beach in front of his shack I felt at once at home, at home within myself. But I had barely started my journey. To make sense of Nagamuthu and my Mamallapuram experience I needed to move on, to experience more. If I had given up after my chicken breast and Indian pesto incident with Arzooman, I would never have experienced the idyllic contentment of Mamallapuram. It was only the sense of impending failure that I had felt at the Green Cove that made the sense of accomplishment here so much more worthwhile. Similarly I would have to move on from this experience and test myself further.

It was like leaving our flat on the Great Western Road. When my family first moved to Glasgow we shared a flat with my maternal great-uncle. The flat was in Glasgow Street. Ironic really that the new immigrants lived in Glasgow Street. We eventually bought a place on the Great Western Road, in a red sandstone tenement block. The Great Western Road is not so much a street as an infrastructural inst.i.tution. It stretches aorta-like from the heart of the city heading westward through Kelvinbridge and into Hillhead. Metamorphosing, changing and developing, the road reaches out all the way to Anniesland Cross. It is Glasgow's straightest and longest road. My parents bought a rundown little two bedroom flat above a fabric shop, aptly called Fab Fabrics. 605 Great Western Road was the first property that my parents owned in Glasgow and it was the most amazing flat in the world to grow up in. It was on the first floor of a four-storey close and out back we had a c.r.a.ppy little communal, dark and considerably scary garden. At the back of the garden was a giant Victorian bird cage, for no apparent reason. This flat, this garden and these streets were the most exciting playground a child could hope for. Tenements were best described by Billy Connolly as vertical villages. That is exactly how they felt.

But of course the aspirations of immigrants meant that a flat in a block was not nearly enough. My father wanted a house; a house was a statement of success, it showed that the immigrant had made it. A house had an upstairs and a downstairs, it had no communal parts. And it had its own garden. So, having settled in the idyll of Hillhead, at the tender age of six I found myself dislocated to the heart of Spam Valley, Bis...o...b..iggs. There is a distinct lack of charm in a 1960s Wimpey house. I remember a real sense of loss for our old tenement block in the heart of the West End of Glasgow.

The first flat I ever bought as an adult was a tenement fl at in the heart of the West End of Glasgow. It was kind of karmic. And this same sense of karmic completion gave me the feeling that my brief episode of calm with Nagamuthu, the very sound of the Indian Ocean crashing quietly on the sandy beach would make some sense and grow in significance only after I had left.

I knew that something significant within me had altered. I was, as yet, unable to quantify or clarify what exactly it was. Like the sense of anticlimax I felt leaving 605 Great Western Road, arriving at Bis...o...b..iggs made sense of it, and every house or flat I have lived in since has made sense of the experience that preceded it. I was sure that the knowledge I had garnered from Mamallapuram and Nagamuthu would unfold from within me, as my journey itself unfolded further.

I had seven more cities to visit and seven more meals to cook. I felt like it may well end up being seven more lifetimes. Maybe that hippy in the pastry shop on Byres Road was right.

5.

OF MYSORE MEN.

'Your kind attention, please. Train number 6222 Mysore Express will leave platform three at 21.30 hours.'

'Welcome to Chennai Station. Please do not sit on the floor.'

The faux-welcoming voice of the slightly snotty lady on the prerecorded tannoy is the first thing I hear over the dull roar of life that seems to be sucked into this building. And what a building! A ma.s.sive marble structure with unfeasibly high ceilings, it seems that all of humanity have a train to catch from Chennai station tonight. The few seats that were available have long since been claimed, and old, sari-clad ladies lay sleeping peacefully on the floor of the concourse, flagrantly disregarding the tannoy'ed request, waiting for a train from nowhere to take them somewhere. There is a buzz about this place, the sense of constant movement, permanent transience, an indefatigable energy. Music blares from speakers, people blare at each other and TV screens blare heroines miming to the latest Bollywood hit. The station is open on three sides and from these three sides they come and they gather, expertly orientating themselves around and into the ever diminishing gaps between brown flesh.

This can't be more different from my first train journey. Chennai Station is much more akin to my expectations than Trivandrum was; in Chennai the only expectation is how many extra bodies can be crammed onto already full departing trains. This sense of chaos around me only makes me feel more smug about my prearranged ticket.

