The 100th Curry

The curry-o-meter slipped into three digits last Saturday night, heralding a milestone few temporary visitors, I suspect, could achieve without as heart-strong a dedication as I have shown.

The road to the century was pot-holed with all sorts of character defining obstacles: garlic reflux, dinner sweats and an entire medical journal’s worth of humbling gastric complications. However I mustn’t dwell on the less edifying aspects as the experience has been as enriching as any. I believe only Indian cuisine - in its endless combination of flavours and styles - could possibly allow such an extravagant number of sittings in such a timeframe.

The actual 100^th curry was timed to coincide with the arrival of two friends from Australia – Debbie and Luke. We assembled a medley of colleagues and ex-pats within one of Delhi’s more authentic eateries. The curry itself was standard as curries go (some chicken arrangement, if I remember). Finishing the 100^th was met with jubilation.

Some highlights in reaching the 100^th…

Mughlai mutton – As with most Mughul foods, it’s lamb that’s usually cooked as a kebab, and is so tender and succulent you’ll want to conquer neighbouring countries just to get more of it.

Cardamom – While not strictly an ingredient spice in many curries, its presence in auxiliary offerings such as milkshakes and kulfi (non-diary ice-cream) is exotic and refreshing.

Methi Chicken – A take-away favourite. I don’t actually know what it comprises but it has a visually luminous quality that makes it quite appealing.

Biryani – Saffron infused rice, often with chunks of chicken, mutton or vegetables. Its downfall being that one will usually mow through a whole plate without looking up and then feel remorseful for not leaving enough room for other dishes, nor leaving enough biryani for other diners.

Garlic naan – pungent and powerful, and usually the demise of dieters, the garlic specie is the preferred bread of the naan family for the serious eater.

Buffalo milk – the liquid equivalent of smoking a Marlboro. Served steaming hot and left unsweetened in a terracotta mug, it makes one feel strong enough to wrestle anything to the ground. Real Men Drink Buffalo.

Kashmiri cuisine – when not shooting at one another, these northern folk do amazing things with dried fruits and coconut shavings.

…and some testing moments on the journey…

Chicken necks – Every so often one of these disgusting bird gullets worm their way into my food. I’ve no interest in the throats of any creature save for the one belonging to the smarmy chef who attempts to pass this off as food.

Curried pickles - Erroneously served as a garnish when it would better function as a bin-liner.

Street food – Nothing ostensibly wrong with it when adjudging against any taste parameter, but one does put their life in the unsanitary paws of the street-wallahs when braving this medium. Everyone promises not to eat from the street, everyone does, and everyone gets sick.

What I haven’t yet disclosed is the fact that this achievement could not have been done without the dedicated effort of an ever-present wingman. My time in India has witnessed much transience; ex-pat colleagues arrive and depart, staff are replaced and even loved ones are relegated to cameo parts. But there is one stalwart comrade who always keeps me company during the Odyssey – especially so on the road to the 100^th curry. A comrade who provides a sharp alkaline touch to stabilise the onslaught of ferocious Indian spice, a friend who stays behind to offer warmth long after the chai has cooled.

Ladies and gentlemen…

Interesting discoveries:

• Curries, as we know them, are referred to over here as ‘wet’ dishes, or ‘gravies’. The term ‘curry’ will often be appended to Thai curries.
• I’ve not had one hot curry. All are belligerently spicy, but none match the heat generated by some I’ve had back home. I believe this is because I’ve only really hung around the north, where the cuisine is not typically fiery. Infernos such as Vindaloo and Madras curries are native to southern India and as a consequence have not been suitably sampled by this writer.

Administrative facts:

• Curry-o-meter: 108 consumed.
• The curry-o-meter measures individual sittings when curry is present as part of the meal, not individual curries. Individual curry dishes consumed: probably close to 400. Before I’m nominated for any awards in gluttony, I’d like to point out that each serving is typically very small, and is designed to be shared.

Song of the moment:

Frontier Psychiatrist, by The Avalanches.

Farewells, in their various forms

I took a couple of days off after the last Bombay trip to take Jen to Varanasi and Agra – two cities of sacred and cultural significance. In fact, they are dripping with sacred and cultural significance. So much so that the cities’ local merchants of tourism need only to rely on the pull of such significance, and not the push of adequate accommodation or transport, to lure curious visitors.

