Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (11 page)

The quintessential toddy shop in Kerala is still a male bastion—unsurprisingly, in a state that its residents say is still a deeply conservative one. ‘Just yesterday afternoon,’ Mahesh Thampy had told me, ‘I saw three local women standing at a pushcart, eating a few dosas off paper plates. And people stared incessantly, very unused to even that simple sight.’

But in the last few years, two elevating things have happened. The toddy shop, long a part of authentic Kerala, has now become a part of Authentic Kerala, the tourist-brochure version of the state, and female visitors will not be denied their right to sit in cabanas and order toddy and karimeen. Also, the subculture of toddy shop food has begun to be celebrated, and the food desired not merely as incendiary accompaniment to liquor but in its own right. Enter, then, the toddy parlour. Even its nomenclature is such a far cry from that of the toddy shop that it deserves commentary. The toddy ‘shop’ indicates the most basic of transactions, where money changes hands, a product is sold, and the customer heads for the exit. With toddy, the process is only slightly less rapid. Few of the paddy field
workers, itinerant cyclists or other local drinkers wish to actually tarry in a toddy shop longer than it takes to knock back a few glasses, so that the alcohol can hot up the blood faster and cheaper. The toddy ‘parlour,’ on the other hand, carries the weight of both etymology and custom. The word ‘parlour’ comes from the French ‘parler,’ to talk, and a room thus dubbed becomes an open invitation to shoot the breeze. But the genteelness and almost Victorian delicacy we have come to associate with a parlour sits amiss with the grime and the focussed alcoholism of the toddy shop.

The two most famous specimens of these toddy parlours, known as far away as Cochin and Trivandrum, sit on the road from Kottayam to Pallom, barely a kilometre from each other, and are bitter rivals in court to boot. The original, Kariumpumkala, started life as a genuine toddy shop in 1958, and although it became known for its superior food, it held on to those roots. But in 2001, when the Kerala government suspended all toddy shop licenses in a brave, and vain, attempt to discourage drinking, Kariumpumkala won through that awful year solely on the strength of its food. When the licenses were restored, one year later, Kariumpumkala didn’t even try to apply for one; it had found its new direction.

Kariumpumkala today is a slightly ghastly brick-and-mortar structure, painted in shades of green and pink. Its top two storeys are air-conditioned, every floor is tiled, and the tabletops are made of granite. Over the billing counter is a shelf full of trophies that Kariumpumkala has won in something called the Philips Food Fest. But most heartbreaking of all is a perverse remembrance of times past—a sign that says ‘Smoking, alcohols strictly prohibited’.

Kariumpumkala’s present owner would talk of none of this. He was obsessed, instead, with his legal battle with Karimpinkala, the upstart establishment down the road that, he
claimed, had stolen and only slightly modified his restaurant’s name. ‘That isn’t the real one,’ he said repeatedly. But Karimpinkala still serves toddy, and Kariumpumkala does not. That little edge makes all the difference in the sweeps to win Kerala’s hearts and minds.

In the leafy parking lot of Karimpinkala, a ‘Toddy Shop And A/c Family Restaurant’, we found Maruti Swift cars and gleaming SUVs, and cabanas that were closer in size to mid-level dorm rooms. We sat under fans, on plastic chairs that skidded on the tiled floors, and drummed our fingers on a glass-topped table. We were handed a menu, laminated in clear plastic. Apart from the ‘Sweet and cold coconut toddy’, we could have ordered Diet Coke, Fanta, the enigmatic ‘Soda B & S’, or ice cream. We could even have asked for that most pan-Indian of dishes, Gobi Manchurian. As we sat staring a little disbelievingly at that menu, another SUV pulled up outside. A family dismounted—parents, little children, and even a grandmother—and stormed into one of the other cabanas. We were, most definitely, not in Kansas any more.

Karimpinkala’s toddy, served in small earthen jugs, was thick, faintly stale, and tasted of sediment. But its star turn came in the form of its karimeen polichchathu—fish that was steamed in its marinade rather than fried, wrapped in a banana leaf, and served under a canopy of curry leaves, onions and red pepper flakes. And so I finally managed to grasp the flavour of the pearl spot itself—a tart, citrusy tang, but warmed with the heat of spice, as delicious as a mildly sunny sky.

