Gluttony-I: Varq

Varq, Taj Mahal Hotel
1 Mansingh Road
Tel: 91-2302-6162
Category: Expensive

Having suffered too many bad renditions of Indian nouvelle cuisine--a rose petal and marigold salad with paneer tikka chunks stands out as a particularly horrifying experience--my husband and I approach Varq with some nervousness. To my mind, too many bad meals--Scrooge-like portions, pretentious service and no real understanding of the culinary tradition--have been passed off as fine dining under the nouvelle-fusion banner.

But Varq drew rave reviews when it opened a while back, and I like Chef Hemant Oberoi's reputation. He's the wizard behind The Bombay Brasserie, and his work sounds intelligent--a corn soup poured over turmeric-flavoured popcorn, a reinvented crab that uses classic Indian spices, cleverly layered on thin filo leaves. And besides, this is impulse dining--I refuse to order home delivery any more, on the grounds that I can cook better, cheaper and faster in my kitchen, and that allows me more space for the occasional indulgence.

Neither of us is suitably dressed, unless you count black T-shirts as high style, and we don't have a reservation, but that doesn't prevent Varq's staff from treating us with great courtesy. We're early and good tables are available--we get one with a view of the refurbished Anjolie Ela Menon murals on one hand, and the quiet garden on the other. The decor's contemporary, with beaded chandeliers, and restful without being extraordinary--it signals comfortable rather than quirky.

Our waiter is ready to explain the concept of Varq, and we sense he's had to do this several times before for the benefit of baffled Indians wanting to know where the kabab platter went. Varq offers a Western rather than Eastern way of dining--you order separate appetisers and main courses instead of shared dishes and thali-style meals--and has sensibly included a selection of vegetable dishes and daals, priced differently if ordered as accompaniments and if ordered as main courses.

The amuse-bouche arrives at high speed and for a second, I wonder whether we've made a mistake. It's a nice idea--a tiny bonda lifted from the chaat trolley, with a smear of chutney--but the bonda is cold and slightly soggy, the chutney too sharp. My husband grimly orders a pepper vodka, and I take comfort in the excellent date-tamarind sherbet.

Our fears were unfounded. The first appetizer to arrive is the Varqi crab--South Indian spices, generous helpings, and the combination of the silky, spicy crab with the melt-in-your-mouth filo pastry leaf (studded with black mustard seeds) is incredible--rich, textured and light. The prawn on top is big enough to be shared by two, which we do, forgetting our manners, and--this is always a good sign--I see the staff beaming at our obvious delight. The second appetizer, liver three ways, is a clever concept, but I'm not so sure it works for me. The mutton liver is mildly over-cooked; the chicken liver in a potato wafer basket, drizzled with an orange juice reduction, is not mind-blowing, and the foie gras with a mango salsa is good, but nowhere as brilliant as it could be. Good, but not great, I think, idly admiring the silver varq-inspired etchings on the ceiling, and I realise that Varq has already raised my expectations--in most of Delhi's Indian restaurants, this dish would have been a spectacular success, not a "show me more".

At a table near us, I hear gasps of happy surprise as the diners try their main course, the brilliantly presented Lobster Hawa Mahal, and elsewhere, there's a lady spooning up her dessert, a Hot Chandni Varqi Jalebi, with an expression of absolute ecstasy on her face. And there it is again; from where I'm sitting, I can see how the waiters watch each table anxiously, how their faces brighten when a course goes down well and sink a little when diners seem baffled.

A tamarind sorbet, insistently sharp, clears our palate for the main course. The Martabaan ki Meat arrives in a miniature pickle jar--the gravy at the bottom of the jar is spectacularly rich, by the way, so dig in--and is delicately good. I like the tenderness of the meat, the texture and the contrast between the red achaari pickle, but it's been toned down a bit--a classic Martabaan ki Meat can be far more spicy. This is a riff on the original rather than a faithful rendering--but it's an awesome riff, and once again, we forget our manners, dipping pizza-style Tomato-Olive Naans into the sauce. The baby potatoes are forgettable, and I wish I'd ordered the "bharta three ways" instead--baingan, tomato and pumpkin purees that look incredibly tempting. But the lasuni spinach is awesome, all the more so for being so simple: it's just spinach cooked with pearls of garlic, salt and pepper, and it manages to extract something of the flavour of a good aioli from ordinary lasun.

