Thursday, September 19, 2013

London in September


How do you write about a place whose literature you are intimately familiar with, yet have had little physical presence in, mostly just transiting thru its airport?  How do you write about a place whose history you cannot but be in awe of, realizing it had systems of governance in place 300 years ago that are relevant even today, that it created a phalanx of officers who believed it was their preordained right to rule the world, and armed with just this sense of entitlement, had the confidence to walk into distant lands, into tribal villages, with wife and baby in tow, and expect to, and then rule, simply armed with the cloak of their confidence?  How do your write about a place that bears the street names of Landsdowne Court, and Little Russell Street and Greater Russell Street: names that have rolled off your tongue and passed under your slippers in the Calcutta of the 70s and 80s?  How do you write about London, a place you should have visited much more than you have, a London that is far from the Bilayat of your parents and grandparents, far from the London of glossy photographs of guards at Buckingham, of empty biscuit tins with alluring images of a tidy society, but a London more multicultural than New York, a London of abayas, of lungis, of flaming hennaed beards, of East European hotel accents, of  tweed jackets and herringbone fabrics, and merry evening men wearing blazing orange sports coats and lime green pants?  No Indian of a certain generation can write about England without a chip on his shoulder, without either over-reaching admiration, or slight ridicule, or an enforced sense of familiarity.

The afternoon we reached London, I took a walk to Hyde Park, a 10 minutes walk away from our hotel on Edgeware, a street full of middle eastern shops.  Once there, I looked for Speakers’ corner, the iconic symbol for free speech, where thru history, cranks, minorities, the oppressed and the antagonized could stand up on a public podium and rail away with no repercussions.  My father had spent time in London in the 1950s, he used to visit the British Museum every day, walk thru Hyde Park often.  I had first heard about Speakers Corner from him.  I asked a vendor at the corner, she vaguely pointed me to the place. There was no speaker. Just folks with smart-phones. 

Along the road by the Northern bank of the Thames, a taxi driver almost ran over and killed a bicyclist.  Only through a maneuver resembling the Japanese judo trick employed by Holmes to escape the clutches of Moriarty and re-emerge to public demand, did the cyclist escape.  Following this incident each party uttered a single foul word at each other, beginning with the letter f.  They then wheeled along and went their way.  It was the most civic display of the usage of the word f---- that I have ever seen.  The British have a way with softening curse words.  “Barnshoot” is an example.

At night we went to Southall for dinner.  The is the bastion of Punjabi life in Britain, the biggest Punjab outside of Punjab.  I had first heard of this place in  Khushwant Singh’s writings. He had met a sweeper at Heathrow in the 70s from Southall who wept and beseeched Mr. Singh to take her back home.  You can skip the English language entirely, and for a lifetime, if you are in Southall.  The place looks like a slightly prosperous North Indian city.  

The day we return we travelled to the Tate Modern gallery.  It is a beautiful, civilized thing to have museums with free entrance.  Tate Modern can sometimes be confusing, since the art can overflow into the visitor’s space.  “A” hesitated to sit at a beautiful oak bench with dark tight grain, and lines with a slight, deliberate curve in the fashion that Japanese furniture can sometimes have.  He thought it was perhaps also a museum piece.  There was a sparse Italian room with works of wood and stone slabs.  I suspected that the visitors walking into the rooms themselves were part of the artist’s design, a dynamic brush that the artist had trusted us with.  There was a room full of photographs of public executions sites in Syria, simple straightforward places where Honda Accords were parked on the curb. 

We walked back to Edgeware Street one night from the river, walking through Trafalgar Square, Piccaddilly and Oxford Street.  Somewhere south of Trafalgar we came to a road called Whitehall, by the side of which were statues of British generals with moustaches, looking sinister in the harsh floodlit night.  Field Marshall Viscount William Slim, the WWII General who retreated from Burma to India pursued by the Japanese, only to turn around and beat them back in the plains of Imphal, stood on a stone pedestal in his army boots, with perspicacity in his eyes and binoculars on the ready, should the London fog lift some day.  Inscribed on the pedestal below him were the names of the Indian and Burmese towns where he had seen action: Kohima, Imphal, and Arakan. A South European couple came over to look at the statue and the lady puckered her eyes as her lips tried to mouth the unfamiliar names of the towns.  And yet how delicious those names sounded to me—my grandfather had settled as a headmaster in Imphal, my father and my uncles had grown up there.  V.S. Naipaul, on visiting Pathankot in India found it strange to see the very technical British engineering word “railhead” amidst, what was in his mind, a very chaotic India: “How strange again and again to hear this solitary English word, to me so technical, industrial and dramatic, in a whole sentence of Hindustani—the railhead for Kashmir.” My feelings are similar, though in inversion to the course of this sentiment: these remote places whose names roll off so easily off my tongue sit etched in stone like strangers: geo-ported anomalies from a time long back, in this smooth, thoroughly occidental suburb.

