Indian Takeaway Part 7

I now wander the market looking for potatoes for the mash, peas and apples. Apple sauce and pork are like Astaire and Rogers, Gilbert and Sullivan, Morecambe and Wise; some things are simply meant to be together. It's a strange sort of market, a blend of food and fancy goods. Now you probably take for granted the phrase 'fancy goods'. Fancy goods however are the most troubling sorts of goods for me. Their very description is oxymoronic and deceitful. These goods are bad and they're anything but fancy. Rovi, my beloved cousin, is an expert on fancy goods. He has travelled the world sourcing fancy goods; buying fancy goods; selling fancy goods. He is the king of fancy goods. Quite how to define fancy goods is a challenge. They are curios or trinkets, made in bulk and more often than not plastic or acrylic or otherwise manmade. There isn't a good that's fancy that Rovi hasn't an opinion on. Even Rovi would survey these fancy goods and question the platonic essence of their fanciness and their goodness. A small multi-coloured, plastic monkey with a ball attached to its hand by an elastic string? Not fancy and not terribly good.

I leave the market potatoless, pea-free and without apples. Panic sets in. What is the point of roast pork belly without mash and apple sauce? Rosewell, through the gift of broken English combined with my irreparable Hindi, tells me there are some roadside stalls where we can purchase vegetables and fruit. We extricate the Amba.s.sador from the mayhem of ice delivery, which seems to be turning into a full-blown musical outside the market, and escape, the pork warm against my leg (there's a phrase I never thought I'd find myself writing).

Now, you would think it would be relatively unchallenging to purchase potatoes in a country that does more things with potatoes than the National a.s.sociation of Potato-growers on International 'Do something different with a potato' Day. You would think. Or perhaps this is my ignorance of pan-Indian vegetables. Given my Punjabi ancestry, I a.s.sume all of India is the same when it comes to food availability. The Punjab is rich in agricultural resources. There's nothing the Punjabis can't grow. Potatoes are a staple of the north Indian diet. Potatoes with everything. That would appear not to be the case in Goa.

Four stalls later I am still bereft of carbohydrate. The good news is that I've managed to purchase some peas; at least I think they're peas. If projected at high velocity, one can imagine these green spheres becoming military missiles of ma.s.s destruction, perforating any person who would dare to come into its path. They're b.l.o.o.d.y hard. Nonetheless, they are, technically, peas. I have also acquired apples. Fifty rupees for four apples; it is not much cheaper than British prices. This is explained as we drive away. Rosewell tells me these are imported apples. Even India thinks other people's apples are better than theirs. I return to Orlando's tattie-free.

'Don't worry, man,' Orlando says. 'We got some sweet potatoes somewhere.'

But sweet potatoes are nothing like potatoes at all. In fact, I've often wondered why grocers and supermarkets are not prosecuted under the trade descriptions act for wilfully misleading us into thinking that a sweet potato is a potato that's a bit sweet. With the pork belly being too fatty, what I really need is the floury mouth-filling comfort of a real potato. Don't get me wrong, I love a sweet potato like the next man. There is nothing finer to accompany Caribbean goat curry than a deep fried sweet potato. Roasted in the oven with thyme and honey, sweet potato can be a significant launch pad to any sort of main course experience. Even mashed with chilli, garlic and spring onion (a sort of Caribbean champ), it is a meal in itself. But it simply won't work with my over-fat piglet pork belly.

In the late-morning light of Orlando's first-floor kitchen, my suspicions about the fat to flesh ratio of the belly are confirmed. Not only is it too fat, the skin still has nipples on it. Thankfully, the nipples make the hair seem more palatable, unlikely though that seems. I've clearly been sold a pup. Before I spiral downward into a porcine nightmare, Rosewell returns, a bag of potatoes in his hand. Never before have I felt the desire to kiss a man full on the lips. Rosewell knows he has done a good thing and I ask him to stay for lunch. Unfortunately he can't, such is the life of a freelance cab driver in Goa. At least I have potato now to a.s.suage my issues with the pork.

I decide the best course of action is to trim the belly as much as I can. The problem with fatty belly cuts is that fat is by its very nature slippery, and grabbing hold of the fat before gently divorcing it from the flesh is trickier than one might think. Thankfully some of the fat allows itself to be removed but in amongst the nipples and hair, there seem to be mud marks on the belly; the sort of mud that even Ariel at sixty degrees would struggle to shift.

