Arriving into KL LCCT felt fairly familiar after the three month-old visit of January. The bus ticket sellers had the same pushy jovialness and the Air Asia horde had the same bone idleness. Even the walk out of arrivals past the coffee kiosks and taxis felt over familiar.
The flight over was typical fare for Air Asia – changes, delays and arguments at check-in. Well, to be fair, I was at fault for the low key dispute, but I will still be checking the Air Asia website for hoodwinking tactics in the pre-pay baggage section. A walked through departures $10 lighter.
Arriving in at the LCCT the first stop for the budget traveller is the Sky Bus terminal. Being an Air Asia-affiliated service it was no great surprise to endure a two hour journey, rather than the advertised one. My hotel was in the vicinity of the now-defunct bus station and I knew of a proper English curry house not too far away. I urged the bus on as the anticipation in my stomach grew.
Visiting Kuala Lumpur for the first time back in January was like a pilgrimage for me. I had never been in a place with real Indians, eating real curry. Whether an Indian in Kuala Lumpur is more real than an Indian on Turnpike Lane is open to debate, but for me the KL Indians win.
Kuala Lumpur has the smells, vibes and hustle of an Indian city. You are woken at 6am by throngs of worshippers at temples, throwing melons at deities and met with equal frequency by lunatic street dwellers and lady-dealing pimps; maybe even Mumbai wouldn’t live up to this, I thought.
All of my proposed itineraries seemed to involve curry house crawls. I imagined Mughlai dishes being assaulted by a plump, sweet, coconut-dusted Peshawari naan, washed down with a sugared lassi. With these dreams swishing around my head like a worshipper in the Ganges I hit the streets of Little India.
I quickly realised my dreams were delusions and immediately felt like a fish out of…the Ganges. I walked into curry house after curry house and stared blankly, attempting to decipher menus I could read, but not understand: Sappadu? Poli? Rasam? I soon realised the Indians of Turnpike Lane were very different from the Indians of Kuala Lumpur - a few thousand miles different.
It’s our fault, again
Everywhere you go in the old British Empire you meet with Indians; Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and South America have all been settled by enterprising souls from the Subcontinent. Over the course of the Empire, Indians ventured everywhere around the globe that was Empire Red. From South Africa to Guyana and Fiji, enterprising market traders often speak with Indian accents.
All this is largely because, having laudably abolished the slave trade, the British establishment were left with a dilemma – how to make people do stuff for free? They came up with the brilliant ruse of signed-for slavery, or indentured labour. Indians were soon doing capitalism’s bidding on shores as distant as Spanish Town and Mauritius. Up to a million and a half Indians were scattered across the globe before the practice was outlawed in the late-nineteenth century.
What does this have to do with the price of Darjeeling in Uttar Pradesh, I sense you mutter. Well, the Indians in the UK mostly arrived over the years from the Punjab and Bengal, either directly, or via East Africa, where they were originally indentured, whereas the Indians of Kuala Lumpur have a long history of migration from Tamil Nadu, as indentured or free labour. I was in a city awash with Tamil curry, but where a good chicken Karahi wasn’t available for love, nor money. The British obsession with treating the world like a game of Risk had led to forlorn 4-day rummage through the backstreets of Masjid Jamek for a non-existent culinary holy grail.
It was on my final night of that first trip that fate dealt me the hand I had been seeking. As I wandered the streets for my last meal I took a double take as a fleeting menu seemed to offer up a daal. In I trudged, sunburnt, sleep-deprived and more than a little peckish.
Bingo! I walked up to the self-service counter and was met by names as familiar as fish and chips – rogan josh, saag gosht, biryiani! I filled the plate with all and sat down to contemplate my harvest. I then ate what was the greatest plate of curry mankind has ever produced. I went back for more in the morning.
On leaving that night I burdened the proprietor with the tribulations I had encountered in finding real English curry. He seemed genuinely pleased that I disliked Tamils as much as he did. When I stressed it was the food, not the people, I had a distaste for, he remained upbeat. I vowed to return. This was back in January and with this all in mind I disembarked from the bus at Pudu Raya and marched back towards Times Square to drop my bags off and indulge myself.
Many types of indulgence were on offer, including cheap girls and expensive alcohol, but I plumped for poppadom and mango chutney. On leaving the restaurant for the third time I finally noticed its name – UK Asia. A lump grew in my throat as I contemplated that the greatest achievement of 400 years of empire was the dissemination of turmeric and cumin.
