Mumbai: Gujarati Thali Again and the Sad Story of the Asiatic Society

Another rainy day in Mumbai. I'd stopped being so disappointed - it's foolish to be disappointed by rain in Mumbai - but I was by this point growinfg bored, cooped up in a moldy hotel room with only a terrifyingly huge snail to keep me company. There just wasn't a hell of a lot to do in Colaba when it rained like this. I could sit in Barista and drink surprisingly all right cappucino, and regard knowingly the boy with a copy of Nabakov and a wispy beard one seat over. I could while away a few hours in an internet cafe that smelt of pee, catching up with my friends to the sound of the Muslim owner's Arabic pop-music, piped in the background. I could leap through puddles and slosh through buckets of mud to the local gas station to purchase a Diet Coke, listening in while a Mumbai Society Lady upbraided the properitor on his disappointing biscuit selection. These were the entertainments provided to me. At least I had some books.

I tried to visit the Asiatic Society Library. The Asiatic Society certainly had a good pedigree: founded in 1804 by Scottish judge and professional dilettante Sir James Mackintosh, the society intended to gather "useful knowledge, particularly such as is now immediately connected with India". An Asiatic Society in London followed, and the current building was finished around 1830. It currently functions as a library, with over 100,000 books in the collection, andover 15,00 books classified as rare (including one of the two extant copies of the Divine Comedy).

I was hoping for a colonial and welcoming library like the one I'd found in downtown Bangalore - a calm oasis of learning full of amiable egg-heads who might be willling to talk to me. I might even be able to find a book or two on Hampi, the ancient Vijayangar empire, a personal obsession of mine. It sounded promising.


Abroad is always under construction.

. I dutifully tramped over to Kala Ghoda, slightly soaking myself. The Asiatic Society sits in the middle of a large and impressive looking ring-road, or at least it might have been when new, back when it occasionally saw something approximating maintenance. Now it's old and the buildings ae stained with grime and moss, but they retain a certain grandoise, out of place appeal - there are not very many people here, for Mumbai, and the little park in its center is a nice enough place to while away the day. (I had found myseld trapped in this part of town two years ago, in the hottest part of the day, and had stumbled slightly dazed into this park - it was so crowded with people with the same idea as my own that we all jockeyed madly for butt-space, there was nowhere to retreat. I ended up sitting half on an ant pile next to a girl studying French: I had a nap anyway).

I am sad to report that the Asiatic Society was a vast disappointment. They were theoretically renovating it - there was scaffolding up around the outside - but the interior was dusty and dirty, and the books were all locked away. (I find locked away books in a library vasly offensive - surely thre are security reasons for such, but the browsing element of a library is destroyed, the sense of discovery mooted). There was no attendant to ask to unlock the books, and it was nearly impossible to see through the faded glass, anyhow. The rain kicked up ferociously as soon as I got inside, and I sulkily retreated to the "Ladies Study Area" to look at a book on South Indian History I had in my backpack. Cooing from the ceiling: a pigeon family had taken up residence inside the library's main room.



I had lunch at the Copper Chimney, in Kala Ghoda. It's one of those upscale North Indian/tandoori places favored by power-lunchers and Punjabi families dressed up for a weekend outing. Curiously enough, it's downstairs from a trendy buffet/gelato/Wesern restaurant, and is decorated in a very contempo fashion. I went for my usual picks - tandoori chicken, tandoori gobi.


Could someone familar with Mumbai and/or able to read Hindi tell me who this man is and why he has a statue?

It always amuses me that many Westerners don't know how tandoori chicken gets that red. It's food coloring. They don't use it here, usually a sign of a higher quality establishment. This was excellent. Lots of yogurt coating left on their.

Saleem and I had been hoping to meet up again, but I recieved a call from him around 8:00 PM, after he got off work. "It's raining so hard they've stopped running the trains from Bandra," he said.

"Jesus," I said. "That's not normal is it?"

"Oh, no." he said. "Not normal." Mumbai after all is sub-aquatic city, a city mostly accustomed to being buffeted with rain. Well, within reason - there were the floods back in 2007. This monsoon wasn't flooding, not exactly, but it was persistent, it wouldn't quit, it just kept on thumping away.

The Monsoon, the goddamend monsoon. I was fairly insulated from it in Bangalore - a town with remarkably pleasant weather - but this years monsoon has been the worst in 20 years, a remarkably persistent SOB. Well, according to this article, not the worst by a long shot. (Actually, rather dry on average) Simply one of the most maddeningly erratic. Back in the day, you knew when the monsoon would start and when it would end. Now? All bets are off.