In amongst shearing nipples, slicing fat and removing hair I find myself thinking of Keith in Waitrose. I never have to do this to the pork belly he sells me. But then Keith and Waitrose on Finchley Road feel like a million miles and many lifetimes away from here. Short of an oven to roast the belly, I have to rely on an old north Italian method. They are renowned for twice cooking their pork belly. First they poach the pig slowly in milk, then roast it to a crisp finish. I will poach and then fry, keeping my fingers crossed for the selfsame crispy finish.

Orlando's kitchen is not a cooking kitchen, it's a kitchen to be looked at; he can't remember the last time they didn't eat out. The de-haired, de-nippled, de-fatted and de-mudded pork fills Orlando's biggest gla.s.s pan. I can see, through the smoked gla.s.sware, the defiant pork, insolent in its milky bath, willing this recipe to fail. If I'm to be honest, I can't say I'm feeling so confident myself. As the milk starts to warm, I peel and chop the apples. I chop half the apples very finely with the hope that these will break down and dissolve more readily, forming the sauce around the larger chunks of apple; it's my intention to give Orlando and the kids a two-textured apple sauce. The apples sit in a large pan with a dash of water and more than enough sugar to help the process on its way, bearing in mind Indian sugar for some reason seems to be significantly less sweet that Tate & Lyle. My pork and apple sit hob by hob, side by side and I watch and sweat. Inspiration takes hold of me. I add a healthy slug of cashew fenny into the apples. When in Goa ... I peel the potatoes and the trinity of pans in front of me suggest a meal may well be served. As to the quality of the repast ...

I can't help but wonder about Orlando's wife stuck in London miles away from her family and then I realise the parallels with my own family. My mother was stuck in that Sinclair Drive shop while my father showed his sons his India. Are Orlando and his family any different?

The milk comes to the boil and I turn it down to simmer. The apples look about as saucy as they're going to get, which doesn't look nearly saucy enough. When you read the ingredients on the side of Bramley apple sauce, you wonder how difficult it can be to make yourself. I suggest you try it and soon you will know the alchemy of apple sauce. I hope that having turned out the apple sauce and refrigerated it, the sugary syrup will thicken, and it might just work. The pork has been simmering now for twenty minutes. I know I keep banging on about the fat content, but you have to understand, the very composition of this Goan pork has rendered my every calculation meaningless. I'm not sure whether I should boil fattier pork for less time or more time; I'm not even sure whether I'm meant to boil it at all. Too late because I have. I turn off the heat and allow my piggy friend to sit in its milk bath for a little longer. There's one thing I'm sure of; I'd rather have overcooked pork than undercooked pork. I am also acutely aware that this evening we are to return to Travellers for that elusive pork vindaloo. My pork offering had better be good.

I kill the fifteen minute wait by phoning my brother-in-law Unni in Bombay. His wife, Anu, is my wife's cousin; they're very close. Unni is a commercials director who has started making movies in the new vibrant, modern India. His love of European cinema and my love of modern India seem to be a happy intersection in our lives. He holidays annually in Goa.

'What are you doing?' he asks me.

I explain to Unni where I'm staying.

'We are buying a place there. There, in that complex.' Unni is incredulous. That makes two of us.

Now I am aware of the dimensions of the globe, the circ.u.mference, the radius, the surface area of the planet. No matter how one looks at it, this world is many things but small. It transpires that the house he has made an offer on is four houses away from Orlando's. You travel halfway round the world but coincidence is never far away.

I bring the robust peas to the boil in heavily salted water. I don't know what it is about these peas but they really scare me. My fear is well placed. I have never in all my life witnessed peas emit so much green to the water they boil in. Now, when I say green, let me explain. At the start of the cooking process, the peas were green (correct) and the water was clear (correct). By the end of the cooking process, the peas are less green (not right) and the water is radioactively green (very, very wrong). I am really not sure whether I should serve these peas, but on balance I'm serving the peas and not the radioactive water, so I feel a little more comfortable about their presence on the plate.