The real star of the show is the Calicut prawns, done with asparagus in a delicate, aromatic coconut sauce--this is really how to take classic spices and sauces and rework them ever so slightly. We've overdone it; there's no room for the desserts, and I need to come back some day to redress this. I also wish I'd ordered the Vedic tisanes along with the meal, rather than the sherbet--which is immensely tasty, but perhaps too rich as an accompaniment. And I want to try the khurmani kababs, the seafood soup--okay, fine, pretty much everything on the menu.

Too often, with an old school Indian meal, you leave with a sense of too much richness and the dismal awareness that Digene will be your aperitif of choice the next day. But Varq left us replete, not overstuffed. It's definitely expensive, even by Delhi's now exorbitant standards, but I'd argue that it's worth it--sometimes. (A meal for two, with tisanes/ drinks, could easily run from Rs 8,000 upwards.)

Part of the magic is Chef Hemant Oberoi's deep love for Indian food--he really knows his ingredients, and Varq, like Bombay Brasserie, reinvents without going over the top. Is it as good, or better than, Devi in the US? I'd like to know--Suvir and Hemant sound as though they bring a similar intelligence to their interpretations of Indian food. What made Varq work for me went beyond the menu, though. It was the sense of well-being we were wrapped in, and the staff's open pleasure when they saw that their diners were, indeed, having a good time.

The BS Column: The Orange, juiced

(Published in the Business Standard, May 19, 2009)

Hiroshima, Alzheimer’s, a racist 1931 rape trial, an inventor on the verge of a love affair, a pastor on the verge of death. Nothing in these themes or these characters indicates the gender of the author of the novels in which they appear, and this is where the conundrum of the Orange Prize lies.

The winner of the “Bessie” will be announced in a few weeks time, marking the 13th year of the world’s only major prize for women. In its first few years, the Orange Prize generated more heat than light, with many arguing that a prize exclusively for women writers was discriminatory at worst, unnecessary at the very least, in this century.

Over time, the Orange proved its worth to thousands of readers, though, not by creating space for women’s writing as much by redressing the invisibility of women writers. A S Byatt called it a “sexist” prize, refusing to allow her publishers to enter her books for the Orange; other women writers, from Chimamanda Adichie to Ann Patchett, had a more nuanced view, celebrating the fact that the prize gave them a virtual room of their own.

If you go through the shortlists for every year, it becomes harder to argue that the Orange doesn’t serve a purpose. A certain kind of writer—talented, but not glamorous, intensely engaged, but not always fashionable—shows up in these shortlists, writers who would have been lost or overlooked without the Orange. And over its 13-year life span, the Orange may actually have begun redefining what we think of as “women’s writing”.

It’s a shift that publishers like Urvashi Butalia know well, as women’s publishing houses witness and encourage writing by women to grow beyond the fascinating but narrow confines of writing on gender. The more popular view of women’s writing is far more of a ghetto: yesterday’s Mills & Boons, today’s chicklit and arranged marriage bestsellers.

This year’s shortlist includes: Burnt Shadows (Kamila Shamsie), Scottsboro (Ellen Feldman), The Wilderness (Samantha Harvey), The Invention of Everything Else (Samantha Hunt), Molly Fox’s Birthday (Deirdre Madden) and Home (Marilynne Robinson). The range of themes, and the historical periods, explored in these novels is broad—and it is this breadth that really defines writing by women today.

