Mona's Meals | Sunday, 08 February 2009

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Draining the colour out of life

Nobody warns you about how India’s chaos gets under your skin like an essential oil. After a couple of weeks there last year, The Writer and I realised that we were getting so used to the madness, to the ripped-up roads - yes, much worse than Malta’s - to our driver going the wrong way as if he did this for a living (he did), to the incredulity of the hotel staff when I said that pillowcases with holes in them were not acceptable in a five-star, to the streets teeming with people, to the overflowing sacks of colour in the form of flower petals and spices, to the explosive children’s smiles in even the poorest of areas, that we were actually considering going to the cinema.
‘There it is!’ the driver happily pointed out to us across the let’s-pretend-it’s-a-road in Chennai. Cinema in India is not a Saturday night out: it is a daily celebration of alienation. And stardom goes a long way - the stars usually move seamlessly from in front of the dancing, twirling lights of Bollywood to the less wondrous blaze of politics. In fact, most of the time, they continue to do both. They model jewellery, clothing and pose on cars. They are big, and slick and extremely rich by any standards, including western ones.
The building across from our Ambassador car hideaway was slotted between a man fashioning massive pestle and mortars and a shop selling bicycles and bananas. The only thing keeping the edifice together was the paint on a huge hand painted poster emblazoned on its façade.
‘Is that safe?’ we asked him, much to his surprise. Together, we had braved recycling operations where entire families slept and separated plastic in tiny homes, villages where diamond-polishers kept hidden arms for protection, and every single ‘spicy’ food known to the sub-continent. Yet nothing could pull us out of that car and into what we believed was a crumbling edifice on the verge of killing its next thousand-strong audience.
Which is why I’m quite happy to wait and watch Slumdog Millionaire in the relative safety of home in Malta. The reviews have called it ‘life-affirming’ and judging by the wonderful people we met on our trip, who, like our driver, don’t have a rupee to their name and choose to sleep in the car so as to save the hotel allowance, yet still turn up in gleaming, starched whites every morning, it probably will be. Poverty in India is relative: you will never know what it really means until you go there. And once you do, you will stop thinking about it. Actually, I’ve seen much worse deprivation in Madrid.
In the South, from Madras to Kerala, you get temples. Hundreds of them, each containing tens of thousands of statues, and because this is India, people. There, we discovered Hindu gods: the dancing Shiva, god of the yogis, destroying everything under his twirling feet, and his lovely wife Parvati. Together they gave birth to Ganesha.
Considering that Shiva is four times the size of Parvati and Ganesha has the face of an elephant (a real one, not a person with elephantitis), then I cannot begin to the imagine the ordeal the woman must have gone through to first engage with her husband and then give birth to his offspring. I’m hoping that, in the absence of an epidural, she really knew her meditation.
That is why I was intrigued when a restaurant called Ganesha popped up on the horizon, or well, Xemxija. We are used to the ‘Indian’ called Madras Curry, Star of India or some such, but Ganesha? ‘We have to go!’ I implored TW, who sighed resignedly and acquiesced when I said I was dragging the Brunette and the Blonde along on our experimentation.
The B remembers the outlet when it had been a ‘Mediterranean’ called Wild Thyme. ‘They have done absolutely nothing to it’ he said upon our entrance into what is a very large and airy dining room in a new suburbia. The signs were right and it was true: nothing had changed from the dark woods emblazoning the wall. The new tenants have just hung what seem to be small Indian tapestries around the room. Seeing as we are all very averse to tat, this was highly acceptable.
On a Saturday night, the place was packed and the smell of food was lovely and welcoming. Considering that it’s quite far from anything (even if the area around it is a new urban sprawl), this was surprising and promising. TW and I ate all over in the sub-continent and in all cases, the restaurants were organised, the service was acceptable and the food was amazing. No, we did not get Delhi belly even once, thank you for asking.
It was immediately apparent that the service, consisting mostly of young-ish people, did not know its fork from its glass, let alone organisation, Indian food terminology or how to hand new diners a menu when they sit down. The disorganisation was so organised I could have written a sitcom about it. And then I remembered: John Cleese already has.