It's time to bring everything together. A frying pan with oil is heated on the hob. I dry the milk-soaked pork belly in the vain hope that the oil, like some biblical miracle, will manage to crisp up the skin. It's never going to happen. I place as many pieces of pork belly into the hot oil as will fit and genuinely pray. I'm not quite sure who I'm meant to be praying to, given my own personal confusion towards the supreme being and the fact that I happen to be in the most Christian place I have ever been to (including the Vatican). Nevertheless, I find myself almost audibly uttering the words, 'Please G.o.d, make them crispy.' I distract myself by mashing the now boiled potatoes, embellishing them with luscious Indian b.u.t.ter and a little milk. I retrieve the apple sauce from the fridge. Now I'm muttering, 'Please G.o.d, make it saucy.' Clearly, if there is a G.o.d, she or he is otherwise occupied since my apple sugar and fenny mix is sticky rather than saucy. I'm hopeful that Orlando and the kids will have very limited experience of proper apple sauce.

We eat. Carlos, being Carlos, feels it is too hot for mash and rightly deems the pork belly too fatty. Having said that, I can't ever remember seeing him eat anything. He would have been very happy with a bowl full of c.o.ke. Charlene likes the fat when it is crispy and loves the mash. Orlando leaves nothing, but then again, Orlando is a lovely man, so I wouldn't let that be any sort of reflection on the quality of the meal.

The meal over, the afternoon heat descends and with bellies full, a kip is required. So we sleep, with the promise of a drive down to the beach for sunset.

It takes no more than twenty minutes to drive to the beach, chasing the sunset full of pork for the second time in one day. A few hundred people gather at Colva to watch the sky darken, to eat ice cream and to paddle through the ebbing, incoming waters. I would have thought that coming to Goa, the very epicentre of the traveller's journey of self-discovery, might have offered me a few more answers. But I am feeling that I am leaving with yet another clutch of questions. The last thing I expected to find on this quest was an Indian duality like my British duality. Orlando is a proud Goan, but does not regard himself as Indian. Is Orlando any different from me? He is, in so far as I am engaged with my dual heritage, my Britishness and my Indian past. For Orlando, life in that regard is very simple.

Perhaps that is why Goa doesn't really feel like India. This is an alien land, a mini-nation of fiercely proud and independent people that bears very little relation to India herself. I am almost halfway through my journey and I seem to have seen a hundred different Indias and a hundred different Hardeeps on the way.

Perhaps my dad was right. Maybe I should not have bothered with Goa. And maybe cooking British food for Indians is futile. The journey is beginning to feel futile. I am not at all sure what I am learning.

The waves crash and the sky is incarnadine, the multicoloured bodies slowly become monochrome as the glorious gloom of night descends. Suddenly, for a moment, my whole journey becomes clear in fading twilight. I have travelled halfway around the world to find myself. But I now realise that I cannot truly do so until I lose myself in the experience of India.

All the while I have been travelling, from Kovalam through Mamallapuram, Mysore and Bangalore I have been trying to relate everything to what I already know, as if I were some sort of scientist. Standing on this beach, feeling the sand between my toes and the grains of time slipping silently through my fingers I begin to understand. The darkness brings light.

Then I hear in the distance an all too familiar sound. A broad Lancashire accent.

'Have we missed the sunset? b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. My feet are b.l.o.o.d.y throbbing ...' A fat, sunburnt tourist is waddling towards the beach, wholly unaware of her own volume and blissfully unaware of her terrible dress sense.

'My b.l.o.o.d.y feet ... '

And in an instant, clarity, like the sun, has vanished.

8.

DELHI BELLY.

'Hi, Dad.'

'How's it going? Where are you now?' He was clearly happy to hear from me. 'Left Goa this morning. I'm in Bombay now and heading for Delhi,' I said. The bus from Goa had been remarkably unremarkable. It had been the single journey I was dreading the most. Yet I have arrived in Bombay rested and relaxed. It promises to be a smooth onward journey all the way up to the north. But promises can easily be broken.

'You flying?' my dad asked.

'No, Dad. Train. Change at Bombay.'

'Are you not stopping in Bombay, son? If you are you have to meet Joggi Saini.'

'No, Dad. I'm not stopping here. Can't do everything. I'm going straight up to Delhi. I've done Banglore. How many cities can I see?'

'OK.'

'Dad, quick question. When you left India, did you know who you were, or were you trying to find yourself?' No sooner had I asked the question than I knew the answer.

'I never understood this finding yourself nonsense. Maybe it's a cultural or generational difference. I always knew who I was. Finding myself was never a luxury I could afford.'

'OK. Sorry, Dad.'

'Now, have you told Manore Uncle you are coming to Delhi? I spoke to him yesterday and they are expecting you. Rovi will look after you.'

'I'll call them today. Everything else OK, Dad?'