A public farewell

Varanasi shares with Middle Eastern Sumar the mantle of the oldest continually inhabited place on Earth. As Amritsar is the religious home of the Sikhs, Varanasi’s divinity is absolute as the holiest city among the Hindus – as their mythology narrates many important events as having occurred on the site Varanasi now stands. Moreover, the city sits on the banks of the Ganges - a mother river from which a suckling India draws spiritual nourishment. On top of the city’s attraction as a destination for Hindu pilgrims, Varanasi also offers an obscure option for Hindus to circumvent the cycle of reincarnation should they die there. It is believed that expiration within the city allows the soul to attain salvation, as immersion in the Ganges brings about the forgiveness of sins and the curing of ills.

Recent environmental and human influences have somewhat clouded the argument supporting the Ganges’ retention of its alleged healing properties. Unfortunately India has suckled too long and industrial waste and an extremely dependent overpopulation of river users has turned the river septic. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Despite a cornucopia of warnings and attempts to limit its use, the Ganges is still as populated, as social and as relied upon as ever.

We caught a plane to Varanasi from Delhi, and travelled into the old city by various means of transport that were dictated by how narrow the roads became as we approached our hotel (which was perched on the bank of the river). Even after using our rustic trek through Rajasthan as a yardstick, Jen and I were still appalled by just how dirty Varanasi was. Dirt and refuse seems to have had an uninterrupted renaissance during the 8,000 odd years of continuous habitation, and has covered the city in an odious veneer that would possibly require a flood to remove. Fortunately, we only spent a short amount of time in the city (about 20 minutes) as the real excitement happens upon the ghats – being the steps rising out of the river.

The ghats host all manner of activities, from the humdrum to the bizarre. They essentially serve as wide stone walkways that hug the Ganges upon which temples, hotels and large piles of firewood (I’ll get to that a little later) are situated – all attracting different collections of people with different motives for being at the river’s bank. There are the religious folk (sadhus and the like) who conduct all manner of dogmatic observations ranging from the auspicious incense burning ceremonies to the absurd ritual of staring straight at the sun as a form of meditation. There are the touts (the collective noun of which I’m going to coin as ‘a ubiquity’) who punctuate the bustle of ghat life with their squawk (“Helloooo…boat? Helloooo… boat?”). There are the young men and old women who use the water to wash young bodies and old clothes respectively - both of which then being stretched out in the sun to dry. Finally there are the onlookers - local and foreign - who simply come to the ghats to watch humanity at its strangest, most perfunctory and most intimate.

All this activity makes for difficult passage through the ghats. One is restricted to walking, and dodging, their way around – with the local city-folk, cows and goats providing excellent defence against one’s wish to progress in a straight line. Numerous urban mines proliferate the ghats, providing yet more things to dodge while walking: the squelch of slippery cow-pats, the stickiness of spat out paan explosions and the crunch of disposable terracotta chai mugs left on the ground to await their pedestrian demise.

It was dusk when we checked into the Alka Hotel. We had our first brief glimpse of one of the world’s most legendary rivers from the hotel terrace that hung over the top of the ghat. It was wide, still and eerily silent. A few boatmen slid across its surface, with one leaving a trail of floating candles behind it. We remained in our room long enough to conclude that the Hindu god of hotel accommodation had forsaken us, obviously having run out of patience at our extravagant overuse of his blessing in Bombay only nights before.

On our first morning we answered the touts’ call to the boats and took a dawn voyage down the Ganges. This trip catalysed within me a feeling somewhere between uneasiness and world-weariness that would remain for the duration of our three days in Varanasi. Through the gloom of predawn we made out the shapes of temples and bathing ghats, and as the sun glossed the bank in daylight these shapes sprung to life with people busying themselves with those aforementioned pursuits. But no matter how vibrant the river became, I couldn’t shake the apparition of Varanasi as a dark city emerging from a dead river.

I knew this had spawned from my knowledge of the macabre enterprise of two of Varanasi’s more famous ghats. The Manikarnika and Harish Chandra Ghats are different from the hundred or so others that dot the riverbank – for they are the burning ghats. If a soul is to make use of Varanasi’s ability to short circuit the rebirth cycle, the dead must be cremated atop one of the many open air funeral pyres that are built within these ghats. Only the ‘untouchables’ (the dalits falling below the caste system who perform society’s most unpleasant tasks) are permitted to touch the bodies and maintain the fires – which run 24 hours a day. While I knew what to expect from this aspect of the Varanasi experience, it’s still an unsettling enough event to leave one unable to fully prepare for.

