Feasting, Writing and Roaming Across India
Surviving India with Imodium
India hardly feels like a nation that would be easy for anyone, inbred veteran or fleeting visitor, to digest. So it’s apt that a book titled Digesting India starts with the author recounting experiences of the opposite: of loose motions, projectile vomits and other stomach-churning situations that inevitably hit adventurous travelers. Especially folks like Zac, who are extraordinarily audacious when it comes to sampling foods. So much so, that they are forced to record their t.t.b/h (trips to the bathroom per hour), blowing toilet doors off their hinges or fertilizing proximal coconut farms. This then is O Yeah’s sage advice to newbie foodie tourists: never set out on your journey without Imodium.
Exploring Foods and Places
Fired by a gusto to discover and rediscover his adopted country, Zac is clear about his reasons for traveling: “For me, travel has always been about exploring – be it cuisines or cultures.” Naturally the Finnish-born, Swedish-raised author hasn’t limited his forays to the humdrum resort-type spaces that most tourists huddle in. He’s dozed off on railway platforms in Salt Lake City and rural Punjab, or hung about “flea-infested bus stations in Africa.” While accumulating reams of gritty tales to enthrall boozy pub-hoppers or the literary crowd that gets woozy on words. Including fascinating tidbits about writers and spaces/places that spawned their works.
As a habitual or inveterate traveler, the pandemic was rather intolerable for Zac. But it gave rise to this book – which languorous readers like me can flip through on cozy arm-chairs or gently swaying hammocks.
In Defense of Grubby Street Eats
Zac has a rugged and vigorous digestive system. The kind that can imbibe a medley of street foods, or snacks between fantastically sinful breakfasts, lunches and dinners – bringing to mind, indulgent Nawabi lifestyles of yore. But unlike those ancients, O’Yeah is a nimble traveler, a bibliophile and a discerning, wry observer of the absurdities that constitute our country. While he gleefully bites into kathi rolls in Kolkata, crispy vada pavs in Mumbai, or the distinct bedmi aloo at Shyam Sweets in Old Delhi, he also has us chuckling – even rollicking with mirth – at scenes that feel both familiar and foreign.
Like when the British High Commissioner was snapped up eating a masala dosa with a “fork and knife”, and the Twitterati responded with: “Ayyo, Karma, how to teach you guys about civilization only! Eat with hand saar, holistic sensory experience will be.” Fortunately, the High Commissioner soon made amends, and was photographed again, digging into the masala dosa with his fingers.
So we root for O’Yeah and his foodie friend who asserts, “the grubbier the grub, the better it’ll taste.”
Guts & Glory: Bengaluru Chronicles
As a Bengaluru resident, he guides us through a city that he possibly knows better than many inhabitants. For instance, he walks us into Shivajinagar joints, where all kinds of animal “spare parts” are fed to tolerant eaters – including eyes, spleens, livers, tongues, brains. Zac disabuses those who might think that offal (the innards and trimmings usually discarded by butchers as waste) must taste awful. As a cross-cultural omnivore, he realizes that what one community discards, another savors. Unafraid to muck about in parts famed for gang wars and petty and not-so-petty crimes, O’Yeah trundles through the bylanes of Majestic, which inspired his detective series. And where women line up by the Central Jail, with tiffin boxes for imprisoned husbands.
He also dips into his favored bookstores – the now defunct Premier Bookshop, the still buzzing Bookworm and Blossoms and Book Hive, all close to the old joint that the historian Ram Guha describes as “always welcoming”: Koshy’s. O’Yeah, as the trilingual author of countless books on India and beyond, rests his feet in the “oasis for bibliomaniacs who live in the slow lane, as compared to all those cyber czars in the fast lane of gastropubs in Koramangala and microbreweries of Indiranagar.” Fortunately, there’s food and beverages to wash down his thoughts.
Which sometimes meander into the past. Like to the one-time Funnel dance hall on South Parade. As Janaki Nair notes in The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century, these places, in the colonial era, “spelt an unmatched social freedom” to many from older parts of the city. Here one could have non-veg, alcohol and mingle freely with members of the opposite sex. For those who could not cross oceans, wining and dining in the Cant was a crash course in “cosmopolitanism.”