Jijin, our auto-rickshaw driver for the day, had by now cottoned on to our routine, and when we left Karimpinkala, he said: ‘But you should also try
mundhiri kallu’
—literally, raisin toddy—‘because that’s a specialty here.’ Between the months of November and March, Jijin explained, toddy-shop owners slipped raisins into the evening toddy and served it the next
morning, when the raisins had drunk their fill and fattened into triple their size. ‘Although these days,’ he said, as he started to scour the sides of the road leading to Kumarakom, ‘people get cheap and just add grape juice to give it the same flavour.’

We found no
mundhiri kallu
at our first stop, a whitewashed toddy shop set back so far from the road on its dusty little plot that it looked like a Last Chance Saloon in the American West. By this time, it was noon, and hot outdoors, but the shop was dark and cool inside. The day’s toddy had lost some of its sweetness by then, and it was bubbling energetically as it fermented. We still managed a few glasses each, Jijin included—which may well have explained his subsequent, intemperate willingness to let us have a go at driving his auto-rickshaw in turns to the next toddy shop.

In our cool, dark shack-cabana, we ordered a couple of bottles of
mundhiri kallu,
which turned out to be a pale pink concoction, reminiscent of Pepto-Bismol. At the bottom of the bottles were thick layers of white sediment, and the swollen corpses of raisins bobbed in the toddy. It tasted, to my mind, just the same as regular toddy, although the raisins served as occasional happy surprises, bursting with a concentrated blast of sweetness.

‘In the villages, the sediment is very important,’ Jijin said. ‘They add water to it and then mix it into the batter for appams, to make the appams soft.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘So people come to the toddy shops and take this sediment away. In the cities, of course, they just buy yeast.’ Jijin paused here and mulled. ‘Yeast works too.’

There was a further comfortable silence. Then Jijin, expounding further on the sediment, said: ‘They make a type of vinegar from it as well.’

‘How?’ I asked.

It was the wrong question to pose. Jijin lapsed into deep
thought, emerging only after many minutes to drink more
mundhiri kallu.
I drank more
mundhiri kallu
as well. At some later point, the three of us may or may not have sworn to each other to never forget this moment, and that we were all brothers, man, whatever our differences, we were all brothers, well, in a manner of speaking, and that it was important not to lose this—
this,
you know, this connection—never lose that, man. And then we tripped our way back towards the auto-rickshaw, and Jijin drove us to Kumarakom and bundled us onto the bus to Kochi.

Accepted wisdom has it that only in the south of Kerala is the food so fiery, because of its insistence on wading into the chilli and kokum. In the north, curries are tempered with more coconut or coconut milk, taking the sharp edges off the spices. I was curious to see how that principle worked in toddy shops in the north, around Kochi or Kozhikode, but first we had to find some. If Alleppey was the mother lode and the area around Trivandrum was a vein of dubious quality, north Kerala resembled an abandoned shaft, mined clean of all ore. In Kochi, we found one toddy shop purely by accident—in the Jewish Quarter near Fort Cochin, an open-fronted establishment that was very obviously a tourist hook but that nonetheless served some good toddy. Driving out of Kozhikode, we had to look for forty minutes before we found a toddy shop. In that time, in Alleppey, we would have found ten.

The mechanics of toddy shop commerce, we discovered in Kozhikode, changed for no man, not even for a north Keralite. The karimeen curry—or as it was known in these parts, the erimeen curry—still came to the table as bellicose a red as in the south, still singeing the back of the mouth on its way down. The chembelli was still fried in the same masala, and it still tasted of cardboard. The coconut-heavy cooking of the outside world had
been stopped and turned away on the threshold of the toddy shop kitchen. The food still left you gasping and sweating, the glasses of water—tinted pink, as always, by a purifying tree bark called Pathimukam—were still laughably inadequate, and I still found myself hollering hoarsely for toddy, for its milky sweetness to put the fire out.

My original rationalization for the sparser occurrence of toddy shops in this region had been the most obvious one: This was an area with a much higher concentration of Muslims than the south, and so consequently a higher concentration of firm teetotallers. But our guide, Madhu Madhavan, a young Kochi-based radio producer of great spirit and enterprise, was not so sure of our theory, so he undertook to interrogate the toddy shop proprietor about it.