Burnt Shadows finds a narrative arc between Hiroshima and Guantanamo Bay, and among its principal characters are a Japanese woman who survives Hiroshima, and a young Pakistani whose path leads him to prison in the US. Scottsboro examines the infamous 1931 rape trial in the Deep South, where the testimony of two white women put nine black men behind bars for several years on rape charges.

The Wilderness explores the confounding, unmoored, intense world of Alzheimer’s from the perspective of a male protagonist struggling to understand his life from a few scattered clues. The Invention of Everything Else is about the growing (and imagined) friendship between the exuberant scientist Nikola Tesla and a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker. Marilynne Robinson’s eloquent, moving Home follows the stories of those we met in her previous novel, Gilead. Glory Boughton returns to look after her father, the pastor; the return of her brother Jack forces many questions for the two as they face the imminent death of their father. I haven’t read Molly Fox’s Birthday, but the blurb indicates that it’s about an Irish actress, as seen by the Shakespearean actor who borrows her house briefly.

If you read only these descriptions, you would have no way of knowing whether the authors of these books were male or female, and that is a tribute to the broader, limitless world of women’s writing today. Some critics of the Orange take this further, arguing that if the books are relatively genderless, there should be no need of a special prize for women.

The raison d’etre of the Orange Prize, however, was not to address an inequity of voice—from the earliest, most pioneering women writers onwards, women have often demanded the right to write about what pleases them. The founders of the Prize saw and addressed an essential inequity in the space that women writers were allocated—fewer column inches, fewer reviews, fewer soundbytes on TV shows, and most crucially, less space in the public memory.

Each year, the shortlist does what it did for me this year, and what it has for 13 years running—underlines the presence of one or two well-known women writers, and introduces us to several more who would otherwise have slipped through the cracks. Take women’s writing from the margins to the centre, says the Orange, and until women find themselves at the centre without need for special pleading, there will always, sadly, be a need for the prize.

On keeping a journal

From William Boyd's Bamboo (2005), a collection of his critical writing, this lovely riff on Keeping a Journal:

For the journal - relating as it does a life-story, or part of a life-story - does so in a manifestly different manner than the other forms available, whether biography, memoir or autobiography. All these last three are fashioned by the view backwards, informed by the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Only the journal truly reflects, in its dogged chronology, the day-by-day, week-by-week progress of a life. Events have not yet acquired their retrospective gloss and significance; meetings and people, projects and schemes have not matured or developed.
The impenetrable judgments of the future more often than not undermine the honest analysis of the present. That job you were so excited about has not yet turned tedious; that thriving dot-com company you sunk your savings into has still to go belly-up; that pretty woman/good-looking man you met at the party last night has not become your wife/husband - and so on. The journal has to have the same random shape as a human life: governed by chance and the haphazard, by that aggregate of good luck and bad luck that everybody receives. Biography and autobiography dilute this inexorable fact, shaped as they are by the wisdom of hindsight and the manipulations of ego, and are literary forms that are, in many ways, as artificial and contrived as fiction. But, by definition, a journal cannot do this: it's written as the future unspools into the present.

Dan Baum and the fine art of tweeting

Like many New Yorker readers, I've been a Dan Baum fan for many reasons, his brilliant New Orleans series among them. So I was sorry to hear that his contract hadn't been extended last year--and more than amused when he began tweeting the story of his firing from the New Yorker recently.

Dan's Twitter feed is here; his New Yorker tweets are collected on his website, here:

People often ask why I left the New Yorker. After all, I had a staff writer job. Isn’t that the best job in journalism? Yes.


Nobody leaves a New Yorker job voluntarily. I was fired. And over the next few days, I’ll tell that story here, in 140


Character chunks.

But the real eye-opener for me was this collection of pitches, done by Dan and his wife and collaborator, Margaret Knox.

These are some pitches for stories that were accepted.

And these are some pitches for stories that were rejected.

I wish I'd known about these during my brief stint in publishing--just to show writers how much work might go into a good manuscript synopsis/ proposal. It's a rich archive, and Dan's generosity in sharing these is remarkable.