According to Hindu custom, the soul leaves the physical body at the moment of death. This results in the treatment of the deceased becoming impassive and even clinical when attending to its destruction. The body is wrapped in a thin white sheet, placed on the pyre and set alight. Incense is heaped on the corpse as it burns to mask the smell of incinerated flesh. A body burned in this manner typically takes three hours. Accelerants (usually flammable gels) are applied to the corpse should there be a need to speed combustion. At some point during the cremation the oldest son (should there be one) will be required to break open the skull of the corpse with a large mallet to facilitate a more efficient burning of the brain. The ashes are finally scattered into the Ganges, and the soul is released into heaven.

We witnessed about a dozen souls reunite with their creator in this fashion. Unsurprisingly, this left us quite shaken up. However I found the most affecting aspect of all this not to be the ghoulish work of the untouchables, but the manner in which everybody else goes about their daily routines with such little attention given to this grim ritual. The pyres are metres from the water and the bodies are dragged through it one last time before being set alight. Only 10 metres away (and downstream) people will submerge themselves in the river and brush their teeth with this same water that just ran off a corpse. Kids will rummage through the ashes looking for salvageable valuables and the cremators will gossip and joke with one another while stoking the flames.

Once we made our way further along the bank, away from Manikarnika Ghat, I realised just how much infrastructure was in place to cater for the public farewelling of the bodies of loved ones. Giant stacks of firewood were impressively constructed adjacent to the ghat, and whole markets were set up behind the first tier of riverbank buildings where stalls supplied the ingredients for cremation (incense, gels) and weighing stations calculated the requisite amount of firewood needed for the pyre given the weight of the body. Next to the burning ghats were hospices, where the sick and elderly rent rooms overlooking the pyres and await their chance to escape their terrestrial ennui.

Varanasi is regarded as a totem of Hindu culture and vibrancy - and indeed it is. The city plays host to enormous religious festivals and its river has a magnetic quality among pilgrims. It’s crowded and colourful and enjoys an ever changing populace. Its ashrams and musical academies, its funeral processes and its ravenous tourist industry have combined to provide Varanasi its light-hearted moniker as “the city of learning, burning and earning”.

But regardless of its being a nucleus for festival and pilgrimage, I will remember Varanasi not for those who passed through, but for those who passed over.

The Ganges at dawn...

...during the day...

...and finally at dusk.

A celebrated farewell

We returned to Delhi with just enough time for an early night before a completely uncivilised 6am rise to catch the train to Agra.

Forming the eastern tip of the ‘Golden Triangle’ (a marketing instrument crafted to assemble Delhi, Agra and Jaipur into a palatable four-day excursion), Agra is yet another city whose historical importance and ancient buildings manages to generate healthy tourist footfalls. I’m unable to remember exactly what Agra’s historical importance stems from, but I’m sure the main culprits would be wars, forts, Moghuls and the British.

As we had just the day in Agra, we were restricted to visiting only the Agra fort and a particular marble mausoleum erected by a Muslim emperor to entomb one of his wives after her unsuccessful attempt to live through the birth of their 14^th child.

The Agra fort fell in step with other Indian forts by being large and fort-like. I believe I’m now fast reaching the point where the appeal of India’s garrisoned regal residences is facing rapidly diminishing returns. It did provide a nice view of the mausoleum though.

Emperor Shah Jahan’s marble celebration of his dead wife is much more impressive. Built in the 17^th century, his mausoleum remains unmatched as an example of Islamic Moghal architecture. With its large domed roof, skyscraping minarets and intricate adornment of Islamic calligraphy inlaid with black marble, the mausoleum stands out as a striking creation as it stands alone within the grassed plains of Agra.

The white marble mausoleum

A sad farewell

Our Varanasi and Agra tours were completed in haste, so as to ensure Jen was able to see both cities before she played out her own farewell (from the country, not this world).

Again I have been in Bombay the past couple of days for work, but this time Jen opted to remain in Delhi as she hadn’t yet explored it properly. I had to move heaven and Earth to ensure I landed back in Delhi with enough time to say goodbye to my beloved. Jen’s flight left this morning from Indira Ghandi International Airport at 8am. I bounded through the apartment door at 2am, after forcing my way onto the final, delayed, flight out of Bombay from the preceding evening. We had only two hours in the apartment before the 4am alarm of Satan chimed, heralding that aching feeling brought on by an impending farewell. It was time to once again drive back to the airport.

It was a sad farewell this morning for obvious reasons. Saying goodbye to my sweetie was tough as it signalled the end of a ripper month long adventure. Jen and I have navigated our way across China, French Polynesia and now India, and despite often conflicting views on the amount of luxury we should travel in, we’ve always loved these shared experiences. Saying goodbye to my sweetie brought tears because, right now, I’m unsure when next I’ll see her. While my return to Australia is possibly imminent, there is still a chance of the odyssey continuing beyond what’s currently planned.