'Yes. Fine. How's the cooking?' he asked.

'You know ...' I allowed my answer to tail off in a noncommittal sort of a way.

'Son?'

'Yes, Dad?'

'When you come back ...' He paused.

'Yes?' I prompted.

'There are some doc.u.ments to sign. Call me from Delhi.'

I hung up.

I've been to Delhi many times. When I was a boy, Delhi was the gateway to north India. To get to Ferozepure we had to fly into the capital. Delhi was also the last Indian city my dad lived in. His wanderl.u.s.t was nascent even when he was a young man. The vista of Ferozepure was never going to be enough to satisfy him, much as he loved the place of his birth. He was bound to seek his fortune elsewhere. My father as a man in his mid-twenties left his physical and spiritual home for a short placement in New Delhi; he planned to be there just for a few years. That was more than forty years ago.

He ended up never returning home. Home. This echoes with my own life. I too left Glasgow my home at the tender age of twenty-two. My plan was to leave for three months. That was in 1992 and I have never returned there to live.

Delhi to me is a strong and shining beacon from my childhood. I remember with astonishing vividness the fun that my dad always seemed to have whenever we were there. He would be relaxed and smiling, even though we were always in transit to another place. He knew the city intimately, despite the changes it had gone through since he'd lived there. He very much loved Delhi. We would venture out on a Vespa, hugging him tightly for dear life; such journeys were probably memorable for those very hugs, stolen from a loving but non-tactile father. Delhi felt like my dad's city and because I loved my dad, admired him, I too wanted Delhi to be my city; I wanted to be just like my dad.

The thought occurred to me as I prepared myself for the last few stops on my journey that my emotional energy was increasing. Maybe this entire journey I was undertaking was actually about me and my dad. Maybe, in launching myself on this quest of self-discovery, all I really wished for was my father's approval. After all, he sprang to life when I had suggested the possibility of such a madcap escapade. And although he expressed his reservations, as only he could, about my desire to share British food with the Indians, he was nonetheless supportive of my endeavours. Wouldn't it be the sweetest of ironies if I was going halfway around the world and enduring thousands of miles of travel around the Indian subcontinent in order that I might seek the approval and blessing of a 74-year-old man in the West End of Glasgow? Maybe this whole trip was about the big fella ...

Twenty-one colours of turbans I have seen my dad wear Lime GreenSky BlueBurnt OrangeSunset PinkSoft PeachMint GreenChocolate BrownRose WhiteMidnight BlueDeep PurpleVerdant GreenShocking PinkElectric YellowDried EarthTonic GreySoft HeatherStrawberry RedUnripe SatsumaMilitary KhakiStorm GreyLemon Curd My father was a customs officer at New Delhi airport. He planned to spend only a short period there, enjoying the metropolitan buzz of city life while he surveyed his options. He ended up making a home for himself and living a bachelor lifestyle. His best friend, Manore Kapoor, had settled there with his wife, so my dad was as happy as he could possibly be. Manore Uncle's wife, Kapoor Aunty as we affectionately call her, was a legend in the kitchen, even in the sixties. My dad had the best of both worlds: all the fun of bachelordom with great home-cooked food from his best friend's wife.

I think in many ways Delhi was the making of my father. He was a small-town boy with aspirations. Delhi gave him a flavour of a life less ordinary. It nurtured his aspirations. It was the start of a journey he has yet to complete. And how poignant for me that I am on an as yet incomplete journey and I find myself in New Delhi. As I arrive in the city I think back to the beach in Goa, to my moment of clarity when I realised that I would have to give myself to India rather than hope that India had anything to give me. As you know, I have visited India many times, for many reasons, but never have I travelled here seeking knowledge through the prism of myself. That is what is making this journey so significant and so daunting.

I feel I should be learning about myself, I should be acquiring new information about who I am and why I am here. The problem is that stepping off the plane in Kovalam all those weeks ago was an entirely different man. Now I'm in a city I have known for most of my life and I feel like I barely know who I am; this quest has changed me. I am sure of very little, except that the notion of Indianness for me is utterly meaningless. I am not Indian; not in the slightest. Did I feel Indian in Kovalam or Goa or Mysore? I felt Scottish, British and Punjabi. Here, almost in New Delhi, I feel Punjabi. I am a Punjabi Sikh Glaswegian who also feels some empathy with being British. That's how I feel today, on my way to New Delhi.