‘Nonsense,’ our host said brusquely. ‘The Muslims drink just as much as the rest of us. More, probably.’

As our theory melted into puddles around our feet, the proprietor must have seen our stricken faces, looking like the last flat-earthers hearing about Magellan’s voyage of circumnavigation. More gently, he said: ‘Well, maybe they do it at home rather than out in public. But they all certainly drink, there’s no doubt about that.’

He transacted some business at his till, saw that we were still standing there, and said, by way of coded closure: ‘There are more toddy shops in the areas where the communists are in power.’

This made little sense to me, but standing outside the toddy shop, Madhu interpreted it for us. ‘He’s talking about the biggest caste in Kerala, the Iravas, who have traditionally been toddy tappers,’ he said. One of the proposed origins of the very word ‘Irava’ is the old Tamil word for toddy, ‘iizham,’ and some legend has it that the Iravas even brought the coconut palm from Sri Lanka to India.

In north Kerala, the Iravas have come to be known as the Thiyyas. ‘The Thiyyas occupy a slightly higher position in the caste hierarchy, and they think that toddy tapping as a profession is beneath them,’ Madhu said. There is, therefore, less tapping in the north; much of the toddy that is served near Kochi and Kozhikode is transported there from the districts of Alleppey or Palakkad. ‘And there’s a rule of thumb—a huge part of the Communist Party membership is made up of Iravas,’ Madhu said. Even a body like the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, a social reform organization working for the Irava community, steadily started, in the 1950s, to lose its members to the Communist movement, as Thomas Johnson Nossiter points out in his book
Communism in Kerala.
‘So the Iravas tap the toddy, and where the Communists dominate, they get licenses easily and set up their shops,’ Madhu said. ‘I’ve heard of officials in Irava organizations in Alleppey who own chains of toddy shops there.’

As Madhu spoke, and even later as I was looking up the histories of the Iravas, of Communism in Kerala, and of toddy shops, my mind’s eye kept flicking back to that single whitewashed toddy shop outside Kottayam, that Wild West saloon transplanted out of its own space and time. It had looked so basic and peaceful, without a hint that it existed where it did because of statewide politicking and a centuries-old caste system. The confluence of politics, religion and society can wash over every single particle of life—even something as fundamental as the toddy shop, born out of the simplest of man’s desires: to get off the road, out of the sun, and get a drink.

T
o attempt to write with enthusiasm about food, I have discovered, requires two great qualities: the ability to eat with a catholic, voluminous appetite, and the ability to eat out alone. The first is a purely physical constraint. A. J. Liebling, the emperor of gourmandizing writers, once pointed out that the average day presented, to the members of his tribe, only two opportunities for really extensive fieldwork: lunch and dinner. ‘They are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol,’ Liebling wrote. ‘They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road.’ (If his monumental waistline was not proof enough that Liebling practised what he preached, his accounts of his meals are; at one lunch, with a friend, he consumed a whole trout with butter, a Provencal meat stew, and a young, roasted guinea hen, with the appropriate wines and a bottle and a half of champagne. Then, presumably, there was dessert.)

But even a weak appetite can be cultivated and expanded, if not to Lieblingian proportions then at least to a point of modest adventurousness. The ability to dine out alone, however, seems
to be like the ability to curl your tongue—either you have it or you don’t. Those who don’t have it tell me that it is just an insuperable mental block. I once heard of a software engineer, on deputation in the United States, who worked late hours and came back to his hotel well after room service had ceased room servicing. The coffee shop downstairs was open all night, but so reluctant was our friend to sit in a restaurant by himself and eat a sandwich that he simply skipped dinner. For the entire month.

Fortunately, I have always been made of tougher material; nothing would induce me to skip dinner. Often, in fact, when I’ve been travelling, I’ve actually preferred to eat alone, and not only because it enables a silent, more intimate communion with my food. A restaurant, particularly during a weekday afternoon, is like a finger on the pulse of a town. People come in with distinct agendas, even if the agenda is not to have one. They make business deals, argue over sports and politics, court each other, ignore each other, spend time with family, suffer the company of colleagues, or, like me, sit in a corner by themselves and watch it all over the top of a newspaper. And in the manner of a primitive cultural anthropologist, I lap it up in fascination, convinced that I am seeing the life of the town unfold in front of me. Maybe I am; or maybe I’m just seeing people eat lunch.

