Zac O’Yeah is a Swede who has lived in the city of Bengaluru, India, for three decades. He has published 19 books, including a detective trilogy. His website says that O’Yeah’s “most recent job is the lead vocalist for Swedish cyberpunk-disco orchestra The Ändå”. He is 56 and his author photograph seems several years out of date.
The Great Indian Food Trip explores that country’s lesser-known dishes. “There are two eyes on my plate,” he writes about a dish of goat offal. “They are not ogling or anything like that, because they are nicely covered in gravy and I bite into one ... hmm, unusual.” With this sentence, O’Yeah launches into the canon of white man food adventure porn. The culinary descriptions are more napalm than striptease; you read it from your armchair to relish, vicariously, the danger.
India is a cacophony of languages, religions, races and millenniums of history, which is reflected in the food. It is a lot to digest. For instance, in a hotel in Puducherry, which retains reminders of its French colonisers: “(e)ntrees consist of intriguing Tamilan ‘falafels’ that are called vazhapoo vada and made of mashed banana flowers served with a coconut dip, khuzipaniyaram (dhal with delicious spongy rice balls), karuvepillai varutha meen – fleshy and sweetish mahimahi (Hawaiian dolphin) fillets baked in leaves with a sweet-and-sour sauce of jaggery, chilli and tamarind; era podithooval (shrimp sautéed with ‘gunpowder’ mixture).”
O’Yeah’s adventures range from hedonistic to austere. In Kerala he chases mussels. At Gandhi’s ashram in Sevegam, he eats “boiled vegetable hotchpotch featuring home-grown beetroot”. In Goa he combines the local fenny (a spirit akin to tequila) with “venerated vinegary vindaloo”, which is pork marinated overnight in a “rainbow of spices”. Jeopardising his blood pressure, he binges on “lethal” bondas made irresistible by the musings of author RK Narayan, fried puffs of dough sold by roadside vendors, graced with mint chutney that may or may not have been churned out from “green gutter water”. O’Yeah’s pilgrimage includes much drinking, whether it is morning pints with tipsy uncles in loincloths, Anglo-Indian aunties who “breakfast on vodka”, caffeinated gin or extremely potent tea.
Celebrating Judith Mok: ‘a bright star in the European sky’
Sebastian Barry is named a Chevalier in France’s Ordre des Arts et Lettres
Eight books by Irish authors for children and teenagers, all perfect for Christmas
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber: Intense flares of thought from a brilliant mind
Some of the best practitioners of this style of culinary writing (which remains a boys-only club) have lived fast and died young, including Anthony Bourdain. The macho adventure crucially seasons the food about which they write. A grandfather of this genre was George Orwell who, as O’Yeah points out, was born in Bahir. Orwell’s food descriptions in Down and Out in Paris and London were honed by starvation. He revels in the joy of “minced veal, a wedge of Camembert cheese, bread and an eclair, all jumbled together”.
Unlike Orwell, O’Yeah is not a compelling writer. O’Yeah, who is a decade older than Orwell was when he died, writes like a man-child. Vegetables are “veggies” and he prefers “tummy” to stomach. “Yummy” is often employed, as is “puffy”, “plump” and “umpteen”. Ellipses, dangling prepositions and exclamation marks are liberally scattered. Baklava in Kerala “are just perfectly flaky, buttery, cardamonny, creamy, cinnamony bite-sized pastries soaked in honey”. The book is spiced with bad puns. In the “super-chilled-out ... ultra-boutique absolutely stunning” hotel in Jodhpur, he wonders, listening to the playlist, whether “I’d hear Nirvana or simply hit Nirvana”.
Yet there is momentum in O’Yeah’s adventure. You want to follow him through his Indian journey, even though there is a temptation to take a red pen to his adjectives. He is a precise observer of people, be they taxi drivers, the novelist Arundhati Roy flirting with street dogs over coffee in Delhi, or a girl in a Puducherry pizza joint who enters in a burka, changes into a tank top and orders a drink. Furthermore, as a crime novelist, O’Yeah is skilled in suspense. He says: “A fictional detective is somewhat of an urban explorer.” The Great Indian Food Trip operates as a series of investigations that propel the reader.
O’Yeah, a bibliophile, weaves a web connecting Gandhi, Amitav Ghosh, Bal Thackeray, Rabindranath Tagore, Somerset Maugham and contemporary Indian writers including Goan poet Manohar Shetty, novelist Damodar Mauzo and the Delhi blogger Mayank Austen Soofi. The India he paints teems with voices past and present. Many food writers use literature to give dimension to the foods they portray. O’Yeah, on the other hand, uses the culinary genre to access the world of colonial and postcolonial Indian literature.
Detective-like, he burrows into his favourite authors, their birthplaces and their haunts, and quests for the real-life inspirations behind the imaginary places in their books. (He hunts for the city that inspired RK Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi.) However, O’Yeah’s most tender moment is in Chandigarh, and his search for Mr Singh. Decades ago, as a backpacking youth, he met Mr Singh at a bus station and he introduced him to the Rock Garden, a “40-acre surreal artwork made of broken bangles, empty bottles, oil drums, plates and teacups, tubelights and other recycled debris of modernity, shaped into fantastic birds, monkeys, human houses, bridges, winding paths, waterfalls powered by rainwater palaces of discarded rubble”. Chandigarh, Mr Singh once pointed out, is mapped like a living organism, with the restaurant district as its gastric system. His search for Mr Singh is haunted by the spirit of chicken, which in this city is cooked in a tandoori oven.
O’Yeah cannot find Mr Singh. Meanwhile, the Rock Garden and Chandigarh continue to evolve. The episode is a melancholy interlude, punctuated by poultry made scarlet by spices. Here, O’Yeah acknowledges how he clings on to his juvenile self while being mired by the detritus of the past. Within the bad-boy food oeuvre, O’Yeah will not be immortal. However, there is poignancy in his desire to understand India, this paradoxical, magnificent country, and to realise that it will continue to change centuries after he has gone. Hopefully, there will always be something “yummy”. Or to quote O’Yeah at his most embarrassing pun height: “Sheekh and ye shall find kebabs.”