Rich and Jen's Indian Odyssey: 2006-07

Interesting discoveries:

• India’s interpretation of ‘first class’ train travel is quite creative
• The amount of stuff Jen left behind

Administrative facts:

• Curry-o-meter: 96 consumed

Song of the moment:

Alone Again Or, by Love

Bombay in Style

With the holiday break over, and Rajasthan a pleasant memory, I plugged myself back into the Gurg’s bubble. But not for long. Client work again ramped up, meaning the past week was spent in Bombay. Not wishing to leave Jen behind, I packed her along with other travel necessities and re-installed myself within India’s capital of cosmopolitics. As this business trip saddled the weekend we thought it best to remain and look around Bombay. I’ve now travelled there about ten times for work but have not spent any meaningful time taking in the sights, so it was exciting to have a weekend at our disposal to properly explore.

Bombay proper is made up of one main and seven peripheral islands, and was once a coastal fishing town before commerce stampeded in, scaring the fish away and turning the anglers into stockbrokers and movie producers. Actually, commerce was invited by the British, who played patron by commissioning hotels, monuments and infrastructure for it to gorge on. Bombay, now, is India’s Manhattan. An island overweight from its population but still vain from its accomplishments. There are remarkable differences between this city and other, smaller cities in India. Traffic is held up by young fashionistas on mobile phones rather than cows, and the splutter of auto-rickshaws replaced with the grunt of large European cars. Bars and other nightspots adequately match anything in the West, both in terms of slick clientele and astronomical drink prices.

As with Manhattan, the best approach for visitors is to just dive in and experience the madness from a pedestrian perspective. The shopping is excellent, with the available goods being of much better quality than other places. Jen bought enough stuff to keep the State of Maharashtra’s economy afloat at least until something else sinks it. Actually, Jen settled into Bombay living extremely well, but that was to be expected given the circumstances in which she was travelling. As I flew down for work, Jen enjoyed business class air travel and five-star accommodation during our time there. While I was off during the day (and much of many nights) with the client, Jen had to make do with massages, high dining, limousines and a lengthy cocktail hour at the hotel.

The only purely touristy activity we undertook was a visit to the Mahatma Gandhi Museum. This was good but also very dusty. An annoying legacy of Mr. Gandhi was to have most streets in almost every city named after him.

Interesting discoveries:

• Bombay has some impressive colonial architecture
• Gandhi spent 21 years in South Africa
• During the period when breakfast is served, in the ITC Grand Sheraton Hotel in Bombay, on the first floor dining room, in the corner behind the jams, one will find a jar of vegemite.

Administrative facts:

• Curry-o-meter: 91 consumed.
• 26^th of January is India’s Republic Day – a day when it’s prohibited to buy alcohol. This is interesting as this date is shared by Australia Day – a day in Australia when alcohol receives the opposite treatment.

Song of the moment:

You and Whose Army? by Radiohead

The Rajasthani Sojourn

Mehrangarh Fort: Rajasthan's sentinal

From Udaipur we travelled to Jodhpur, whose eponymous pants were unfortunately nowhere to be seen. I found Jodhpur to epitomise what I expected India to be like before arriving. Crowded, crazy spice bazaars, wailing beggars, sleepy-eyed camels and cows stopping traffic, and of course the ubiquitous eruption of colour against terracotta terrain and sapphire skies. In addition to its managing to live up to my expectations, Jodhpur has become a highlight in my Rajasthan sojourn for two other reasons – both to do with the city’s municipal design.

Mehrangarh Fort is the biggest thing I have ever seen. It is a megalithic creation, the size and impressiveness of which has left me straining for superlatives. I’m going to have to leave it to the experts’...

"From the bastions of the Jodhpur Fort one hears as the Gods must hear from Olympus…” (Aldous Huxley)

"The work of angels, fairies and giants" (Rudyard Kipling)

The fort is the first of the world’s great attractions that I have found to live up to the dimensions measured out by my mind’s eye. The Empire State Building, Big Ben, the Hope Diamond and so on are indeed amazing but were all unfairly assigned boots too big to fill by my imagination. The Mehrangarh Fort did not suffer this mis-calibration of expectations.