The only major disadvantage to eating in solitude, especially in a town that one doesn’t know very well, is figuring out where to eat. Asking in your hotel will only earn you a warm recommendation for the hotel’s own restaurants. Asking the wrong people—and it’s impossible to know who the wrong people are until you’ve eaten in the places they suggest—will lead you to the sort of food they
think
you want to eat, rather than the food they would themselves eat, which is also the food you really want to eat. On a vacation, of course, the joys of wandering around and of serendipitous discovery are all very well. But it must be most disheartening, for food writers as well
as serious gourmands, to come away from a place only to discover that they had been sucked in by a succession of tourist-trap restaurants, all the while ignoring the authentic, wholly brilliant eatery just next door to their hotel.

This was the position I found myself in on my first afternoon in Mangalore. I had taken an overnight train from Cochin, waking just in time to see the pastels of morning wash over the serene beginnings of the Konkan Coast. The half-light conferred a magic upon otherwise ordinary sights. Sitting next to the window, I gawked at everything that passed by me—deserted sports fields; immaculate little station platforms; ordered brick houses painted in colours that would have looked garish in the city but that looked merely cheerful here; grove after grove of coconut trees; an occasional stream or backwater. And ever so suddenly, like a flash of benediction, a view of the open sea, separated from my train only by a thin ribbon of land.

Mangalore seemed sleepy when I got off the train, and it seemed sleepy when I left my hotel in search of lunch. I was to learn, over the course of my days there, that it was a town that seemed sleepy right through the week, as if just walking its rolling, undulating streets rocked its residents into drowsiness. Its restaurants displayed such a pleasing lack of business drive that they seemed almost anachronistic. One restaurant that I spotted, called Hotel Kudla, had used the excuse of ongoing roadwork in the area to down shutters indefinitely—even though the restaurant’s front door remained perfectly accessible.

I walked around for half an hour, looking for a place to eat, before the February sun began to feel more uncomfortable than warm. My usual markers weren’t working in Mangalore. I tried to peek into restaurants to see if I could spot groups of locals, but every dining hall was uniformly empty. I pondered the names of the restaurants, trying to figure out whether they sounded generically touristy or specifically Mangalorean, but I got
nowhere with that either. Finally, out of a desperate desire for shade, I ducked into a building, descended a flight of fire-escape stairs, and in the basement of the Hotel Dakshin, I ordered my first fish curry in Mangalore.

I had come to Mangalore expecting to fall completely in love with its fish curry, but I lusted instead, for much of my time there, after another dish, before I rediscovered my original love on the very morning of my departure. I had eaten the signature curry only once before, years ago, and I remember being entranced by its silky gravy, smooth and deep orange and full of flavour—very much the opposite, in fact, of Kerala’s toddy shop
meen
curry, which was pungent and overwhelming, and which broke apart into its oil and non-oil layers upon standing for even a few seconds. To my palate, the Mangalore curry was the superior one, and I expected this to be a joyful reunion.

But it didn’t begin well, or perhaps my hopes were set too high. That first curry—turmeric-yellow from a certain angle, red from chilli powder from another—was watery and bland. In the middle of the dish, like an algae-covered rock jutting out of the sea, was a hump of bangda, or mackerel, glinting a silvery green under the light. Mackerel has a famously insistent taste, but this fish was shy and reclusive, as if it would have rather been at home with a good book. I hacked at it from various angles, but it remained dull and uncooperative.

A possible reason revealed itself when I was presented with the bill: Rs 10 for the curry, and another Rs 10 for the dosa I had ordered with it. What kind of fish curry—in this day and age, in a restaurant in a prosperous town—cost Rs 10? I feared the answer. I’d read too much about how quickly mackerel spoiled, and about the scombroid food poisoning that followed rapidly, with its retinue of symptoms: dizziness, rashes, nausea, blurred
vision. For the first time in my life, I put down a 50 per cent tip, because I had no smaller notes or coins. My mind reeling, and already feeling faintly ill in my imagination, I left the Hotel Dakshin and walked a dejected kilometre or so. Then, deciding that perhaps another meal would work as some consolation, I entered an eatery called Nihals, sat down, and called weakly for the fish of the day.