I saunter amongst the pandemonium. I am worry-free; what shall I do first? Shall I check on the status of my train? Why ever should I do that? I have aeons of time. Protocol suggests a small, sweet Indian coffee from one of the scores of coffee shacks on the periphery of the concourse. A sweeter, more delicious coffee I have yet to taste in India. Shall I check the status of my train now? Are you insane? But the last thing I want is a panic. Which is exactly why I had prebooked a slightly more expensive air-conditioned white amba.s.sador car to bring me to the station. He had arrived quarter of an hour early and my wiry dark-skinned driver with his impossibly full moustache had spent the extra minutes buffing an extra sheen of whiteness on his already gleaming car, a whiteness sadly lost to the inexorable gloom of night. As I skipped out of Greenwoods, my trusty wheely bag by my side, I reminded myself that I had given myself a clear two hours to make the journey, recalling the words of Thom Yorke from Radiohead in the song 'No Surprises'.

The cab journey had been generally smooth. Now I have a full hour before departure. I amble carefree to grab a couple of pyramidical samosas, noting a banana vendor on my way, making a mental note to purchase a bunch on my journey back to the as yet unmolested departures board. Having smugly dawdled the first thirty-five minutes away I should have sensed the initial stages of hubris gathering within me. The train to Mysore is at platform three. It is an enormous snake of carriages falling away to a train-like dot in the platform distance. I reckon it would take Sebastian Coe, at the peak of his powers, at least two minutes to run its length, with a feisty Steve Ovett kicking hard behind him. I finally look at my ticket. I have never in all my life seen a single train ticket that conveys so much information. It declares the distance to travel; whether I am an adult or child; gender specifications; age details; ticket number which is different from a booking number which in turn varies from a reservation number; the cla.s.s of journey; some other random but rather official-looking numbers; coach number; berth number; seat number; ticketing authority; concession status, rupee fee. It even has a note on the side suggesting a 'Happy Journey'. It's astonishing really. This single ticket has more information than some novellas I have read. And the information is truly inspired if you know what to do with it, if you know how to decode it and make the information work in your favour. Such decoding is lost on me.

I know I am at the right station at the right time; I have been reciting it in my sleep for the last two days. My gender is correct and I have to thank them for making me three years younger on the ticket than I really am. What is vexing me are the details of my carriage and berth number: carriage WL/17 and berth WL/05. There seem to be no such carriages; more worrying still, there seem to be no carriages even close to that description.

I have very limited experience of Indian travel as an adult, but one thing I can be sure of: whatever else one might say about the trains here, the seat numbering system is exemplary; never in all my train-travelling experience has there ever been confusion or fuss about where exactly on the train I should sit. Never. So you can understand my confusion and fuss at being asked to locate a carriage that simply doesn't seem to exist.

Having perambulated the entire length of the train I am none the wiser and still unseated. Luckily for me, or so I think, each carriage has a printout plastered on the side listing names and seat allocations. The only carriages that don't provide such information are the third-cla.s.s compartments. These are already full of people, boxes, bags of rice and the odd chicken. They are euphemistically referred to as 'free-seating areas', a.k.a. first come, first served. I walk carriage lengths at a time, samosas and bananas in one hand, case and ticket in the other. My nervousness grows exponentially as each printout draws a blank. It seems that every conceivable anagram of the five letters K-O-H-L-I appears save for the correct spelling of my name. I scuttle past another third-cla.s.s carriage, catching myself thinking the worst. Is this where I will have to sit? Having checked every carriage, every list twice I end up back at the head of the train, none the wiser and a great deal wearier. My name appears nowhere. Not in type, not in biro, not in chalk; not even in my own imagination. It is like I have ceased to exist. I have been air-brushed out of Indian railway history in some sort of Stalinist manoeuvre to revise my very being. (As you can see I wasn't taking this experience too personally.) I look at my ticket again in the vain hope that the 2km hike up and down the train might have imbued me with some new power of Indian Railway Ticket Understanding, or IRTU as I will now and for ever call it. Alas, my IRTU is still at novice level. My IRTU has got me to: a) The right station b) The right platform c) On the right day d) At the right time Thereafter my IRTU has failed me. Spectacularly. As I hopelessly flounder, examining my ticket for the thousandth time, the lone Indian Railways official policing this platform walks past. Seeing me obviously confused, he ups his pace in an attempt to avoid close questioning. I manage somehow to trap him as I spread myself and my case and my samosa and bananas as wide as I can. He barely looks at my ticket and instructs me to board any old carriage and let the omniscient conductor sort out the fine detail.

It is 9:24. I have six minutes to make a decision. Time being of the essence I jump into the final carriage, a first-cla.s.s carriage I have intimately examined four times thus far this evening. I find the first available seat and sit down. And I wait. Time is best killed in the pursuit of eating. I eat my samosas, knowing full well I am an interloper sitting in the wrong seat, trying to use the eating of a pyramidical Indian snack as some confident cover for my crime of seat theft.