Wandering to the nearby but rarely visited Kolar Gold Fields, Zac notes that KGF got electricity in 1902, before the rest of India. The mining town also sold something called “Beer” in a Beer Shop (and Zac does not miss the sheer charm of calling something by its Aristotelian essence). The marketplace that held the Beer Shop was also called Beershop, something that many ladies mispronounced as Bishop.
Bond(a)ing with RK Narayan
In R K Narayan’s The Guide, the bonda is described as, “composed of flour, potato, a slice of onion, a coriander leaf and a green chilli – an oh! How it tasted – although he probably fried it in anything.”
O’Yeah himself cannot resist buying these globular temptations – bondas – when he saunters past a street vendor. Though he knows, like RK Narayan, that the vendor would quite easily stoop to using kerosene to pare down costs. Zac’s BP spikes as a result, requiring changes in his meds.
As a fellow-writer, he senses that RK Narayan must have been food-deprived as a vegetarian in 1950s’ California. Something that the veteran author acknowledges in My Dateless Diary, since he often had to contend with conversations like:
“Are you a vegetarian by conviction or religion?”
“I am a born vegetarian. I cannot eat anything except rice, greens and dairy products.”
“Extraordinary! Wonder that you are alive.”
Zac gave up on bondas after climbing to the top of Sravanabelagola and encountering the statue of the ascetic who was supposed to have starved himself to death.
O’Yeah had met RK Narayan at his home in Chennai, in the late ‘90s. They spoke mostly about food. “The less we talked about fiction, the more communicative he became and so we chatted about basically anything but writing.” Zac and other book lovers were relieved, when the famed author’s Mysore home was spared from demolition in 2011. It’s been turned into a museum with “a big fat biography of his mentor, Graham Greene, his shirts, muffler and grey jacket.”
Literary Lore about Legends
Digesting India features many such alluring anecdotes about writers. Like Graham Greene and Bruce Chatwin. O’Yeah even stays at the Beach Hotel, built in 1890 by the British. Somerset Maugham was supposed to have conceived of The Razor’s Edge in one of its suites. When Zac asks to stay in that legendary room, the staff greet him with a stupefied: “Your mom? What’s her name?”
Hermann Hesse’s grandfather, Hermann Gundert, ran a school in Thalaserry, Kerala. Gundert even learned Malayalam well enough to write in it and produce one of its first dictionaries. Hesse, author of the renowned Der Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, almost made it to the place but did a U-turn after reaching Sri Lanka. Zac however made up for the grandson’s quibbles, snapping up a selfie by the Nobel winner’s ancestral home.
O’Yeah bumps into Pico Iyer at Bhutan. While Iyer is quick to point out the irony of giving a talk on The Art of Stillness in a country that personifies calm, the expert travel writer is slightly dampened by changes in the mountainous terrain. But he’s aware that one can’t stay nostalgic for a place that might have never been utopic for many: “We visitors have to be careful about the wishes we project – the fact that we want places to remain beautiful for our camera lenses.” More tellingly, Pico does not own a mobile. The extra time this accords him – to read, write and engage with the real world – is something that many of us might envy.
Abiding With Gandhi’s Fetishes
Zac dwells on how the audience must have balked at Gandhi’s admonition to start eating healthful salads to showcase the ideal diet to villagers: “No masala in the curry? Uncooked food? I visualize jaws dropping and eyes popping.” But the Mahatma’s strictures were offset by his foresight. Well before veganism was faddish, Gandhi had already foreseen the benefits of soybean as a meat substitute. Like modern fitness trainers or nutritionists, he was a critic of overeating. At Sevagram Ashram, Zac eats dinner at 5:30 pm, a simple (or horrifying) meal consisting of roti, some boiled and raw veggies. To compensate, he sleeps well later. It was possibly expedient to do so, since he’s woken up at 4 a.m. for morning bhajans.
This book might be exactly the kind of goading we need: to explore the littler eateries, grubbier bars, smaller bookstores and incredible histories of ordinary gullies and dwellings. Before we dash out to “See Europe in 10 Days”, Zac compels us to revisit places closer to home.
References
Zac O’Yeah, Digesting India: A Travel Writer’s Sub-continental Adventures with the Tummy, Speaking Tiger, 2023