More bangda curry arrived, with a serving of coarse red rice and a side of curried potato. But now things were looking up. The mackerel tasted fresher, although still not as distinctive as I expected it to be; its bath of gravy was smoother, speckled with mustard seeds and a whisper of ginger, but it still wasn’t as fierce as I wanted it. Recalling Liebling’s thesis of fieldwork opportunities, I ordered a bangda masala fry (garlic and coconut; crisped; skin blistered and peeling off like that of a banana; very good) and ate my way through this second lunch. When the bill came—Rs 42, which included Rs 30 for the fry—I began to understand and feel better about Mangalore’s prices. If anything, Hotel Dakshin had overcharged me.

Emerging into a mellower late afternoon sun, I wandered aimlessly down the road, turning into smaller alleys, and passing marketplaces that had yet to reopen for the day. But everywhere I went, I saw unfamiliar restaurants with worn signboards, each impassive in its appeal and yet taunting me with unknown promise. The best Mangalore fish curry in the world could have come out of any of those kitchens, but with my trial-and-error technique of random walkabout, I ran the very substantial risk of never finding it. At that juncture, and with a Hotel Dakshin behind me, the thought was too frightening to bear. Pulling out my cell phone, I began to call around for assistance.

Mangalore lies on a curve of land that descends from the Western Ghats to the sea, and it is deeply enamoured of its waters—the backwaters of the Netravati and Gurupura rivers, but also the coast, where waves wash up tiredly and rest a while before leaping on their return journey towards Arabia. In his book
In An Antique Land,
Amitav Ghosh describes the ‘great palm-fringed lagoon, lying tranquil under a quicksilver sky,’ joined to the ocean only by a narrow channel of water. Mangalore’s glorious stretches of sand were its first ports, inviting boats that could be beached safely. In the Middle Ages, to the Arabian traveller who had never left home before, it must have been an awesome sight: pristine sands, lavish vegetation, a rich entry into a vast new land.

On my way to Panambur Beach, Mahesh, my auto-rickshaw driver, happened to ask me where I was from.

‘Madras,’ I said. (I’ve never quite been able to call the city by its new name, even though it was renamed Chennai just one year after I began living there. I’ve often wondered at that inability. Either it is evidence of a buried conservative streak, or a liberal sense that scoffs at the inadequate rationale behind the change of the name. Or maybe it is simply the very flimsy conceit that a real, dyed-in-the-wool Madrasi would never call his city Chennai, and that I fancy my wool to be as dyed as they come.)

At any rate, I said: ‘Madras.’

‘Ah, Madras,’ Mahesh said, and drove peaceably along for another half kilometre. Then: ‘I’ve been there once, you know.’

By this time, I had been away from home for over two weeks, and I was beginning to miss it. I would have grabbed at any opportunity to talk about Madras.

‘Oh? When was this?’

‘Seven years ago,’ he replied. Just a few hours before he arrived in the city, Mahesh explained, the chief minister at the time, J. Jayalalithaa, had arrested the opposition leader, M. Karunanidhi,
in a dramatic nocturnal operation. Consequently, Karunanidhi’s party had organized a city-wide protest strike, and buses and local trains weren’t running. ‘The strike was beginning just as I got off the train,’ Mahesh said. ‘I had to finally take an auto-rickshaw all the way to my destination, Padi. It cost me Rs 120.’ After a minute, delightfully oblivious of all irony, he said: ‘These auto drivers always fleece you.’

Panambur Beach is a dozen kilometres north of Mangalore, just past a giant port that ships out, among other things, iron ore from the Kudremukh mines. A beach festival had concluded the previous day, and all its paraphernalia—balloon-shooting stalls, food stations, rusty little carousel rides, banners—still stood, unmanned and desolate in the setting sun, like a graveyard of amusement. To one side was a giant billboard that morbidly advertised the number of swimmers who had died at Panambur each year, thereby cautioning visitors to stay on the sands. It seemed to deter nobody; the beach was filled with swimmers towelling off, or still dripping, or emerging from the surf laughing and playfully flicking water at each other.