Conscience gets the better of me. I decide to move to a different seat moments before a family of three crowd around my samosa-crumbed seat and seek refuge. The train has pulled off, a detail that has pa.s.sed me by. I search in vain for a seat called WL5. I settle on another seat, a seat that very roughly approximates to some of the numbers on my ticket. It isn't seat WL5, but it is a seat 5 and it resides amongst some jolly young student types. I brush samosa crumbs from my mouth. I hold my case, my bananas and my breath. I close my eyes and hope that sleep will offer some solace and shelter from my seat-less existence.

No sooner have my eyes shut than images revisit me of the mayhem in the third-cla.s.s carriage; my imagination runs riot. I dream of tooth-free, wrinkled grandmothers in skimpy cotton saris tempting me with newspaper-wrapped food, the provenance of which could not be guaranteed; their long, bony brown fingers ushering me forward, nothing but darkness behind their cold, uncaring eyes. My sleeping mind transfixes on an insolent, big-eyed child, a girl who has, so early in her life, developed anti-Sikh tendencies, eating a rotten mango and offering me nothing but hate. And that chicken, now the size of a small man clucking straight at me, questions my very existence with every juddering movement of its overly large head. And I feel myself being inexorably pulled towards this unreserved, third-cla.s.s dystopia, this free-for-all of humanity, mangoes and poultry; and there is nothing I can do to stop it happening ...

I am snapped out of my stupor by one of the jolly students who gently rocks my shoulder, sparing me from the bony-fingered granny. He politely and eloquently informs me that my big fat hairy Glaswegian a.r.s.e is parked on the wrong seat, a seat that does in fact belong to his friend, another jolly young student type. I am all out of ideas, so I simply submit to fate and show him my ticket. He takes one look and to him, everything became clear. WL, he told me stands for Wait Listed. Wait Listed? All I can see now in my mind's eye is a granny chicken with big insolent eyes, eating a mango. I exclaim. Audibly. I ask him what that means, Wait Listed. He shrugs his shoulders non-commitally. I ask him if I would have to sit with the granny and the chicken and the mango girl. He looks worried. He kindly agrees to sort it out for me. He takes my ticket and digs out his mobile phone from deep within his pocket. Now, remember when I listed all that information they print on the ticket? Well, just above the s.p.a.ce where they print your grandmother's maiden name, the colour of your first pet and your inside leg measurement, there is an official-looking number. He texts this official-looking number to some train conductor somewhere in cybers.p.a.ce. Within seconds the phone beeps back the information that I have seat 22 in carriage A1. A1: the very first carriage on the train. And here I am in the very last carriage. I thank him, I pick up my case, my bananas and myself and head towards the front of the train.

Now here's a little detail you may want to carry with you if you ever find yourself at the furthest available point on a train from your designated seat. Unlike the trains in the UK, Indian train carriages are not interconnected: at least not always. (Needless to say they are interconnected on all those journeys where you find yourself in the right seat, in the right carriage, at the right time.) But as I should have remembered from my early endeavours to try and find my seat, this train is made up of three distinct sets of carriages with no connection between each group of three. I have not fully taken the time to appreciate this little quirk of carriage non-connectivity until I have banged and battered myself down the three lengths of narrow gangway, apologising to the myriad of legs and elbows I collide with as I try to move elegantly through the moving train. After the third carriage I reach an impa.s.se, an impa.s.se of sky-blue painted Indian metal. How am I going to get to my seat? Quite simply: I have to wait until the train makes its next stop and then dash as far as I can along the platform before the train sets off again. An inexact science, I trust you'll agree.

I wait impatiently for the first stop. I decide, in the interests of pragmatism, to ditch the bananas: they will only slow me down. I reckon I could cover the length of three carriages in about five minutes (five minutes would seem to be the minimum stopping time of Indian trains at stations). If I manage to achieve three carriages per stop, then it shouldn't take more than ten or eleven stops to reach the final carriage. Piece of cake. I limber up as the train seems to be slowing down into a station stop.