I have never arrived in Delhi before by train. There's a very good reason for that. The train journey from Bombay to Delhi is listed as lasting twenty-nine hours but they could pick any prime number and that would also be believable. The number bears no resemblance to the actual journey time. I find myself in carriage A at Bombay station. Now, I thought Madras station was swollen with humanity; Bombay station makes Madras look like Chipping Campden mid-morning on a wet Wednesday. It is as if all of India and their extended families from overseas have decided to descend upon the city at the same time. The concept of personal s.p.a.ce is constantly being questioned. On the way from the taxi to the concourse, I am simultaneously touched in seven different places by six different people.

You would think it relatively straightforward to hop on a train between the two of the biggest Indian cities, but logic doesn't always apply to India. There are four trains leaving this station for Delhi in the next four hours. I'm not altogether sure which one I'm meant to be on. All I know is I'm in coach A of one of them. As I've become so accustomed to doing, I take a small census of opinion from those on the platform and then from those in the carriage of the most likely-looking train. It seems as if the Indian mail train that leaves Bombay at 16:43 is the train I'm destined to be on.

Destiny is a word with thousands of new connotations in India. Was I predestined to be on this train? If it's the wrong train and I was predestined to be on it, was I predestined to realise I was on the wrong train? Or, was I predestined to be on the wrong train and not realise I was on the wrong train and, so predestined to travel on the wrong train? But what of that predestiny, if it has placed me on the wrong train and not alerted me to this fact? Yet I still find myself arriving at the same city I would have arrived at had I been on the train I was predestined to be on. I'm not sure I understand any of this, either.

Coach A it is. I happily place myself in the hands of destiny. I am in many ways destiny's child; I'm a survivor. In a strange way, the length of this journey doesn't scare me. There's almost something biorhythmic about a journey of this length; something magical about the way one's body starts to move with the motion of the train, becoming one with the steel, the wood and the gla.s.s of the locomotive. There is comfort in the length of the journey, an inherent sense of preemptive accomplishment. There is the ebb, there is the flow, there are the peaks, there are the troughs, there is the ying, there is the yang. And then, there's the diarrhoea.

And what diarrhoea. In the world of needles, there are a mult.i.tude of sizes, shapes and styles. Jesus once spoke of the difficulty of a rich man gaining entry into the kingdom of heaven being on a par with the ease at which a camel could slip through the eye of a needle. Imagine, if you will, the smallest needle with the smallest eye. Fix that image clearly in your mind. It is easier to slip a camel through the eye of that needle than it is for me to stop s.h.i.tting through it.

I didn't even get an hour or so's honeymoon period before the liquidity in my bowels made itself known. And when I say it made itself known, it was a bang rather than a whimper. No sooner had we left the station than I'd left my seat; and the contents of my guts left my body. (At least I thought it was the contents of my guts; I'm a big man but even I was astonished at the ability of the human body to produce liquid excrement with such regularity, such immediacy and with such pain. Such deep, deep pain.) I thought the best thing to do upon evacuating my bowels for the fifth time was to seek some solace in slumber. It is amazing what happens to the human body when a.s.sailed by what we can euphemistically call 'internal difficulties'. There's a reason why you very, very rarely defecate in your sleep. Your body will not allow it. Therefore you endure the shallowest of sleeps, a sleep that is essentially not sleep at all, but rather what we in Scotland call a dwam dwam; a zombie-like state that exists somewhere between a sense of full wakefulness and a vague feeling of sleeping. It's the worst of both worlds and extending that into a third dimension is the gurgling promise, nay threat, of a belly you thought you had emptied for the last time somehow filling itself up again with liquid drawn from the four corners of your already battered and bruised body. I think it is clear that I wasn't having the best of times.

Contradictory though it seems, although your body keeps spewing out more liquid than it could possibly have absorbed, you need to replace your fluids. I know this thanks to Rajiv Sinha.

Smoking cigarettes is absolutely the biggest crime in the Sikh religion. You can harm small animals, beat your children and embezzle funds from the gurdwara gurdwara committee and still maintain some degree of respect within the community. If however you were to light a cigarette, not only would you be burning tobacco, you would also be setting light to any prayer, any hope or any chance of not being completely and utterly ostracised by the wider family of Sikhs. Smoking is forbidden within the scriptures of the religion; it is outlawed; it is forbidden. Sikhs hate smoking. I feel my point has been made. committee and still maintain some degree of respect within the community. If however you were to light a cigarette, not only would you be burning tobacco, you would also be setting light to any prayer, any hope or any chance of not being completely and utterly ostracised by the wider family of Sikhs. Smoking is forbidden within the scriptures of the religion; it is outlawed; it is forbidden. Sikhs hate smoking. I feel my point has been made.