These are the bits I remember: us being shown to a table and left stranded as the server disappeared, not being given menus, being given menus and the server disappearing, nobody taking our order for the best of twenty minutes, having to argue with one of them because we wanted some poppadoms and chutney in lieu of somebody bothering to take our order.
Most of the staff kept disappearing, not to serve other diners, but behind the bar and to an area we couldn’t fathom, where they could not be seen. The streets of Madurai were a haven of peace by comparison.
On the verge of an argument, one of them (we had met three by now and nobody had taken the order itself) decided to grant our wish and, sure enough, the poppadoms turned up. They were crunchy and fresh; the chutney came out of a jar and the ‘yoghurt dip’ was as runny as an overflowing teat.
Orders were placed half an hour later, by which time we managed, by the skin of our teeth, to order wine; an expensive red. Although I was the one who had ordered it, the server offered it to TA to taste, in the small water glass. They did not even seem to know that the owner had bought different sized glasses for a reason, or what they really were there for.
The starters were dull, tasteless and as far away from Indian as Greenland. Bits of chicken breast with flicks of chilli lazily attached to them, onion bhajis instead of chicken pakoras and a mulaguthani soup for the Blonde; all alarmingly devoid of flavour.
By now the raucous of dissenting voices had started. We finally figured out that the food was taking a long time to arrive and people were complaining. The family behind us started up some kind of dvd machine for their children, trying to avoid a nasty hunger-induced tantrum. They were a large group and rather unhappy.
Thirty minutes later, so were we. There was no sign of our mains and we had practically ploughed through our Pinot Noir. In the meantime, the staff had continued pretending to work, by walking up and down the room, looking at nobody and avoiding people’s cries for attention, then escaping. I even waved my napkin, Winner-style - it did not work.
I was particularly struck by the fact that near the bar area, glasses were being polished and checked in the light until they were gleaming. A man who seemed to be the owner or manager also noticed that the floor was on fire, service-wise, and his staff were playing around, and he had a full-blown argument with one of them. They were really shouting, but few people could see because of the way the dining room is set up. The owner strode off in a huff and the server continued to do what he was doing.
Then again, when I say ‘struck’, I use the term loosely, since there was much choice for one to be struck by. The Eastern European waitress for example, with her harsh blonde fringe and her cold eyes, who had spent the entire night walking around making believe she was busy, brought us some of our dishes. ‘What is this?,’ we asked, pointing at a bowl of gloop. ‘That is, um, potatoes,’ she improvised, ready to argue with us if we disagreed.
We had not ordered any, of course. They turned out to be lentils, as real as a Giorgio Armali t-shirt. TA ordered king prawns, but they never turned up either. Neither did the home-made paneer. The lamb madras, the mean moilee (dentici fillets cooked in coconut milk and too few curry leaves) and the beef kheema mutter turned out to be good, and in fact I had the feeling that somewhere in the recesses of that kitchen was a real Indian, cooking away from the heart. There was certainly no evidence of anything from the sub-continent in the front of house. Which is possibly why none of the staff had absolutely no idea what they were dishing out. In fact, I wonder whether they had actually ever tasted Indian food.
Meanwhile, the table behind us, and several others, were still waiting for their mains. Their protests had grown louder and the music, which was manic, could no longer drown out their complaints. Some were even getting up and going to the bar area to moan.
Desserts were real, and I was overjoyed. That is, until they actually turned up and turned out to be absolutely horrible. My shahi keer was a cold gloop, when it should have been a runny, warm and spicy bowl of rice, cream, saffron and almonds. The others ate their gajar ka halwa, a carrot pudding and the gulob jamoon (in India’s south this is usually three fried pastry balls in a sugar syrup but here it was one huge ball) but certainly not because they actually liked them.
When the bill turned up, we realised that we had been charged for items that had never arrived and not charged for some which had. We figured out that they balanced out. On the thin edge of a bollocking from the owner, the staff seemed to be trying to make up, with everybody, not just us. They offered free liqueurs to people who did not want them, including our table. Another owner or manager literally begged some of the diners behind us to please take a drink, on him. From what we could see, he had, and often.
Ganesha is the Hindu god of success and many shops display his statue at the entrance. According to the blurb on the menu, he is also the god of wisdom and prudence. Enough already.

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