Debut novelist Vikram Nair’s Gone With The Vindaloo is a celebration of food, particularly North Indian food.
Debut novelist Vikram Nair’s Gone With The Vindaloo is a celebration of food, particularly North Indian food. It elevates spices, vegetables and meats into coveted morsels, aided by deft handling of language. The first part of the book, which traverses between the palatial homes of bureaucrats and huge establishments of British officers during the Raj, is a treat — with its descriptions of food, of crazy bawarchis and masalchis, of obsessions with food and eating, of course! Nair, the founder of Khaja Chowk, a decade-old chain of kitschy Indian street food restaurants, brings authenticity and love of food to his tale of three generations of cooks in a family. The culinary exploits of Kalaam, as described by his son Param to his grandson Pakwaan, are the zaniest and most enjoyable parts of the novel. Kalaam’s adventures in Benaras and Lucknow provide Nair an ideal platform to display his love for Indian food - from murgh mussalam zafrani, to vindaloo of the title, Sheikh Hasan Raza’s kathi rolls to Mohammed Shah Rangila’s Saag Masala. Nair, who grew up in Bhubaneshwar, with his brother Gautam and sister, the internationally-renowned filmmaker Mira, has used his childhood to embellish his novel. Nair has used his father Amrit, who was a bureaucrat posted mostly in Orissa, mother Praveen, and his siblings to flesh out a few of his characters. Accidental conception of his youngest sibling Mira despite their father’s desire for only two children, first revealed in a piece in the New Yorker in 2002, is also revealed, especially the irony of their father being incharge of the family planning programme, which advised Indians to have two or less children. The patriarchal control over sons is beautifully revealed in the contrasting stories of Pakwaan and Tek Ram. The two fathers — Mahadev and Param — and their treatment of their sons is dealt with compassion, especially the character of the bureaucrat who is fond of using clichéd aphorisms. Nair, a post-graduate in history from Delhi University, took some 10 years to write the book and the effort put in the first part of the book shines. The spiciness and tartness of picaresque tale is, however, lost with the introduction of Svetlana, who first comes to India as a nirvana-seeking American. Like Pakwaan’s vindaloo, which loses its flavour when packaged with consumerism, the book loses its punch in vilayat.
The book, which was released last month at the Jaipur Literature Festival, to borrow Nair’s tagline for his restaurant, is “full full Indian” and is entertaining in parts where food is at the centre stage. It would be interesting to read him in detail on Indian food.