It was pissing down rain, as it had been for the past four days, and I was the only person in Golden Star Thali, situated near the Opera House, opposite Carni Road railway station. The host was small and thin and had an extremely grand manner to him: he ushered me to my seat in a fairly theatrical fashion. "It's all you can eat, madame," he informed me, as the metal thali plate was set before me.

Christ, did he ever mean it.



This montrosity is Golden Star's 300 rupee thali. Not exactly a major investment for a comically large amount of food. It's less refined then Samrat's thali, but it's a little tastier - got more "soul" as we'd say in my native tounge. Loved the stir-fried cabbage and the variant on aloo gobi. It's not as sweet as Samrat's either. (No, I didn't ask for the ketchup. Came with). The Gujarati dahi? Fantastic. I'm very keen on all Indian dahi/curd products and this did not disappoint. You cannot stop them from pouring ghee all over the plate so don't even try. They also bring you masala chaas, a yogurt drink with turmeric and ginger. Incredibly refreshing and a fantastic way to restore electrolytes in Mumbai's climate.



This is, I believe, Gujarati Dal Bati. Basically, it's dal with bits of wheat dough - these seem to be Gujarati "crackers" or biscuit bhakris. Golden Star is very fond of running specials on every day of the week, be they unlimited Bengali sweets, unlimited desserts of another sort, or other items of their choosing. See what's on when you visit. They give you a card which, if stamped ten times, scores you a free thali. I love these guys.

Bangalore: Commercial Street, Plastic Dogs, Emgees, Paneer

So, we went to Commercial Street. Tom was leaving that evening on a wheelchair-buying junket in Chennai. I just wanted to go out and see The Real Bangalore (whatever that is). Commercial Street makes for a wonderful entree into such. Basically, it's where the hoi-polloi in B'lore go to buy stuff. M.G Road is for the wealthy and the aspirant, the venue where one purchases Levis, designer electronics, European chocolates, and other status-symbol goods. Commercial Street is roughly five minutes away by rickshaw but encompasses the other stuff. There's Levi's outlets here too, of course, but there's also umpteen thousand sari makers, fabric stores, pashmina outlets, wedding jewelry huts, places where one can buy freshly slaughtered animals of every make and model, and much much more. It's crowded, dirty, and has a startling amount of dead animals on the street at any given time. There's women in full hijab everywhere, there's usually no tourists anywhere in sight, and you're often forced to fancy foot work to avoid stepping in a gigantic mound of cow dung. Welcome to India. I think.


Bangalore is filled with incredible murals like these. I don't know who's doing them or funding them, but two thumbs up. Gorgeous.

Bartering and arguing over prices is part of life in India, and it's especially the case in shopping areas like Commercial Street. There's a ferangi tariff for foreigners, and it's upon you to bring it down to something manageable. Many European or American tourists come to India (or other developing countries) with noble ideas vis a vis bargaining. They feel that these Indian guys are making exponentially less money then we do, and thus, it's a bit of a dick move to bargain incessantly over what is tantamount to a $1.35 to us decadent Westerners. Philosophically, this seems like a legtimate and reasonable stance. In practice? Yeah, that lasts for about a day. Then it becomes a matter of honor. No one likes being screwed over on a daily basis, no matter what the philosophical and moral underpinnings of the thing are. And so you begin to bargain, more and more and more, and the longer you spend in India, the more intense you get about it. Still, that doesn't mean it has to be a serious and unpleasant death match. Bargaining can be a hell of a lot of fun. Everyone has different tactics.

I particularly liked Tom's take on bargaining. He'd address the sellers in perfectly correct, colloquial English. "I'm looking for a tiger belt buckle, with a particularly nasty expression on its face. No, not the gun one. That's a bit too violent. I'm thinking something with more panache. (as an example)." This served the dual purpose of confusing the seller (who often cut the price lower out of sheer bewilderment) and amusing the hell out of Tom and myself. I've adopted this tactic over the past few weeks, and it really works.




A lot of people don't know that Southern India has a significant Christian population. There's Catholic churches, schools, and cathedrals all over Bangalore (and even more in Goa and Kerala). This is St. Mary's Basilica, consecrated way back in 1882. Holy Father Pope Paul VI himself elevated it to Basilica status. The Virgin Mary inside is, needless to say, draped in a saree every day instead of the usual robes.