The BS column: The Translator's Tale

How do you get the world to read in Indian? I’m quoting a young Italian editor who said this when she discovered the wealth of Indian literature outside the narrow confines of writing in English recently.

It’s a great question. Ever since Indian writing in English took off in the West with R K Narayan, Raja Rao and Kamala Das, most of the world has read Indian writers chiefly in this language, to the exclusion of others. The equivalent would be a bit like narrowing the great canon of European literature down to works originally written in English—no Goethe, no Calvino, no Mallarme or Maupassant. This is ridiculous: as Pritham K Chakravarthy, translator of Blaft’s anthologies of Tamil pulp fiction and folk tales, says, we all grew up with translation. “How else would we know Marquez or Sartre?”

Part of the problem has to do with the demands of publishing as a market place—Indian writers in regional languages were seen as less glamorous, less marketable. The recent London Book Fair saw a slight but significant shift when writers like U R Ananthamurthy—one of the few Indian writers recognized in the West—and Sankar were given an attentive, and eager, ear. A few literary journalists commented on the frustration of knowing a country only through one of its many languages.

Perhaps we’re seeing a new openness to reading Indian writers in translation. For years, translators such as the venerable and fluent Gita Krishankutty have done their work in relative silence. In an interview after winning the Crossword award for translation, Krishankutty, who has translated writers from K Satchidanandan to V K Madhavan Kutty, spoke with sadness of the invisibility of her work—discovering that the books she’d worked on were not available in bookstores.

One of the biggest complaints against Indian translation used to be that it wasn’t of high quality—Krishankutty’s skills and sensitivity to the rhythm and music of the writing were an exception, not the norm. Translators like Arunava Sinha (Chowringhee, My Kind of Girl) are changing this. “I was attracted to translation because some stories talked to me,” says Sinha. “I wanted to share them with others.”

To illustrate how complex the translator’s task can be, he speaks of three different books. “Chowringhee, by Sankar, is a cascading text, piling on phrases, sentences, metaphors and references in masses of words with high emotional content,” says Sinha. Translating it into English, an “essentially more reserved language”, required a balance between “restraint and exhibitionism”.

My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose, was very different. “This is prose written by a poet with a very light but sure touch. The cadences and tone of the original prose needed to be captured as much with the ear as with the eye.” With a third novel, set several centuries in the past, Sinha says, “There is the larger issue of preserving the historical distance that the original creates without making the translation completely unreadable to a contemporary audience.”

The isolation that translators in India work in seems incredible, given the number of languages we have, and the great need for good translation. But despite the efforts of Katha, Siyahi and other literary groups to bring translators together, most of them work in a kind of absolute solitude. “I don’t know any translators from other languages, except Tamil,” says Pritham. She stresses the need to work with a good editor, which made a big difference in her view to the quality of both of Blaft’s anthologies.

Sinha agrees, saying, “I’m afraid there’s no real community of or exchanges between translators. And publishers do not work as closely with translators as they do with authors.” But there are signs of change—more cynically, if the US and European markets start to look with greater interest at Indian writing in translation, there will be better opportunities for translators and a demand for higher quality translations.

A possible way forward is shown by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, translator of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, and an acclaimed author (The Story of a Widow) in his own right. Farooqi had once commented with dismay on the average reader’s resistance to works in other languages: “Storytellers always traveled and spread their stories; now you need a visa.” He’s not waiting for his paperwork, so to speak. Instead, he’s kicked off the ambitious Urdu Project, which plans to focus on classical and contemporary Urdu literature.

Its first publication demonstrates the size of its ambitions—a translation of the 24-volume epic Hoshruba. Perhaps this is the way forward for translators—to effectively turn publisher and build their own list of the quirkiest, most unmissable books you and I have never read.

