Indian Takeaway Read Online Free PDF Page B

sevens have it.
    With hours and hunger to kill, I realise I have more than enough time to travel into town, look around, eat and come back. I hail a cab for Port Cochin to a place called the Chinese Fishing Nest. Intriguing.
    Once in the cab I realise that my decision to fly has been vindicated. The cab is older than me. In fact, older than me and the driver combined (which is saying nothing since he is but a boy). This boy at the wheel of an ancient white Ambassador has yet to be bothered by the complexity of a multi-blade Gillette razor; he is blissfully ignorant of a contour-hugging shave; hehas some years to go before truly appreciating ‘the best a man can get’. Having said that he has freakishly hairy arms. Hirsute arms and a baby-smooth face: my first close-quarter encounter with a man of Kerala.
    The Ambassador spirits its way through the traffic. That’s the thing about a country as deeply spiritual and religious as India, there is a strong investment in fate. It is their constant daily beacon through this life, as it has been through past lives and future lives. This unstinting belief in the Kismet Code by extrapolation surpasses any requirement for other codes, particularly the Highway Code. They drive like nutters. They seem to believe, quite seriously, that if fate dictates your time is up, then your time is well and truly up. Bad driving per se will not attract death; only the eternally pre-written event of your death will lead to your death. This renders lane discipline meaningless.
    They laugh in the face of oncoming traffic, coming on from every side and angle; people, elephants, carts, bicycles, oxen, buses, children, goats, cars, lorries and a white Ambassador taxi all exchange space in the potential explosion of metal on flesh. The one thing about north and central India is that the cow is sacred. In the hierarchy of Indian highway management the bigger you are, the more right of way you possess; unless you are a cow, in which case you trump even the largest of military vehicles. This however does not apply in the south. There are more Christians than Hindus here and so the sacredness of the cow does not apply. And while the pandemonium of the north and centre is bizarrely regulated and calmed by random bovine acts, there is not this freakish cow-based control on Keralan and Southern Indian traffic.
    Having reignited my own belief in the Almighty, based on the age-old premise that an inability to beat the belief system isreason to join the belief system, we weave and brake and hoot and horn and eventually make our way into Port Cochin.
    The Chinese Fishing Nest turns out to be Nets. The vagaries of Indian–English road signs. But, Nets Shmets, I have come here to eat. Cochin is the centre of Kerala’s tourist trade, the gateway to the lush and verdant backwaters or, as I have planned, further south to the sea resort of Kovalam. Given its prominence on the Arabian Sea, Cochin has become a conduit for commerce throughout India and has a multi-faceted and somewhat chequered colonial history. The Portuguese first visited in the fifteen hundreds, closely followed by the Dutch and British. It boasts India’s first church and also a synagogue. Wandering around I discover a restaurant called Menora, with the image of a Menora, rather aptly, painted on its doorway. I rather excitedly enter assuming they would offer me fusion Indian–Jewish cuisine. But alas, it is but a ruse to pull tourists in. I leave empty of stomach. I wander around the small garden square by St Francis Church and up to the children’s park. Daytime is considering its position as evening suggests resignation, and families have gathered around the pretty park, the noise of the ice cream vendor’s generator sporadically punctuated with the laughter of children. Here I find a smart little terraced restaurant a hop, skip and a jump from the sea front.
    There seem few more picturesque places to start such a journey as mine. India is a