India (Frommer's, 4th Edition) - Keith Bain [36]
SALADS The practice of eating Western-style salads (except raw onion) is not very common, but most restaurants do have them on the menu. Beware that it is only advisable to eat these in top-end restaurants, and make sure that the vegetables have been freshly cut and washed in boiled water.
STREET FOOD Even in smaller cities like Indore and Jaipur, street food has a fantastic tradition and following. Samosas, vadas, bhelpuri, sev, bhajias, and a host of deep-fried foods are all delicious, and you should try them on your trip. It’s not easy for the first-time visitor to figure out which street foods are safe to eat, however—best to look for an outlet where loads of people are lined up; this means that neither the food nor the oil have been around long. Alternatively, ask your hotel for suggestions.
6 Reading India
by Jerry Pinto
Author, journalist, and poet
More than almost any other destination, India demands that you immerse yourself in the local culture to make sense of all you see and experience. And wherever you’re headed in India, there’s probably a novel you can read to explore the ways people are shaped by the landscape and history around them.
LITERATURE The late R. K. Narayan, one of the grand old men of Indian letters, offers a panoramic view of village life in India. He focuses on a gentle prelapsarian village in Malgudi Days (Penguin), a good introduction to his work. For a more politicized investigation of the caste system, you might want to read U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (Oxford University Press, translated from Kannada), which deals with a dilemma that convulses a village after the death of an unclean Brahmin; or Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (New Directions), set in a village in South India that has to face the storms of Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement.
Small-town India is well represented in Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize–winning novel, The God of Small Things (HarperCollins), which will make you want to travel the waterways of Kerala to see the village life she describes so vividly. And then there’s Bhalchandra Nemade’s Cocoon (National Book Trust), often referred to as India’s Catcher in the Rye.
Each of the big cities has at least one big novel. Mumbai’s industrial past is presented in a charming story of two boys who grow up in a tenement in Kiran Nagarkar’s Raavan and Eddie (Penguin India), but if you’re looking for a page-turner, one of the most compelling books you’re likely to read this year is the thrilling and enlightening Shantaram (Abacus; St. Martin’s Griffin), written by Australian Gregory David Roberts and set in a Mumbai that really comes alive. Roberts potently describes the pulsating rhythm of one of the world’s headiest cities, penetrating its nefarious underground crime syndicates and getting deep inside the soul of the city’s shantytowns. The book has not only taken the world by storm, but is phenomenally popular in Mumbai itself, particularly as the city anxiously awaits its turn as the central location for a big-budget movie based on the book with Johnny Depp in the titular role. Equally captivating, and also an international bestseller, is Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (HarperCollins), a beautifully narrated and utterly gripping account of Mumbai’s criminal underworld, seen through the eyes of its most wanted gangster and down-to-earth detective. You might also want to whip through Q&A (Simon & Schuster), the totally absorbing novel by Vikas Swarup; the book, incidentally, presents some controversial details of the hero’s life that are omitted from Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning film based on the book.
Mumbai is also