Book review: The Best Travel Writing 2009

(For Outlook Traveller, May 2009)

The Best Travel Writing 2009:
True Stories From Around the World
Edited by James O’Reilly, Larry Habegger and Sean O’Reilly
Travellers’ Tales, distributed by Westland
Rs 790, 351 pages





In Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the main character has a highly covetable visiting card: “Holly Golightly: Travelling”. Today’s passport officers would call in security if anyone was so unwise to state “Traveller” as their profession, though: it’s not a respectable job in the same way as “journalist” or “writer”.



As Pico Iyer observes in the closing piece in The Best Travel Writing 2009, travelling is something you do as a summer job, a detour between other kinds of work: “Now, doing the same thing twenty-five years later, I see that the jobs we stumble into often teach us more than all the ideal gigs we so patiently stalk. And getting lost or going on a detour is how we find the places we’d otherwise miss.”



Travel writing in 2009 is especially difficult, compared to what it would have been just a century ago. There are no places on the map marked “Here be Dragons”; Google Earth, Wikipaedia and streaming video give all of us the illusion of having charted every last place on earth. Adventure tourists have replaced fearless explorers. And the greatest fear of modern travellers is not the probability of disease or death—it’s the fear that they will turn out to be tourists, not travellers, after all.



The editors have selected their pieces wisely, given the times. Some writers embrace the tourist’s eye-view, but with a skewed perspective. Chris Epting tracks the motel and hotel rooms where music legends died, sleeping in the same room where Janis Joplin spent her last night, wondering whether Gram Parsons still haunts the Joshua Tree Inn. Cecilia Worth attends an unusual music performance inside an empty oil drum in Antarctica, Gabriel O’Malley battles his own sense of distaste as he visits the Stalin Museum in Georgia.



Patricia Dreyfus captures the experience of seeing a tiger in Chitwan National Park; Jill Paris goes boldly in search of the perfect dirndl. Marc-Edouard Leon attends the World Beard and Moustache Championships in Brighton, where the Beard Liberation Front pleads for an end to discrimination against the hairy, and where anxious contestants may use a snood—a whisker hammock—to protect the shape of their locks when they sleep.



The lure of reading 14th or 18th century travel writing often lay in the traveller’s description of the perils of the profession, and this is no different—though the dragons have changed, become more metaphorical. Read Jeff Greenwald, accompanying his mother to India, Susan Van Allen, wryly watching as Italian men become the pursued instead of the pursuers, or Rolf Potts, negotiating Cambodia via the wrong phrasebook. Even the casual traveller must deal with the shock of a new culture, confused signals and flawed assumptions, or the inescapable reality of being the foreigner.



In ‘The Bamenda Syndrome’, one of the most haunting pieces in this book, David Torrey Peters describes his sense of spiraling downwards into an alternate mental space in Cameroon. He witnesses a medicine man pulling worms out of a friend’s teeth, or does he? “Rather than admit to myself that I had arrived unprepared for certain experiences, I narrated my own explanations to myself,” he writes. “But much like a lie built upon a lie, I found myself unable to revise stories to fit events without admitting that I knew nothing, and so my stories … grew more and more fantastic.”



Some pieces are small gems. In ‘I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Quran’, David Grant explores the ins and outs of ‘dating’ in Ghana, where the norms of the Islamic culture forbid actual contact: “If you’re a DJ up in this country, this is how you get around social stricture when you run out of the music with the pious lyrics. You create a hot mix that has no lyrics at all.”



As with all collections, this one has its flaws. The insistence of some of the writers on finding an epiphany in even the most banal travelling experience is puzzling until you note the high number of MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) candidates and teachers among the contributors. And while the pieces criss-cross the globe, the contributors are chiefly Europeans and Americans, as though there were no African or Asian travel writers to be found, barring the ubiquitous Mr Iyer.



But I would still add The Best Travel Writing 2009 to my backpack. Like the best companions, it has much to offer in any given situation, a smattering of practical advice, eminent portability, considerable humour—and it travels well.