The fort’s size belies its delicate carved intricacies. Its courtyards, spires and even its ramparts are sculpted into beautiful crystalline features. Elaborate stone latticework entwines around coloured glass to transform windows into kaleidoscopes that turn colours with the arc of the sun. As the fort grows out of sheer cliffs several hundred metres above the city, it’s impossible to notice this elaborate detail until actually within its walls – a feat made much easier by the resident maharaja’s opening up of his fort to the general public several years ago. A massive renovation and the installation of museums and other tourist-friendly attractions within its edifice has secured Mehrangarh Fort (and indeed Jodhpur) a place on India’s must see list.

From the fort’s parapets one can easily see Jodhpur’s most unique attraction. Almost all of the city’s buildings are painted blue. Originally used as a method for identifying domiciles belonging to the Brahmin caste, the painting of a house blue has become the staple decoration throughout the city, thus making the view from the elevated fort quite spectacular. We spent an afternoon walking through Jodhpur’s old city, with the Rajasthani charm combining with the maze of cerulean buildings to effect a surreal impression of Jodhpur.

After remaining a fews days in Jodhpur, we drove through the Thar Desert to arrive in Jaipur six hours later. Jaipur is known as ‘the pink city’, as many of its buildings are painted a salmon hue – the Indian colour of hospitality. This is a deception that must rank alongside Erik the Red’s name-swap of Greenland and Iceland to attract hoodwinked settlers to Greenland’s desolate shores.

Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan and is a mess of a city. It’s big enough to attract the grime and sleaze of an emerging metropolis, but too small to have the infrastructure to deal with it. It has amazing shopping if one is into buying grossly inflated tourist shit. Just outside of Jaipur, however, is another of India’s fine fortresses. The Amber fort is accessible by elephant, which is a pricey but worthwhile mode of transport. It is hard to fathom the immense size of an Indian elephant until perched precariously atop one. It’s odd to see the tops of buses from the elephant’s howdah as it heaves its way up the road.

The Amber fort cannot hold a candle to Jodhpur’s titanic equivalent, but it is of interest because of the state it’s in. Bereft of a promised facelift and consequent cordoning off of its more hazardous sections, the Amber fort is left entirely unrestricted to tourists to happily scurry over its features. I’m sure it will take only one footloose elephant to lurch through a fort wall and bring a turret down upon a busload of gawking holiday-makers before the structure receives the remedial attention it deserves.

We spent New Year’s Eve in Jaipur. Our hotel laid on an extravagant dinner gala that ensured an appropriate medium through which to drink spectacularly. Not knowing anyone else present, Jen and I managed to assemble an impromptu gala table made up of a few random travellers and locals who happened to be milling about the buffet. One local who we were sat next to turned out to be a producer for an Indian radio station, who was receiving live crosses from his studio during the evening. He asked us to go on air from our table to inform the listening public of a foreigner’s impression of the night. By the time this request was made, I’d drunk enough to believe this to be an excellent idea. My new producer friend went live and threw to me, and I began commanding the airwaves with a colourful but penetrating diatribe on the Indian New Year’s Eve scene. After an intensively brief period it was apparent that the producer didn’t have much faith in my ability to connect with the listeners and so cut me off, instead attempting to interview Jen. Unfortunately Jen hadn’t inhaled as much booze as her libertine other half and so wasn’t as verbally lubricated as I had delightedly found myself to be. She had a ‘deer in headlights’ moment when the producer asked her to sum up, in a couple of words, what the night – indeed what India – meant to her. With a mind frozen by the thought of a million Indians bent toward their radios in anticipation of her response, Jen broadcast her summation: “Kashmiri aloo”.

Scholars of Indian cuisine will quickly recognise Kashmiri aloo as a dish comprising potato with dried fruit and coconut. It’s a sumptuous dish that can function as an entrée or side, and is both filling and refreshing. Despite its many gastronomic merits, I would doubt it’s ever been used as a term to appraise an entire country in celebration – on live radio no less.

Interesting discoveries:

• Walking through rancid Jaipur backstreets while nursing a New Year’s Day hangover is not pleasant.
• Domestically made batteries do not work – especially when housed in a camera during crucial photographic opportunities.
• Rickshaw-wallahs (the guys who take your money in exchange for frantic pedalling) are actually insane.

Administrative facts:

• Curry-o-meter: 80 consumed.
• Jaipur’s population: close to three million
• Jaipur’s climate is dry but is subject to the extremities of cold and heat during the warm and cold months – with the mercury ranging from 3 to 48 degrees Celsius.

Song of the moment:

Gang of Eagles, by Jefferson Airplane.

Udaipur's beautiful Lake Palace

Jain temple: Ranakpur

Detail of Mehrahgarh Fort.


Jodhpur's blue city from the fort.

Jaipur's meloncholy transport.

Contemplation at the Amber Fort.