When I was thirteen years old, I smoked. I was a rebellious and foolish teenager. (This will be the first time my parents will know about my smoking; I suspect my mother had her suspicions, but this is as confessional as it gets). I smoked, and I was wrong to smoke. I was a fat Sikh boy at a Catholic school; I had no friends and wanted to do all I could to ingratiate myself with anyone who would stop for a moment and allow me to be ingratiating. You have to understand that the eighties was all about the hair and as a kid with a turban I was always going to suffer. This is all about my childhood struggle for ident.i.ty. I had no idea who I was when I was growing up in Glasgow. There were no role models for fat Sikh kids. No pop stars, footballers or actors that looked like me. All the people I could relate to were of an older generation; they weren't British-born Scots. I was clutching at straws in an attempt to work out who I was.

But that wasn't the sole reason for my dalliance with f.a.gs. I smoked because I thought it made me cool. It also meant I had things that people wanted, namely cigarettes. They would have to be nice to me if they wanted me to give them a cigarette and so I had instant friends. Smoking was my own private foolishness and I thought I was the only one who would suffer the consequences of my low-to-middle tar actions.

For some unknown reason, Rajiv Sinha took it upon himself to police my life. And his intervention led to my elder, stronger and draconian brother, Raj, laying into me. Raj managed to use the Sinha boy's information to lever all sorts of 'favours' out of me, an abuse of privilege he spun out for many years.

To this day, I honestly and sincerely have no idea why he did it. But whilst many in Glasgow will have forgotten the miners' strike, the a.s.sa.s.sination of Indira Gandhi and the second goal Holland scored against Scotland at the 1978 World Cup that put us out on goal difference, they will still remember Rajiv Sinha and his unwarranted sharing of information.

There is another point about the Sinhas that merits a digression. During our friendship Meatloaf released his debut alb.u.m, the multi-platinum, rock-iconic Bat Out of h.e.l.l Bat Out of h.e.l.l. No teenage Glaswegian boy's house was complete without a copy of the alb.u.m, each boy having his favourite track. John-Paul Glenday played his audio ca.s.sette version so often, he actually managed to erase the entire recording. But the anthem that united us as an army of conceptual rock-alb.u.m lovers was the t.i.tle track itself. In the context of my life, the Judo-Christian notion of a mammal like a bat exiting the fire and brimstone of h.e.l.l was secondary to the fact that Meatloaf sung: 'like a sinner [Sinha] before the gates of heaven, I'll come crawling on back to you'. Therefore, whilst others interpret the anthem as being about redemption and the concept of a life beyond the temporal, I just imagine Aloke Sinha, Rajiv's brother and my great friend, before the gates of heaven on a silver Black Phantom bike.

My enmity with Rajiv developed over the years. We would sneer at each other, but I'd yet to find a way of exacting the correct calibre of revenge upon his Bollywood-loving body. In the words of John Milton, 'They also serve, who only stand and wait.' I stood. I waited. I was served.

When Rajiv was sixteen he ended up in hospital in Glasgow, seriously dehydrated after a mild bout of diarrhoea turned into a form of dysentery based on the fact that he refused to drink any liquids, thinking the liquids were causing his diarrhoea. f.u.c.kwit.

It wasn't even as if his system had been a.s.sailed by foreign bodies. He was at home in Bis...o...b..iggs. From that day on, I've always been aware of the need to replace lost fl uids during an unforgiving attack. And on this train on this journey at this time I suddenly feel perhaps my vehemence towards Rajiv has been somewhat misplaced all these years. I should never have wished ill upon him; perhaps he would never have had diarrhoea, perhaps he would never have ended up with a mild form of dysentery, perhaps we would still be friends today and perhaps I wouldn't be feeling moments from death. Perhaps.

