Let us Talk of Many Things; of Books and Queens and Pirates, of Mystery and Kings...: Wednesday Wandering - with some delicious Indian Food and Jonathan Harries

visiting around and about,
wandering here and there...

Why Indian Cuisine Features Heavily in my Books

by Jonathan Harries

My mother was a reasonably well-known artist and a notoriously awful cook.

She was creative in her work and a Bohemian in her dress, and though she tried hard to bring her artistry to the kitchen, she failed miserably. Her dishes were colorful and adventurous, but their aesthetic appeal did not transition well to taste. It was clear to all who dared to accept a dinner invitation to our house that the innate skill she possessed as an artist, while evident on canvas and paper, was absent from the frying pan.

Most nights my sister and I looked forward to dinner the way a condemned man looks forward to his last meal. The exception, the one respite from a childhood of culinary deprivation, was Thursday night, when my mother made curry.

Now, I’ve come to realize in the years since that what she called curry was as far from the pukka article as a guppy is from a hedgehog, though at the time I thought it was marvelous. The reason she even attempted this complex cuisine had everything to do with my father’s five-year stint in India during World War II. He’d returned with a head full of anecdotes and a taste for all things spicy. Whether he found her version of what he’d eaten in the officer’s mess hall in Delhi acceptable is unknown, but his love for my mother rendered him incapable of criticism. I believe my sister and I liked the curry because my mother added a tablespoon of sweet golden syrup to ours to combat the fiery flavors of the store-bought curry powder.

As I got older I began to get more adventurous. In Durban, South Africa, I ate Bunny Chow, a dish unique to the city (now you can get it anywhere in South Africa) that consists of half a loaf of white bread hollowed out and filled with mutton or lamb curry. It was probably the world’s first eco-friendly take-out container. At university in Cape Town I ate and loved Cape Malay Curry. It’s made by the descendants of slaves brought to Southern Africa from Indonesia and Malaysia, often sweetened with apricots and raisins and absolutely delicious. In Johannesburg I proposed to my first wife at the Perfumed Garden, a famed Indian restaurant that looked as if it had been transported from Mumbai at the time of the Raj.

But it wasn’t until I first went to India about twenty years ago that I really discovered Indian cuisine and learned that curry is simply a word to describe a sauce or a gravy. It was my father’s stories that first made me want to travel to India, and work that took me there for the first time and then numerous times each year until I retired. I made some wonderful friends and ate in the best restaurants imaginable, including an Italian place where every dish had an Indian spice.

Perhaps I had some of the most enjoyable meals there when I traveled to India with my son Simon to meet my younger son Steven, who was working in Mumbai. Our plan was to retrace my father’s travels in India as he he’d outlined them in his memoirs. We gave up after two days and changed the itinerary to a gastronomic tour around Rajasthan. We ate Gobi paratha—traditional flatbread stuffed with spicy cauliflower—for breakfast, chapattis with daal and chutney for lunch, and Rogan Josh made from goat and fiery red Kashmiri chilies for dinner. Needless to say, both my sons are enamored of Indian dishes and are excellent chefs.

Food is featured in all my books, prominently so in The Carpet Salesman from Baghdad, a prequel to The Tailor of Riga, my first book in the saga of the sica.

The Tailor of Riga first exposed my relatives as the scions of an ancient family of assassins who use a curved dagger called a sica to whack their marks. The book begins with my great grandfather killing Jack the Ripper (which is why no one has ever identified him) and my mother’s great-aunt, who very nearly killed Lenin. It ends with my own humble foray into the family business as a bodyguard to President Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic.

The Carpet Salesman from Baghdad is the story of a distant relative, Elias Smulian-Hasson, who in 1858 is summoned to Bombay from Baghdad by the hugely wealthy merchant David Sassoon to take on an assignment for the Maharajah of Kutch. He is to find and kill a particularly nasty British officer whose brutal acts of retribution against the Indian soldiers who’d survived the great Sepoy Rebellion disgusted even his own men. Elias is also tasked with returning two items of jewelry stolen by the officer, both worth a king’s ransom.