On our last evening we spent some time at a pub.  Many years back, when some of us were working very hard to develop a new material for silicon processor chips, we would head off to an Irish bar in Mohegan Lake in NY late at night to blow off steam after our the kids had gone to bed (most of our kids at that time were of that age when putting the kids to bed was an important part of the family fabric).  The Irish bartender, who had become a good friend, had told me that Guinness, even in draught form, tasted better the closer you got to Ireland—London would be better than New York, and Dublin would be the best.  Now, Guinness is brewed in many different countries so I was always skeptical about his claims.  My friend is now long retired to Florida, but I decided to test his theory.  And indeed the Guinness tasted better, fresher in the heart of London than in New York.  Or perhaps it was just that beer is served a little warmer in Europe than in New York, allowing a better feel for its taste.  Barnshoot!

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Three restaurants in Northern California: Cafe Tibet, Paradise Biryani Pointe, Rangoon Ruby

--> Café Tibet,  Berkeley, www.cafetibetberkeley.com
Paradise Biryani Pointe, Santa Clara, www.cabiryani.com
Rangoon Ruby, Palo Alto, www.rangoonruby.com

The tolerance level of a place can be directly measured by counting the number of local eccentrics.  The United States does not do very well in this regard.  But Berkeley, CA, is an isolated island of exception.  While I waited in the region around Sproul Hall for my younger son to finish his college tour, a parade of eccentrics passed by in unconventional dresses and in discussions with themselves, each his or her own unique center of reference.  It is therefore no surprise that the Berkeley area is also home to a few eclectic restaurants.

We had dinner at the Tibet Café near the University in Berkeley.  The inside is decorated with pictures of Tibet and a small prayer wheel near the entrance.  The owner tells me that  there is a sizable Tibetan community in Berkeley, most of whom have grown up near Dharamsala, India, and schooled in the hill stations in North India.  They speak fluent Hindi and many still consider India their home.  Tibetan food has influences from India and China.  We had curry, noodle soup and an appetizer of battered eggplant chips where, what we in Bengali called Telebhaja, except that the eggplant was not diced crosscut across its length, but along its length.  The curry tasted like an Indian curry.  We hear much about Japanese Ramen and Vietnamese Pho, but Tibetan noodle soups deserve their own place.  If the broth in Ramen is known for its texture and complexity, and the Pho for its direct simplicity, the Tibetan Thenthuk speaks of nourishment and wholesomeness.  Both of our soups were noteworthy—a beef noodle soup and a soup with oats and barley.  All of the dishes were prepared from scratch, but the wait was well worth it.  Tibetan food is homely, rounded at the edges, the poorer cousin in a Camry, but if you arrive tired and lacking in nourishment, it will put you on the train headed for home.

Leaving Berkeley with its residuals of activism, and Indian influence, we travelled to the clearer skies of San Jose and for dinner arrived at a Hyderabadi restaurant in Santa Clara by the name of Paradise.  A one word review—if Milton had the opportunity to dine here he would have regained whatever he might have lost.  Paradise is an autistic restaurant.  Its Hyderabadi biryanis, with a little yogurt, some goat or chicken curry, and shorba(broth) has a magnetism that is hard to resist.  But the rest of the restaurant experience is off the mark.  Routine expectations: that empty dishes be carted away to clear the table for incoming dishes, that there will be a symmetry between the number of plates and the number of spoons delivered, remained unfulfilled.  But what are a few logistical shortcomings in the front of divine food that “Recover'd Paradise to all mankind”?  It is reputed that the mathematician Ramanujan  would write down solutions to well known and unsolved mathematical problems without bothering with the intervening steps, and when asked on his methods would claim that the Goddess gave him the solutions.  It is thus with Paradise, that in this hole of a restaurant where nothing else seems to work right, the biryani comes, pure and perfect, straight from Maradona’s legs and the hands of God.

The third restaurant sounded an exotic one, in Palo Alto, a city far from Berkeley culturally.  We walk into the Burmese Rangoon Ruby, smack in the middle of Palo Alto, into a dining room that has tried to recreate an ambiance of colonial South-East Asia—wood that is made to look like teak but is not teak, a feeling of bamboo without bamboo, glassware laid out on white table cloths in a high ceilinged room, with a large glass window beyond.  A bit of Maugham, a bit of Orwell, and the staff joking with one another, yelling “Whose your Daddy?”, to add a California touch.  Thus began my introduction to the Palo Alto version of Burmese food, closer in spirit, fashion, and body to California than to the shores of Yangon.  Not to say that the restaurant was bad.  It was run efficiently by a manager from Hawaii with a Bronx accent.  There was a phenomenal noodle soup, with refined flavors. I was just not sure whether it was Burmese.  And there was a pork curry dish with mango pickle and potatoes, and a noodle dish that could pass off as Chinese.   The food was fine, just did’nt seem particularly authentic to me.

Cafe Tibet on Urbanspoon

Paradise Biryani Pointe — Santa Clara, CA on Urbanspoon

Rangoon Ruby on Urbanspoon