I find myself between a rock and a hard place. For some reason there seems to be very little water for sale on the train, but there seem to be a lot of tea and coffee vendors. You may know the effect hot liquids like tea and coffee have on the bowel; the last thing my oversized Glaswegian Sikh bowels need is any further encouragement. That is my rock. My hard place is the fact that I can physically feel myself dehydrating; I have no choice. I drink a cup of tea or coffee, coffee or tea, from every vendor that pa.s.ses by. By some fluke of Indian Railways bureaucracy, not only is my berth the bottom berth, thereby giving me easy access up and out without contorting my a.n.a.l cavity in a way that may encourage rogue slippage, my seat is also almost adjacent to the toilet. From a p.r.o.ne position, I can be moaning, bent double on the western-style (!) toilet in less than eighteen seconds.

Most of the rest of the journey is a blur of tea, coffee and lavatory visits. I feel my body weight halve as night becomes morning, morning melds into afternoon and afternoon metamorphoses into the next evening. If I'm honest, I'm not altogether clear quite how I'm going to make it through the journey. But I do. I think we sometimes take for granted the resilience of our minds, the resilience of our bodies and the resilience of good quality Calvin Klein underwear. As the train pulls up in New Delhi station it is as if the entire experience has been a personal test visited upon my being; I start to feel better, almost instantly. Perhaps it's because I know Rovi is waiting for me and I know he is taking me home.

Rovi meets me at the station. Who, you are wondering, is Rovi? Rovi is Wovi's brother. Rovi and Wovi. Wovi and Rovi, sons of Manore Kapoor, my dad's best friend from college.

Whenever we came to Delhi we stayed with the Kapoors. Our first visit to them was in 1979. I remember it vividly because my dad had taken us three out for a drive and when we came home we saw Rovi and Wovi going through our suitcases. It was highly amusing to catch them red-handed rifling through our belongings. Highly amusing for us, if not for them. They knew they had been rumbled; they knew they were alibi-and explanation-free. We stood and watched as they replaced everything silently and left the room.

That trip was also the time I got to sample one of the delights of north Indian cooking. I was about ten years old and had just woken from a jetlag-induced slumber; my father was sitting at the table with the Kapoors tucking into what looked and smelled like a sumptuous lunch.

'Come here, son.' My father beckoned me over. I remember at the time there being smiles exchanged but hadn't quite registered that they were at my expense.

'Try this.' He offered me a laden spoonful from a dish of curry that lay in front of him.

'What is it, Dad?' I was young; I was newly awake; I was hungry. I wasn't refusing to eat it. I just wanted some idea of what I was about to eat.

'Kalaa ... ' he said, his loving use of Punjabi encouraging me to eat. ... ' he said, his loving use of Punjabi encouraging me to eat.

'OK.' He was my dad. I trusted him.

I guided a spoonful of the diced white substance, smothered in a rich brown sauce into my mouth. It felt a little strange but not altogether disgusting. But I distinctly remember registering the experience of a brand new texture in my mouth.

They all started laughing. Clearly I was missing a crucial piece of this cuisinal jigsaw.

'Do you know what it is?' asked my father, fighting back the tears.

I shook my head.

'Goat's brain curry,' he said. 'It'll make you clever!' he continued.

'Goat's brain curry,' he repeated through tears of laughter.

I stood there chewing as they all laughed at the goat-braineating fat boy from Glasgow.

'Clever like a goat?' I asked, not previously aware that goats had been particularly celebrated in the animal kingdom for their searing wit and intelligence. This made them laugh even more. It was at this point in my life that I realised there was something of the accidental entertainer within me.

On the table beside the goat brain curry was a dish that I would walk over broken gla.s.s merely to inhale its aroma. It's another north Indian speciality and in all my life I have never found a better version of this dish than Rovi's mum's; in many ways it's worth the airfare to Delhi alone. We call it bartha bartha; it might better be described to the non-Punjabi speaker as smoked aubergine curry. And it is truly, truly sublime. It is similar in preparation to babaganoush, the dish I prepared for Jeremy the yoga freak and his Svengali, Suresh, in Mysore. The aubergine is placed directly on the flame until the skin is charred black. The masala cooks simultaneously in a pot. Onions, c.u.min, chillies, tomatoes, turmeric and garlic sizzle away slowly until they form the spicy brown paste to which the de-skinned, mashed aubergine flesh is added and further cooked. Peas are often introduced to create a smoky, spicy, slightly sweet dish of perplexing deliciousness.

It had been my plan since I left London to ask Rovi's mum to make bartha bartha for me; I hadn't tasted her for me; I hadn't tasted her bartha bartha since that day in 1979 and had dreamt about it ever since. since that day in 1979 and had dreamt about it ever since.