The action opens in Baghdad, where Elias quickly completes a commission to kill a French spy (hiding out in a brothel) for Omar Pasha, the Ottoman governor, before heading for Bombay where his mark, the beastly Captain Covington, is trying to sell the jewelry. After barely surviving an ambush in the Mahakali Caves just outside of Bombay, Elias pursues his quarry to a mysterious Temple in Travancore, where the two battle it out in a vault filled with treasure and giant cobras. It’s then on to the intrigue-infested palace of the Maharaja of Kutch, where Elias once again finds himself in a horrific situation as he tries to save a princess from being tortured.

In between assassinations and comas, Elias is introduced to an array of local foods. From his first bite of sev puri—crispy rice cakes with potatoes, onions and different chutneys—he is hooked on Indian cuisine. While each meal proves better than the last, his greatest joy is the mangos, which he vows to eat every day for the rest of his life. I’m unclear if what he ate was the great Alphonso mango, which I tasted once in Mumbai; no mango has lived up to an Alphonso since. If you like mangos, these are beyond anything you can possibly imagine.

Thanks for allowing me to indulge my fascination with Indian food. If you do buy my books, know that everything I make goes to support various organizations trying to save our wildlife around the world.

About Jonathan:

Jonathan Harries began his career as a trainee copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding in South Africa and ended it as Chairman of FCB Worldwide with a few stops in between.

After winning his first Cannes Lion award, he was offered a job at Grey Advertising in South Africa, where he worked as a copywriter and ended up as CEO at age 29, just before emigrating to the US. Like most immigrants in those days, he started once again from scratch. After a five year stint as Executive Creative Director of Hal Riney in Chicago, he was offered a senior position at FCB. Within ten years, he became the Global Chief Creative Officer and spent the next ten traveling to over 90 countries, racking up 8 million miles on American Airlines alone.

He began writing his first novel, Killing Harry Bones, in the last year of his career and transitioned into becoming a full-time author three years ago, just after retiring from FCB. He’s been writing ever since while doing occasional consulting work for old clients.

Jonathan has a great love of animals, and he and his wife try to go on safari every year. They’ve been lucky enough to visit game reserves in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Tanzania, India, and Sri Lanka.

About the book:

What if my highly dubious story of a two-thousand-year-old family of assassins turned out to be true?

Can you blame a chap for wanting to turn his otherwise humdrum family into a bunch of assassins?

It turns out you can.

I found this out soon after my novel The Tailor of Riga was published, and I received a bunch of beastly emails and threats from incensed family members horrified that I’d portrayed them as the descendants of bloodthirsty hitmen.

Then, out of the blue, a package arrived from a long-lost cousin in Argentina that changed everything.

It was the diary of an unknown ancestor, Elias Smulian-Hassan, summoned from Baghdad to Bombay by the enormously wealthy David Sassoon to take on an assignment for the Maharajah of Kutch.

His mission was to find and kill a British officer responsible for some of the most brutal acts of retribution against Indian survivors of the Great Sepoy Uprising and retrieve a fortune in stolen gemstones. Elias pursues his quarry from Bombay to the Kingdom of Travancore, where the contemptible swine is planning to rob the vaults of the richest temple in the world.

Priceless treasures, mysterious maharajahs, unspeakably evil villains, and the beautiful Mozelle Jacob, a woman Elias will pursue to the ends of the earth, all blend together like a spicy chicken vindaloo in the next saga of the sica.

Excerpt

Shortly after my novel The Tailor of Riga was published in early 2020, I received a number of emails and texts from known and unknown family members around the world. One or two were quite complimentary (well, one to be sure; the other was ambiguous) on the way I’d jazzed up a rather boring family tree by turning our ancestors into a bunch of bloodthirsty assassins. The majority of messages, I’m sad to say, were less so. They included four lawsuits from Australia and Canada, a “beat the crap out of you” threat from someone in California who claimed to be a third cousin once removed (“removed” was underlined in red), and a permanent deletion from an ancestry.com study by a relative in London.

