Of all the aspects of a journey that linger long after the moment has passed, why is it that food take on such a disproportionately prominent role? Siddharth Dasgupta allows his appetite, and his memories, to find the way towards an acceptable enough answer.
In one of those endless arterial lanes snaking their way through the Beyoğlu district, I find myself at a café whose name lies buried behind rowdy shrubbery. The air bristles with the promise of an extended winter. Istanbul is settling into that dusted-with-orange evening glow where everything—the artistry fading away on the walls of mosques; the shadows on streets carved through the insistent poetry of cobblestones; the dull, distant hum of a street musician lost in his own reverie—appears even more of an enigma waiting to be deciphered, than it would during the light of day.
A row of women stream by, the wind engaging the different reflections in their hair in a game of touch and flee. My heart, already prone to vulnerability, quickens. The two-people-at-a-time-only street lies aware and alive, beneath the sway of a few errant vine leaves and a clutch of wrought-iron balconies that look as though they’ve been ripped from the pages of time. Beyoğlu itself heaves beneath the weight of chaos and beauty, with the larger roads and boulevards emptying a carnival of people into the more romantic recesses of the bylanes, pathways, and sidewalks.
And why all of this will be so acutely etched in my mind, decades later, is that I’m biting into a manti. A collage of meat-stuffed miniature parcels, the individual dumplings are giving this Turkish ravioli of sorts an accent worth memorizing—lamb boiled and spiced to perfection, an assortment of spices both familiar and foreign, and ample lashings of yogurt abundant with purity, the way only Turkish yogurt can be. It’s not as though the manti is particularly special (I’ve had better). It’s just that given the moment, it’s the ‘rug that ties the room together’—a fluid compatibility of taste, ambience, and desire.
Cut to four years later. It’s the middle of one of McLeod Ganj’s winters (what is it about food and winter?) ripe with northern promise. I’m here for the annual Dharamshala Film Festival, but films appear to have taken a subservient role to the food that India’s Tibetan enclave is serving up at every corner and all along the charm and chatter of the town’s two main thoroughfares—Temple Road and Jogibara Road. India’s cosmic crush of colour and flavourful explosions is on full display here, with a slew of small, special Tibetan cafés, patisseries, European bakeries, bistros, and North Indian Himachali shacks serving thali meals that unfurl morsel upon morsel of the unforgettable.
At this specific instance, it’s the robust nostalgia of a Tibetan culinary mainstay—the thukpa—that has my full attention. From my table in the Tibet Kitchen, one that has seen better days, everything tells a story—the old peeling posters and flyers at the front desk; the strictly one-person-only ‘lounge’ space; the paintings on the walls stressed with the vagaries of time; the spartan décor and cutlery that have welcomed caravans filled with travellers over the years; and the red-and-gold etched mini Pagoda-style entrance to the restaurant, affording a veneer of serenity—even as the narrow street that is its home begins to overflow with the cinema and the spirituality sets out to quell their hunger pangs.
Amidst this flurry of stories, it’s the thukpa that speaks to me. Its assemblage of egg and regular stringy noodles, chicken thighs, large chunks of vegetables, and a dense broth seems to carry with it the sorrows and the childhoods and the prevailing triumphs of an entire displaced race. The first slurp lets me know that all these elements have united to create a whisper of ‘you shall remember this, yes you will.’
Why should food hold such sway over our wanderlust soaked memories? After all, monuments are larger, in a literal sense. Architecture and its fables from the past offer a more eye-catching canvas for remembrance. Adventure present more energy and dynamism, sometimes essential to travel; while parties, celebrations, and festivals play the role of the mood boosters, always at hand to embellish our memories with a touch of the extra. And yet, there cuisine is—infiltrating our thoughts of a foreign city with the ease of a wayward breeze.
