Inextricably linked by the colonial master

Beyond the Grevenbroich Bahnof are the Turkish quarters. It’s a crisscross of lanes, with Turkish fruit sellers under sun umbrellas, shops on the corners with men huddled around a television, drinking tea in small bell shaped glasses and watching re runs of Galatasaray’s recent matches.

Conversation threads are invariably about Turkeys impending unification with the EU and how prices will soar, making the prospect of returning home, for expatriates such as them, nothing short of a pipe dream.

The Turks have migrated to every major Western European City, where they run the popular Doner-Kebab kind of joints, corner shops or drive taxis. While there is a general levity in the air, due to the way the Turkish are - laid back and high on bonhomie. One cannot help but detect the fact that everybody in a sense is ‘waiting to exhale’.

Last evening I was walking around the place when I came across a small four table restaurant, not surprisingly named ‘A la Turka’. Though small it is a bona fide restaurant serving authentic Turkish fare unlike the Doner Kebab joints, which are Turkey’s contribution to the world as McDonalds outlets are Americas.

I ordered skewered lamb, with salad and Turkish bread (not unlike our Nan). The cook, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth was a friendly sort. He was quite delighted that he could talk to me in English, unlike his usual customers with whom conversations where exclusively in either German or Turkish. The man worked for many years with the British in Istanbul and through this association, he picked up not only British cuisine but also their language. The average Britt’s obsession with ‘The Indian curry’ is well known, and our cook from Turkey vociferously confirmed the notion. As he said in his slow drawl ‘The British people want to eat Indian curry even with their roast beef and Yorkshire pudding!’

The man took upon himself the professional challenge of rustling up a ‘Curry on the rice’ for me. And if I was to confirm its authenticity as a ‘Good Indian Curry’, it would be a major professional victory and ego-trip all rolled into one. In the man’s own words ‘It would prove that I can cook an Indian curry without ever having entered an Indian kitchen!’

He did rustle up good stuff, a very spicy chicken in thick gravy laid out over a portion of rice. Well it tasted fabulous, but it wasn’t a curry and much less Indian. But I didn’t want to break the man’s heart, and told him it was the best curry I had ever eaten. He was thrilled to bits! It was his professional equivalent of an astronauts’ moon walk. He shook my hand and fawned over me for like ever.

After clearing the plates he sat at my table, and we smoked Marlboros over a glass of Turkish tea. The tea is boiled for hours and has a distinct bitter aromatic taste; it is drunk with a touch of sugar but without any milk. Over Tea he talked about his days in Istanbul and the financial compulsions which had brought him to Germany. He talked fondly of his British Employers, and how shocked he had been the first time his Master asked him to pour milk in the tea. Which I gathered was blasphemous in Turkey’s tea drinking culture. I bid the man good night and in a typical large hearted Turkish way, he bid me a good life.

As I walked back to my hotel, snaking my way through beer gardens on the verge of shutting down for the night, I thought about the unmistakable irony which underlay the entire evening. The way a Turkish cook and I - born in post independence India many years after our Colonial Rulers bid us farewell, were so inextricably linked. And the fact that it took the quotidian curry for us to strike an unusual little bond, a bond based on a shared history of colonial rule and the heterogeneous Occident-Orient culture which emerged in its wake.

It’s been over half a century since the famed sun finally set over the empire, but the long shadows at dusk or ironically the afterglow, will form the sub text of our continuing presents and futures.


Bahnof : Railway Station

Labels: Travel