I alight the train and run like some Madras Moses, parting the sea of brown humanity before me. It seems I am the only one heading to the front of the train. The clock is ticking, my heart is pounding. I manage to pa.s.s six carriages and find myself running alongside third cla.s.s again. I'm sure I see the dead-eyed granny and the mango-eating girl as they are egged on by the mutant chicken. I avert my gaze and keep sprinting. Miraculously the train stays stationary for just enough time to enable me to make my way out of the balmy, sweaty evening into the cool, calm and air-conditioned ambience of first cla.s.s and the expectant emptiness of seat 22, carriage A1. I feel like I have arrived home. And not a stray chicken in sight.

I buy a hot sweet coffee for 5 rupees from the boy who walks up and down the carriage shouting 'coffee' (actually he shouts 'coppee', but I know what he means). In seat 22, carriage A1 I find myself ensconced with a fat, prehistoric man in a white linen shirt, white linen trousers and a white linen jacket. I fully expect his wife to be constructed from white linen. She merely looks long-suffering and tired as he continues the marathon phone call he has been engaged in since I joined the carriage, by now more than an hour or so ago. He continues grunting down the phone.

One would correctly think that the travails of my hunt for the mysteriously wait-listed seat and the nervous tension of the granny, the mango girl and the human-sized chicken might have exhausted me completely. My previous experience from Trivandrum to Chennai has taught me that the higher bunks seem to offer a more enhanced sense of movement of the journey. This can hamper sleep, so wherever possible one should opt for a lower bunk. My much sought-after and sprinted-for seat 22 in carriage A1 is a higher bunk. I decide to move before I get too settled: the carriage is wholly under-subscribed and there is an abundance of free lower bunks to be had.

As I collect myself and my things they don't seem too fussed that I am leaving the compartment, although for a moment I swear I can see in her eye the desire to shout, 'Please, don't go, don't leave me with him ...' The fat prehistoric linen man continues his fat prehistoric phone call.

But my move to the lower bunk is to no avail. As I settle into my new seat, sleep is still a stranger. As I lie rocking on the train, I feel like the only man in the whole world that is awake. My mind drifts inevitably to my next location, the next instalment of my journey. Could there be two more contrasting locations than a sleeper train from Chennai and a coffee shop in Delhi? But it is because of a chance meeting in that coffee shop that I now find myself on this sleeper train. My Mysore meandering was motivated some months back by destiny and cold coffee. Destiny and cold coffee delivered Jeremy Patriciana to me. And now destiny and hot, sweet coffee are delivering me back to him.

My wife is obsessed with three things: India, yoga and really good coffee. After yoga in London she hunts down a really good coffee. When she comes to India she hunts down really good coffee. If she were ever to come to India for yoga, rest a.s.sured coffee-hunting would very much be on the agenda. Her research in the more well-heeled neighbourhoods of Bombay have led her to conclude that the single most reliable and delicious brand of cappuccino in India can be purchased from the chain known as Cafe Coffee All Day. Since her specifications in such matters extend to the number of shots, heat component and general froth factor, I defer to her superior wisdom. So whenever I find myself submerged in the subcontinent without her I always endeavour to find a Cafe Coffee All Day and raise an extra-hot double-shot frothy cappuccino in her name.

I was in Delhi early in 2007, in the middle of a short work trip that involved copious travel, and found myself rather dis...o...b..bulated in a mid-range hotel on a Sunday. I had to remind myself that I was in Delhi and that it was in fact a weekend. I decided to step out of my room into the faded colonial glory that is Connaught Place. Because it was Sunday, it was busy; very busy. Families laughing, lovers quarrelling, dogs barking; then dogs laughing, families quarrelling and lovers barking. Such is the temporal nature of life.

I happened upon a buzzing Cafe Coffee All Day and knew what I must do: drink a coffee for my wife. The place was jumping; a TV blaring noisy and average American MTV. It was mostly full of spoilt brat Delhi kids drinking overpriced coffee and swearing loudly in Americanised English. A few tourists inhabited the air-conditioned sanctuary. I took a table for two. The place filled up so that the sole remaining seat was opposite me. In walked this exceedingly chilled-out guy with long hair and shades; he asked if he could join me. We got chatting and I discovered that Jeremy, a Filipino American, was a devotee of the art of yoga. So devoted was he that he quit life in California as a paediatric cancer nurse and had set up a small yoga school in a place called Mysore. This was too serendipitous, too much of a coincidence. I had always wanted to visit Mysore; my father-in-law studied medicine there in the late fifties and it sounded like a part of India untouched by modernity, still traditional in many ways. It seemed to me that places like Mysore had managed to slip under the burgeoning tourist radar of India. Obviously Goa, Bombay and the like were well-known and well-travelled destinations, but I had thought very few westerners would venture to Mysore.