Perhaps the answer lies in its all-sensorial sway. Food, glorious food, engages with our senses in the kind of manner that leaves the act of remembering a mere formality. Catch a whiff of saffron at a farmer’s market, and you’re instantly whisked away to a chaikhanah in Tehran, sipping tea infused with the delicacy of that particular rarity; run your fingers over a family heirloom, and somehow, it’s the textural oddity of roasted pork that springs to mind; glimpse a plump bouquet of clouds in a blue summer sky, and a specific variety of mushroom flecked with a swirl of truffle oil is the first thing that comes to mind; mingle with the perfumed essence of a lover, and you’re in Paris, specifically rue Mouffetard—being assaulted by its rich mélange of boulangeries and fromageries.
Another vital aspect to gastronomy’s devious sleight of hand is that it is food that is often our first true link to a foreign address, either binding us to a sense of comfort via the trope of familiarity or sending a sharp quiver of thrill pulsing through or bodies with its presentation of the mysterious. The only thing I can think of as coming close to food in the travel reminiscence stakes is the full-blown deliciousness of an affair in a foreign land, ripe with the fragrance of possibility, its potency heightened by the constraints of time—leading sometimes to the equally sensorial pleasures of great sex.
In that sense, food and love (or something resembling it) are kindred souls of sorts—both are ephemeral affairs on the surface, yet their influence can, often enough, last for years. Both are pleasures for the senses like few else, engaging skin, smell, taste, and touch in a risqué tango of give and receive. Finally, there is the longing, suffused within each one’s skin and folds of memory—that ache to go back, that pining for a certain moment in time, that desire to snatch ourselves away from everyday life—depositing ourselves instead in a place where magic doesn’t seem that much of an esoteric concept.
As with a lover, memories concomitant to travel, via food, refuse to abate. Neither do these memories necessarily arise from experiences long past. And thus it flows, this stream of mental impressions, of yesterdays long past and yesterdays no more than a breath’s reach gone.
Where there is travel, there is food; and where there is food, there are the conversations—another of those emotional markers that food tends to pull out of the hat on frequent occasions. How many times has a specifically local meal not readily found in magazines and guides led to an in-depth immersion into its origins, courtesy a native only too happy to school you in its ways? On how many occasions has a simple meal in a café as a lone traveller led to friendships being forged and addresses being exchanged?
Personal instances remain vivid as ever: the Emirati café owner guiding me through the historical trials and tribulations of the rice, meat, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, and dry lime-induced machboos; the drunk Dutch woman trying to convince me of the fact that friets & mayo only truly taste divine in Amsterdam; the impassioned Lebanese waiter at great pains to convince me that sugar-sweetened, orange-blossomed whipped ricotta is a far better choice than clotted cream when it comes to the decadently delicious mafroukeh; the manager of an opulent Taj property in Rajasthan recounting tales of the fabled Rajasthani lal maas, as handed down from his childhood kitchen; the ancestral heir to a 17th-Century vineyard property in the French countryside of Champagne-Ardenne dissecting the art of picking just the right red to go with your flawlessly poached salmon, and so on…
As I sit here, gathering my thoughts and my words, it strikes me that food and wanderlust are genuine comrades-in-arms, presenting life at its most compelling. In this six-decades-old Irani café in my hometown of Poona, the waiters in their muddied whites scurry about on floors bearing patterns from ages past. The early morning breakfast crowd lingers over crisp, ginger-laden masala chai and the fluffed-up nostalgia of buns heaped with dollops of fresh butter.
Spring is on the verge. The imminence of a fresh birth heightens every mood, smell, and ingredient arising from the open kitchen. My meal lies before me; so does my diary. The skies are open and wild, as are the roads. I sense the kiss of restlessness tugging away at my heels. I accept the fact that I’m hungry, all over again.
Siddharth Dasgupta writes poetry, fiction, and feature stories from lost hometowns. He was shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize for his fifth book and third collection of poetry—All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart. The same collection was also on the longlist for the Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize.
Translations and detailed descriptions are provided to give a better understanding of the story to people from different cultural backgrounds across the globe.