There’s thanks for you, I thought. Add a little oomph to the lives of accountants and shopkeepers, and instead of a kiss on the cheek, you get a poke in the eye—which, incidentally, one elderly clan member threatened to do with a kebab skewer, of all things. Ungrateful bastard.

Then one morning as I scanned my inbox, I saw an email from a woman claiming to be a relative with a name I’d never heard before.

Mozelle Hasson-Herrera lived in Buenos Aires, and though it was clear that English was not her first language, she told me that she’d enjoyed the book immensely. That part of the message—as nice as it was to get a compliment—didn’t interest me quite as much as the last three sentences of her email.

I have for you some papers from my great-great-grandfather, Elias Smulian-Hasson, the one who immigrated to Argentina from Bombay in 1858, that you might find of intrigue. They tell a story that perhaps adds some credence to your own. Please to contact me if you are interested.

Now, while I admit to being naïve, impulsive, and prone to exaggeration though optimistically trusting when it comes to accepting the word of others, I am no fool. I know a scam when I see one. So when someone claiming to be of one’s own flesh and blood sends a note intimating that a story very clearly labelled A family saga of dubious veracity has some credence, then the hackles on the back of one’s neck, as the poets say, bristle like those of a Welsh Terrier encountering a badger. Clearly this Mozelle Hasson-Herrera was after a quick buck.

I was just about to send her an appropriate response when something stayed my finger as it hovered over the return key. What if she was genuine? I decided to check her out with the one person I trust more than anyone when it comes matters of the arbor familiae: My mother’s first cousin, Jonathan Smulian—who at age ninety was well and truly settled in Houston having lived or worked in twenty-nine countries during the course of his wonderful life—has an encyclopedic knowledge when it comes to the family. If he hasn’t met them in person, he knows them from correspondence, of which he has drawers full.

“You know,” said Jonathan when I called him, “there was a rumor about a branch of the Smulians in Baghdad. I heard it…must have been fifty-odd years ago… from a cousin—a distant one at that—who lived in Colombia when I worked there. I do know that a lot of Jews left Baghdad in the latter half of the nineteenth century for India. So I imagine it’s entirely possible that one branch may have moved to Bombay and from there to Argentina. I don’t have any records of an Elias Smulian-Hasson or Hasson-Herrera, but ‘Hasson’ sounds like a Mizrahi name. Which means there’s a degree of credibility to her message. Why don’t you reply and ask her to explain further? You have nothing to lose. Who knows, you may get something good out of it.”

Well, I certainly got something out of it.

Though whether it was good, you the reader will have to decide.

All I can tell you is that what Mozelle Hasson-Herrera sent me in a carefully wrapped shoebox left a distinct chill in my bones and played merry hell with my guts. The more I read, the more I felt as if I were descending into madness, for it seemed that some of what I’d labelled “questionable” in The Tailor of Riga could well have been true.

What follows is the story based on the diary entries—what Mozelle Hasson-Herrera referred to as “notes”. They were translated for what I considered an oddly reasonable sum from both Arabic and Hebrew by a very enthusiastic Dr. David Musilan of the University of Montreal. Well, that’s what he claimed when he answered my enquiry on an academic language-translation website. I only discovered what a perfidious bastard he was when I needed a receipt for my tax records. Somehow, he’d mysteriously vanished. His emails came back as “not a working address,” and the phone number he’d given me when we met for coffee at the Starbucks on Greenwich Avenue just rang and rang. Eventually I called the human resources department at the University of Montreal. A very pleasant woman told me that there was no Dr. Musilan currently in any department, and there never had been. The closest they had was a Professor Mullen who taught physics, but he was eighty years old. A far cry from the thirty-five-year-old man I’d had coffee with and who seemed as keen as mustard to start the translation.

I mention this only because if you come across any errors, historical or otherwise, blame Musilan.

That is, if you can find him.

The Carpet Salesman of Baghdad

Website: www.jonathanharriesink.com

Facebook: @jonathanharriesink

Twitter Handle: @harriesjonathan

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