Netherland. Joseph O’Neill

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      I liked and respected my colleagues: the mere sight of them – the men close-shaven and prosperously thick about the waist, where ID badges and communication gadgets clustered, the women in subdued suits, all of them shouldering their burdens as best they could – was capable of filling me with joy. But by the fall of 2002, even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I’d placed under my life’s leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery. It forcefully struck me as a masquerade, this endless business of churning out research papers, of blast voicemailing clients overnight with my latest thoughts on ExxonMobil or ConocoPhillips, of listening to oil executives glossing corporate performance in tired jargon, of flying before dawn to meet investors in shitty towns in the middle of America, of the squabbles about the analyst rankings, of the stress of constantly tending to my popularity and perceived competence. I felt like Vinay, cooking up myths from scraps and peels of fact. When, in October, my II ranking remained unchanged at number four, my private reaction was almost one of bitterness.

      One Friday of that month, I found Vinay in a bad mood. He had, he told me, been asked to write a story about the eating places of taxicab drivers. The theory, apparently, was that here you had a class of men familiar with alien foods who exercised their choices from a vast selection of establishments and had no stake in the bourgeois dining enterprise: men supposedly driven by unfeigned primitive cravings, men hungering for a true taste of homeland and mother’s cooking, men who would, in short, lead one to the so-called real thing. Of course, I could not help thinking it simple, this theory of reality. Vinay had objections of a narrower kind. ‘Cab drivers?’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard one of these guys express an opinion that wasn’t complete bullshit? I told my editor, Dude, I’m from fucking India. You think in India we take our fucking dining cues from cab drivers? And then I’m like’ – Vinay laughed furiously – ‘Yo, Mark, the name’s not Vinnie, OK? It’s Vinay.’ Vinay buckled, as one must, and we found a taxi driven by a man from Dhaka who was prepared to take us to a place he liked. This exercise was repeated with several cab drivers. We’d look at a menu, eat a mouthful of food, and head out again in search of another lurching ride. Before long the night had assumed the character of an evil black soup, sampled somewhere along the line, whose bitty, fatty constituents rose sickeningly to the surface before sinking back again into a spoon-deep dark. Just before midnight, a taxi driver took us to Lexington and 20-something and wordlessly pulled up at yet another accumulation of double-parked yellow cars.

      ‘This is the last one, Vinay,’ I warned him.

      We entered the restaurant. There was a buffet counter, a wilfully haphazard arrangement of chairs and tables and refrigerators, and framed, violently colourful photographs attached to the walls: schoolchildren, sitting under a tree, receiving instruction from a teacher pointing at a blackboard; an idyll in which a long-haired maiden perched on a swing; a city in Pakistan at night. At the rear was a further dining area where men, eating in silence, stared intently at a television screen. Almost all the patrons were South Asian. ‘Look at what they’re having,’ Vinay said despairingly. ‘Naan with vegetables. These guys are on a three-dollar budget.’ While Vinay examined the menu, I wandered off to look at the television. To my amazement – I’d never seen this before in America – they were showing a cricket match: Pakistan versus New Zealand, broadcast live from Lahore. Shoaib Akhtar, a.k.a. the Rawalpindi Express, was bowling at top speed to the New Zealand captain, Stephen Fleming. I settled ecstatically into a seat.

      Moments later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It took a second or two to recognise Chuck Ramkissoon.

      ‘Hey there, friend,’ he said. ‘Come join us.’ He was showing me a table occupied by a black man wearing a super’s shirt embroidered with the address of his building and his name, Roy McGarrell. I accepted Chuck’s invitation, and we were joined by Vinay, who arrived carrying a tray of gajrala and chicken karahi.

      I urged Chuck and Roy to eat the food. ‘Vinay here’s paid to eat this stuff. You’d be doing him a favour.’

      It turned out that Roy, like Chuck, was from Trinidad. ‘Callaloo,’ Vinay remarked absently, and Roy and Chuck started chortling with delight. ‘You know callaloo?’ Roy said. Addressing me, he said, ‘Callaloo is the leaves of the dasheen bush. You can’t get dasheen easy here.’

      ‘What about that market on Flatbush and Church?’ Chuck said. ‘You find it there.’

      ‘Well, maybe,’ Roy conceded. ‘But if you can’t get the real thing, you make it with spinach. You put in coconut milk: you grate the flesh of the coconut fine and you squeeze it and the moisture come out. You also put in a whole green pepper – it don’t be hot unless you burst it – thyme, chive, garlic, onion. Normally you put in blue crab; others put in pickled pigtails. You cook it and you bring out a swizzle stick and you swizzle it until the bush melt down into a thick sauce like a tomato sauce. That’s the old-time way; now we put it in a blender. Pour it on stewfish – kingfish, carite fish: mmm-hmm. You also eat it with yam, sweet potato. Dumpling.’

      Chuck said to Vinay, ‘He’s not talking about Chinese dumplings.’

      ‘Our dumpling different,’ Roy said. ‘Chinese dumpling soft. We make our dumpling stiff.’

      ‘Callaloo,’ Chuck said wistfully.

      ‘We used to eat it at Maracas Bay,’ Roy said. ‘Or Las Cuevas. Maracas, the water more rough but the beach more popular. In Las Cuevas, the water calm. Easter time? Oh my Lord, it full. Sometime people walk for miles through the mountains to go there. You spend Easter Sunday and Easter Monday on the beach. You pack your bag with ingredients separate. You have your sweet drink – we call sodas sweet drink – and you pack your car and everybody take a bathing suit, and you go to the beach and spend the whole day eating, bathing. Oh my.’ He shuddered with pleasure.

      ‘I nearly drowned in Maracas once,’ Chuck said.

      ‘Them riptide there dangerous, boy,’ Roy said.

      Chuck handed a card to Vinay. ‘Maybe you could come by my restaurant sometime.’

      Vinay examined the card. ‘Kosher sushi?’

      ‘That’s what we do,’ Chuck said proudly. He leaned over to point at the card. ‘That’s where we are – Avenue Q and Coney Island.’

      ‘Business good?’ I asked.

      ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘We cater to the Jews in my neighbourhood. There are thousands and thousands of them, all observant.’ Chuck handed me a card, too. ‘I have a Jewish partner who has the confidence of the rabbi. Makes things a lot easier. But I tell you, getting kosher certification is a tough business. Tougher than the pharmaceuticals business, I like to say. You wouldn’t believe the problems that come up. Earlier this year we had some trouble with seahorses.’

      ‘Seahorses?’ I said.

      Chuck said, ‘You know how you check nori, the seaweed you wrap the sushi in? You examine it over a light box, like an X-ray. And they found seahorse infestation in our supplier’s seaweed. And seahorses are not kosher. Neither are shrimps and eels and octopus and squid. Only fish with scales and fins are kosher. But not all fish with fins have scales,’ Chuck added. ‘And sometimes what you think are scales are in fact bony protrusions. Bony protrusions do not qualify as scales. No, sir.’ Roy and he laughed loudly at this. ‘What are we left with? Halibut, salmon, red snapper, mackerel, mahi-mahi, tuna – but only certain kinds of tuna. Which ones? Albacore, skipjack, yellowfin.’

      Chuck wasn’t going to stop there. He believed in facts, in their momentousness and charm. He had no option, of course: who СКАЧАТЬ