I was totally wrong. Jeremy told me that Mysore was a hotbed for yogic activity; there were white faces everywhere and numerous yoga centres and hippy hang-outs, including his own.

He seemed such an incongruous person to visit on my adventure through India, a Filipino American former paediatric cancer nurse who is now running a yoga school in the city my father-in-law studied medicine at. Incongruous though he may be, Jeremy also epitomises a contemporary take on that sixties and seventies adventure to India I've mentioned before; foreigners who came to India for self-discovery through yoga, spirituality and a pursuit of inner peace. Now it's the spiritual component to the globalisation of India.

If Jeremy is on a quest to find himself he can aid me on my my quest to find quest to find my myself. How different is Jeremy's experience of India from mine when you actually shake it down? He is a western child of an immigrant who has arrived in India to pursue his truth. Isn't that exactly what I am, albeit an immigrant, one generation removed from India itself? If I can work out what he, as an American Filipino, is learning from India then perhaps I can apply that to my own experience. Cooking for Jeremy should be interesting; yogis are very funny about what they eat, although he has a.s.sured me that they are omnivores at his school. And most of the yoga pract.i.tioners I know all look like they could do with a decent meal. I intend to provide that, based around the delights of Lancashire and its hotpot. And maybe I will be able to touch my toes for the first time in a decade.

Here I am the next morning with yet another hot sweet coffee watching the beautiful golden light of Karnataka in the morning. There is a curious thing about the light in India. For some reason film never seems able to capture the sun's resplendent haze as dawn breaks beautifully over the subcontinent. Beautifully lit coconut groves, shimmering with texture and contrast to the naked eye become just a bunch of coconut trees when committed to film. Or perhaps I am viewing India through my own personal rose-tinted filter?

The train chugs and rocks and creaks onward to an ever nearer Mysore. Not long now, not long. The train slowly wakens, the coffee vendors and the light combine to stir even the deepest of sleepers.

As I said, Mysore is a place I have always wanted to visit and I have heard many different stories about the place. Mysore is famous for two things: the production of sandalwood soap, the fragrance of which is unparalleled in the world of beauty products; and possibly the most beautiful Maharajah's palace in all of India. The palace was completed nearly a hundred years ago and is said to be illuminated by no less than 5,000 lights that's when they are all working. The city was politically and culturally prominent in the fifteenth century when it was ruled by the Wadiyar kings on and off until Independence in 1947. They were great patrons of the arts and culture. But to my mind the single most appealing fact about Mysore is its unusually small population for an Indian city. It is said to be less than a million people.

And the unusually uncrowded Mysore is lovely; at least the Mysore I am seeing. Jeremy emailed me his address and through the gift of text messaging has sent me directions that I somehow have managed to convey to the rickshaw wallah. We leave the smart train station heading off to the nearby suburb of Gokalam. As we travel down leafy wide streets canopied by over-arching trees splattered with brilliant red blossom, I enjoy the gentle calm to this cool beautiful morning. The sky is big and has a welcoming tranquillity about it. The morning breeze augurs well for a temperate day ahead. I shan't miss the oppressive heat of Kovalam and Mamallapuram.

Cooking for Jeremy gives me a unique chance to pull together a variety of elements from new India. The yogic tradition that stretches back to my own childhood is an obvious and delightful coincidence; the fact that foreigners are still coming to India four decades on in a desire to engage with eastern mysticism is fascinating to me. Combine this with the status of Mysore as an ancient Indian city, steeped in culture and tradition, and, finally, with my father-in-law's links with the place, it gives me an overall sense of warmth.

I arrive at what my rickshaw driver a.s.sures me is Gokalam. I am tired but pleasantly surprised by the prettiness of Mysore. Jeremy meets me outside the small Ganesh shrine in his street, an easy landmark for rickshaw drivers and beggars. At this point I realise that Jeremy is only one conversation better acquainted to me than those numerous rickshaw drivers and beggars. I barely know the man, yet have entrusted myself to him for the next few days. I'm sure I don't let my panic show. The centre occupies the second and third floor of Durga Mansions in a picturesque suburb of Mysore. The kitchen, where I will later be cooking, and the bedrooms are on the second fl oor and the yoga room and training area are up on the third with Jeremy's and Suresh's rooms.

