Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [76]
Crackling crisp naan, flecked with green olives and chile flakes, comes on the side, along with mango chutney fragrant with the fruit. The olives in the bread, certainly not customary, mimic the salty tang of pungent Indian pickles without their strident overtones. To drink with the dinner, Bill picks a Grover Vineyards Cabernet and Shiraz blend made in India in collaboration with a Bordeaux vintner. Both of us enjoy the wine, but while Bill finishes it, Cheryl switches to a first-flush Darjeeling tea, an earthy, full-bodied black brew made with leaves from the Himalayan foothills.
At sunrise the following morning, the hotel doorman hails us a cab to go to the Sassoon Docks, the likely source of our dinner fish and seafood. About a mile from the Taj, the driver leaves the main street and takes us into a maze of dirt alleys, increasingly muddy and packed with trucks and people as we creep along toward the shore. Finally, he creates a parking place for himself near a wharf and lets us out, indicating that he’ll wait for us.
It’s total bedlam in all directions. Vividly painted trawlers in the water jostle with one another for space to unload their catch, which they pile onto the docks in enormous stacks. Hundreds of women—often attired in silks and galoshes—sort through the mounds, slinging fish of different sizes and varieties into appropriate buckets of ice. Men and boys lift full buckets onto two-wheeled, wooden hand trolleys, heaping them precariously and then running with the trolleys in tow to waiting trucks that deliver the seafood around the city.
Not a single square foot remains unoccupied for more than a few seconds, leaving us no place to stand and watch. Our only recourse is to move around in tempo with the throngs, dodging and ducking obstacles constantly, including the swordfish on a man’s head that combs through Cheryl’s hair in passing. Everyone is working so furiously they barely notice us, even though we’re the only observers and Westerners in the crowd. It’s an exhilarating spectacle but soon tires us, so we slog back through the mud to our taxi—easy to find, since no one else arrives or departs this way. Cheryl jumps in the shower as soon as we reach the room, not bothering to remove her shoes, caked with muck.
After a breakfast of eggs and curry in the club lounge, a hotel limo takes us to the airport for our flight to Kochi (formerly Cochin), Kerala. Going along a four-lane boulevard jammed with seven sprawling, staggered lanes of taxis and trucks, the driver says, “Bet you don’t see traffic like this in the United States.”
“Not usually,” Cheryl replies, “but here it seems part of the fabric of life, so it’s not really bad. Mumbai just teems with everything—people and cars, vitality and chaos, joy and misery.”
“That’s all true,” the driver agrees. “The airport teems, too. Good luck there.”
Poor Columbus. Even five hundred years after he stumbled across the Americas on a voyage to south India, we beat him to his planned and preferred destination, the fabled Malabar Coast, now in the state of Kerala. Black pepper, the dried fruit of a vine native to the area, made this Arabian Sea region a major world trade center starting as early as the reign of Ramses the Great in ancient Egypt. The Roman Empire sent fleets of more than one hundred ships on annual expeditions to collect the spice, the most pungent seasoning known anywhere on the globe then except in parts of the Americas, the original home of the chile.
When Rome fell, two of its conquerors demanded a ransom of more than a ton of peppercorns each, considering them as valuable as anything the citizens had. Arabs took over the spice trade during the Middle Ages, and when their cargo reached