I like this leaf Ganesh.

Tom was hunting for a Ganesha figure to round out his collection. You know Ganesh. He's the portly elephant-headed guy. As the story goes, he was the son of Parvati, who longed for a child. Shiva, her husband, wouldn't give her one, so she took the second-best option and crafted a child for herself out of clay. This child grew up extremely quickly (as all Indian deities seem to do) and was devoted to his mother, so much so that he guarded her door against all comers. One day Shiva came to be with her, and Ganesh dutifully blocked the door to him. Shiva lopped off his head. Parvati was, understandably, a bit put out by this, so Shiva replaced his head with the nearest available replacement: an elephant's. But of course that's just one story.

Every South Indian seems to be honor-bound to keep a statue of him on the dashboard of their car.

We found a man selling extremely nice hand-painted Ganesh statues out of his workshop, most of them featuring electric-neon colors and inordinate amounts of glitter. "For the discriminating consumer," Tom said.

The seller nodded. "Ah, you think it is special. You are from the USA, also special. We are from India...not special."

"Oh, no, no," Tom and I said in unison. We looked at every Ganesh statue the guy had, and they were surprisingly high-quality. Getting a fragile clay statue home, though - yeah, that's the trick. We decided to pass. Tom acquired a bronze cobra instead. I was still in that liminal (and occasionally eternal) state of "comparison" shopping. Tom was debating buying one of those eminently sparkly "men's" kurtas they sell down here.

"There's nothing wrong with being a gay Indian," I said. "It's perfectly all right."

"Hmph," he said.

Bangalore and South India, especially on the backstreets, has an almost Mediterrenan feel to it. It's the dry heat of summer, and the ultra-blue sky, and the pastel colors of the houses. It's the palm trees and the birds up ahead.

Then you see a chopped-up rat in the road or someone thwacking the head off a chicken and are reminded.

We saw a splat of water on the ground with six mostly-dead and gasping cockroaches in it. Cockroach explosion? Did we really want to know?

We headed back to the M.G Road area, and ducked into the Cottage Emporium Store. Every major town in India has a Cottage Emporium outlet. They're set up as clearing-houses for local crafts, craftworks, textiles, and other stuff. They usually have mid-range prices, but on the plus side, they're fixed (saves you the bargaining), the stuff is always high quality, and the staff seem profoundly uninterested in you. This becomes a wonderful thing. Indian service philosophies tend more towards the "bug the hell out of you and drive you out of the store" rather then towards American's preferred "be unobtrusive and let me decide what I want, goddamnit."



They had these life-size, plastic, unnerving German shepherds on sale. "Only 4000 rupees," I said to Tom.

"Wow. That's a lot of freaky looking dog for the price," he said. "What a deal."

"I should snap them up."

Emgee's
#73, M G Road, Next to Gangarams
40430000
Bangalore

For lunch, we headed over to Emgee's, which is on MG Road in the Shelton Grand hotel. (There's an entrance on Church Street, too). Their tag-line is Veggie Veggie Healthy. This always used to amuse the snot out of my friend Chris, back when we both worked in Bangalore. Well, I can kind of see his point. The place was aggressively air-conditioned, and that's what we really cared about.



It is, I have discovered, totally impossible to take a palatable picture of palak (spinach). But this stuff was delicious. They somehow managed to make it taste delightfully smoky, without adding any meat products. Yum. Also: saag is always used to refer to spinach dishes in the USA. In India, it's always palak. Here, saag refers specifically to a Punjabi dish made with mustard greens and served with parathas, called sarson ka saag. I suspect this is because the vast majority of Indian restaurants in the USA are run by Punjabi immigrants. But don't quote me on that.

Tandoori gobi again. I think by the end of this trip I will be able to put together the world's preeminent photo essay concerning tandoori gobi. This was good, though not great.



Paneer butter masala. A classic. And delicious. Will kill you early, but you'll die happy. Indians love it too. Everyone loves the goddamn paneer.



Vegetable jalfreezi, which is a spicy curry made with a variety of vegetables. Honestly, many places vegetable curries taste exactly the same to me. This was quite good, though had too much ghee for my taste. Tons of ghee translates as high quality to the Indian palate, but is a lot to handle for someone from California (though you'd think New Orleans would have beaten that out of me by now).

Emgees also has an impressive juice menu, usually has a buffet of some sort of regional vegetarian food (Karnataka stuff this month) and a nice selection of chaats, served from a cart outside. It's definitely reliable -and spotlessly clean.