Indian Takeaway. Hardeep Singh Kohli

      Food is a massive part of my life. When I’m not cooking it, I’m eating it; and when I’m not eating it, I’m thinking about it. I plan my life around meals. I will schedule meetings in certain parts of London to enable me to slip into a specific café or restaurant for a specific meal. I love food; and for its sins, food loves me. There is no one event, no one occurrence that I can look back on and use to explain the prominence of food in my life. When someone once asked me why I was so obsessed with food, I thought a moment, struggling to find a coherent answer. And then it dawned on me; it had only taken me thirty-eight years to realise that, as a child, the only aspect of being Indian which wider society seemed to celebrate was our food. To say Glasgow likes Indian food is inaccurate; it doesn’t like it, Glasgow loves it. And my experience of this love as a boy in Glasgow seemed to be true of life in every other British city. It’s bizarre when you think about the impact Indian food has had on British culture. The smallest town or village more often than not has a little Indian restaurant or take-away, often run by the only Indian family in the area. Even the racists who hated the fact that my parents’ generation had come to Britain still liked our food. It was the only aspect of being Indian that garnered any positivity.

      Ironically, despite this plethora of restaurants around us, we never ate out much as kids. We were the offspring of immigrants. The single biggest expense in my parents’ house was school fees. Still, to this day, I have absolutely no idea how my parents ran a house, fed us, clothed us, took us on holiday and paid the mortgage. And paid the school fees for three boys. Randeep, more commonly known as Raj, is my elder brother. My younger brother, Sanjeev – Sanj, Sniff, Yich, Barbecue Fingers – has a myriad of nicknames and a heart of gold. And I was the tricky second child; the difficult one. The prima donna. They have a phrase for it in Hindi: ‘beech wala’. It translates as ‘the one stuck in the middle’. And I did feel very much stuck in the middle. I was not bestowed with the gifts and love that a first-born son enjoys in an Indian house; neither was I the cute, good-natured baby, the son that they really wanted to be a daughter. I was the misunderstood, James Dean-like presence in the progeny. I was also, admittedly, a right pain in the arse. I was intransigent and eloquent. There’s nothing worse than a snotty child with the linguistic dexterity to give oxygen to his irrationality.

      None of my failings, innumerable though they were, changed the fact that my parents would marshal their very limited financial resources and were able somehow to make them go a long way. Both my parents worked: my mum in the shop; my father long and irregular hours as a teacher in a List D school (the D stood for Delinquents). It was a glorified borstal. His days and evenings, weekends and public holidays were spent whiling the hours away with rapists, armed robbers and murderers, all of whom shared one single defining quality: they were under the age of eighteen.

      And yet, even though we didn’t cuddle up in the lap of luxury I never felt that I went without. We had what we needed. And what we didn’t need, thanks to the fiendishly fiscally astute way my mother planned weekly meals, was anything more than one night of dining out a year. So that’s what we got. A little tandoori restaurant in Elmbank Street in the heart of Glasgow, the same street on which years later I would meet the woman who would become my wife. The name of the place escapes me. Glasgow in the seventies was only just starting its love affair with Indian food, a love affair that would blossom and burgeon into a full-blown, lifelong romance. And it all seemed to start at this anonymous little place just off Sauchiehall Street.

      We would never have gone out to eat food that Mum could have made at home. That would have been pointless. Why pay over the odds for home food? But Mum didn’t have a tandoor and no matter how good her spicy yoghurt mix, no matter how well she balanced the chilli and the lemon, no matter how infused her chicken became, it never ever tasted like it had come out of a clay oven.

      So we went to this little place and gorged on tandoori food. I remember it being delicious and my father being very excited about it. I didn’t quite understand why he was so happy eating red chicken; it was only years later that I fully comprehended how much my dad missed the food of the Punjab, the food of his home. We ate there every year on my dad’s birthday for a few years until the place burnt down. Perhaps the victim of over-eager cooking.