The BS column: How not to write about evil

(Published in the Business Standard, May 5, 2009)

Over half a century of Indian writing in English has produced several contenders for the title of the defintive Partition novel; but other conflicts have been more elusive. Partition has been recorded in many Indian languages—from Manto’s classic, brutal short stories to Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan to Chaman Nahal’s Azaadi, literature has kept pace with history.



Every few years, someone attempts to write the great Kashmiri novel, but even Salman Rushdie (with Shalimar the Clown) missed the mark. The intensity and tragedy of Kashmir has been served better by non-fiction writers than by fiction writers. A handful of novelists have tried to make sense of the Bhopal gas tragedy, of 1984 and of the Gujarat riots, but I would argue that Indra Sinha (Animal’s People), Shonali Bose (Amu) and Raj Kamal Jha (Fireproof) have been adequate witnesses, but fall short in literary terms.



In their defence, it has never been easy to write about tragedy—or to write about evil, as two recently published works demonstrate. The first, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, is a 900-plus page brick of a novel that was highly acclaimed in France before becoming a worldwide bestseller. It is also one of the most repellent books I have read in recent years—not because of its subject, but because of Littell’s perspective.



The protagonist of The Kindly Ones is Maximilien Aue, a former SS officer in the Second World War, complicit in a number of crimes, now living in retirement and working in a lace-making factory. Littell takes his title from the euphemism for the Furies, forces of merciless but exact vengeance in Roman mythology, and he takes his inspiration for Maximilien Aue’s life history from the troubled, bloody history of the legendary House of Atreus. Novelist and reviewer Laila Lalami called The Kindly Ones “a pornographic catalogue of horrors”, and most reviewers have been left disturbed, if not repulsed, by Littell’s mindlessly graphic musings.

(Speaking personally, I can't remember ever being so repelled by a novel. Not shocked; most of Littell's catalogue of horrors is familiar to any reader of Roman mythology or pulp horror fiction. But to read this book was to swing between boredom and deep, almost physical, distaste.)

Relentlessly repetitious, the novel presents Aue’s lust for his sister in terms that do violence to the memory of the Holocaust; he has sexual fantasises that cast her in the role of a prisoner in the camps, for instance. In her review for The New Republic, Ruth Franklin caught it best when she commented: “But The Kindly Ones is not an important novel, because it fails absolutely to add anything of significance to our understanding of its subject, which is nothing less than the most perplexing question of modernity. How could human beings undertake….an unprecedented systematic program of mass extermination against other human beings? “ It is, however, one of the most widely discussed novels of this year, chiefly for its more sensational aspects and because of the huge advance the author received.


J M Coetzee has, far more elegantly and incisively than Littell, examined the question of how one writes about evil in several of his books. In Elizabeth Costello, the title character comes to the conclusion that you can’t write about evil, or bear witness beyond a certain point, without inflicting damage on yourself as a human being. And besides, she asks, how reliable is memory anyway? She writes: “"Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, …. exhausted, shivering, hands in their pockets to hold up their pants, whimpering with fear….?"

A much shorter, much drier document manages to bear witness in its own way. In its scant 43 pages, and in the detached language of the objective witness, the Red Cross Report on Torture effectively presents evidence that indicts the US government for its treatment of suspects and prisoners at Guantanamo. From political websites to the venerable New York Review of Books, the Red Cross Report has opened up a debate on the nature of bureaucratic evil and legalised crime.


Littell offers one way to examine violence that is perhaps valid, but that is deeply repugnant: approach it through the lens of voyeurism, exaggerate the nature of evil to the point where it becomes ridiculous in its offensiveness. The Red Cross report offers a more traditional way: be a witness, write perhaps without the scorching words Coetzee (and Costello) demand, but with absolute honesty. The novelist who seeks to capture the nature of an undertaking such as a holocaust, a riot or a pogrom, must find a way between these two paths. Several Indian film-makers and photographers have found a way of telling their truth, but for the Indian writer, capturing the nature of the beast remains elusive.