Jeremy takes me up to the third floor immediately and offers to show me a few loosening moves. My timing is far from perfect since Jeremy has a meditation cla.s.s with Suresh, his guru, and so we have limited time. I'm hardly complaining. I have just arrived and haven't yet visited the toilet. There is a very real chance that this body-bending behaviour may well cause me some 'natural' embarra.s.sment. I am bent and pulled and pushed and breathed and I try hard to look like I know what I am doing whilst hoping against hope that my rectal gas will remain rectal. This yoga lark is b.l.o.o.d.y hard work. There seems a beautifully visual irony as the brown-skinned Indian man (me) struggles to follow the yogic shapes of the loose-limbed yellow-skinned Filipino American man (Jeremy). Whilst at the time all my efforts were focused on remaining upright and non-flatulent, with hindsight perhaps that moment said as much about modern India as my journey of self-discovery. Maybe.

Suddenly the enigmatic Suresh appears, as if out of the ether, noiselessly joining us. He also has long hair tied back. He has dark, brooding eyes and an honest, open face. When he smiles he shows kindness. He seems like a lovely bloke. And he has a Mexican bandit moustache. So that's the tableau: a slightly overweight, hairy Sikh bloke, a good-looking, buff Filipino American and a Svengali-looking Indian dude with a great moustache. All we need now is a buxom girl trying to learn yoga whose clothes keep falling off and we have the makings of a really bad p.o.r.n movie.

Suresh intimates that it is time for their meditation cla.s.s. Jeremy has been learning from Suresh for almost eighteen months. His training should be complete in another two and a half years. They kindly let me sit in on the meditation.

We enter the yoga room. A Bhudda sits contently in the corner, an iPod sits contently in its iDock. This juxtaposition should have given the game away immediately. Suresh and Jeremy sit down in a very strategic way, tucking certain parts of their left legs in and under certain other parts of their right legs. I soon realise that nothing yogis do is ever anything other than completely thought through. They plan to meditate for seventy-five minutes. Seventy-five minutes. I have never done anything that involves sitting still in one place for seventy-five minutes. And sitting in one place while watching two other blokes breathing and sitting still in one place, is not about to become the first way I spend seventy-five minutes sitting still. Thankfully Jeremy says that I can leave whenever I get bored. But what is the patience protocol in the world of meditation? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? I know I can't sit on the hard concrete floor for an hour and a quarter, not with what my a.r.s.e has been through on the trip thus far. I resolve that it would be rude to leave any sooner than thirty-five minutes in, and that I should wait for an arbitrary number somewhere between thirty-five and forty, so as I don't seem too keen to exit.

They unfurl the curtains and a gloom descends on the already gloomy evening. A small candle is lit before a deity, offering the only real light in the room. The yogic two sit cross-legged, right foot on left thigh, left foot under right thigh. Impressive, and they haven't even started the breathing bit. Suresh takes his mobile out and sets the alarm for the end of the session. I love the collision of worlds; the meditative wonder of yoga and the harsh electronic alarm of a Sony Ericksson mobile phone. In many ways, all that is India is contained in this very room: the spiritual heritage that Suresh, a Karnatakan villager, represents; the contemporary fascination that the 'civilised' west has with the subcontinent, epitomised by Jeremy's presence; and me: the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child of east and west, the chronicler of the contemporary.

Suresh starts a gentle chant, a monotone that is strangely hypnotic. This continues for ten minutes or so. It is both calming and rea.s.suring. Then, in a ritual complex in its simplicity, they each inhale gradually through a single nostril, seizing more air with each nasal inhalation. The third inhalation is the final. They then hold their breaths, and with open hands resting on knees, they count. They then exhale through the other nostril, in three controlled bursts. They repeat the same for the other nostril. It's slightly mesmeric, the sounds of air pa.s.sing through the nose, the very deliberate movement of the hand to the opposite nostril to block it. Every so often, no doubt in a pattern clearer to the more well-trained eye, they perform a series of alternate nasal clearances, by which I mean the most definite clearing of nasal cavities. Then the process begins all over again. I am enchanted for nearly three quarters of an hour. The dull city sounds ever more distant with every inhalation, its random, unstructured noise falling into sharp relief against the tranquillity of hypnotic human breath. It's truly beautiful. But I really need to break wind, so I leave ...

I wander about the rooms, generally trying to get a sense of the place. There are all the usual curios and accoutrements to spirituality lying around: Ganesh statues, Hanuman wall hangings, incense sticks, a pack of playing cards and some poker chips. A pack of playing cards and some poker chips? Surely some mistake. As I shuffle the cards and riffle the chips, Jeremy, fresh from his breathing and breath-holding, appears from around the corner.

'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-gla.s.s 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 succ.u.mbed, 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 b.u.t.tery 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.