Vidya
Balachander

Several years ago, on my first-ever visit to Sri Lanka, I remember enjoying one particularly memorable meal at Beach Wadiya, a glorified seaside shack in Colombo. An apt introduction to the unhurried pace of life in the island I would eventually call home, the meal stretched over several hours and multiple courses of freshly prepared seafood. But the fondest memory I have of that day is of the final course: a generous scoop of chilled yogurt, sweetened with a drizzle of what I thought was honey. It reminded me of my childhood fixation with curd sweetened with sugar. It wasn’t until years later that I found out that the simple dessert was in fact a national obsession, and that the syrup was not honey at all. It was kithul treacle, one of Sri Lanka’s best-loved secrets.

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Unforgettable meals in the bustling city in Madhya Pradesh.

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A seafood stew that unites the region’s principal produce, and a cuisine shaped by absences…

Stacked high on sheets of newspaper, the large lagoon crabs challenged me. Having grown up vegetarian, and been one for well over 20 years, the fiddly process of cracking a crab’s shell to get to its sweet meat still made me a bit queasy. Not held back by any such apprehensions, my travel companions on this trip to Jaffna were making easy work of the crustaceans. Ultimately, the thought of being a bystander began to feel more tortuous than the thought of getting my fingers dirty, and I staked my claim to the Jaffna crab curry that had been delivered to our hotel room a few minutes earlier. Within a few moments, I was sniffling and smiling stupidly, all at the same time.

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Where to eat fish curry, kothu rotti, and other stars of Sri Lankan cuisine.

Of all the cities that I’ve called home over the years, Colombo is the only one where “school traffic” causes almost as much angst as evening rush hour. Most schools let out roughly at lunch time, when the roads of this usually laidback city become gridlocked with honking cars, school vans blocking traffic, and anxious parents escorting their children home. As a newcomer to the city, I used to find all the hand-wringing over school timings amusing. But a year-and-a-half later, it attests to how much I’ve become a part of the city (and vice versa), that I feel a tiny bit victorious at having dodged those treacherous afternoon hours by arriving early at Lantheruma to buy my lunch packet.

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The oppressive heat of the October morning had yet to reach its uncomfortable peak when we walked into tree-lined Kaiserbagh, an erstwhile palace complex in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s fourth largest state. As part of a group of journalists invited to explore the state, I was about to embark on a walking tour of Kaiserbagh’s historic streets, just stirring to life in the early hours of the morning. To be perfectly honest, however, history was far from my mind, which had already raced forward to the breakfast that would follow.

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The pidan was the first surprise in an evening full of culinary revelations. Trying preserved eggs had never featured high on my bucket list, so I approached the dish with trepidation. Small wedges of transformed duck eggs soon appeared at our table. Months of curing had turned the whites a gelatinous, translucent brown, while the yolks had acquired a (not terribly appetizing) gray hue. I braced myself for the punch of ammonia mentioned in every description of pidan I had ever read. But it never came. Instead, paired with a feisty accompaniment of sweet pickled ginger, the pidan acquired a deliciously complex flavor.

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The sun was just beginning to set as I stepped out of our boutique hotel and strode down Rachamankha Road, one of the central streets of Chiang Mai, in search of my first meal. Having flown in after a busy day in Bangkok, crammed with eye-wateringly spicy green curry and more som tam (green papaya salad) than I could possibly eat, Chiang Mai’s relatively empty streets and leisurely pace caught me by surprise. The city is often referred to as the capital of northern Thailand, but the quiet streets, bereft of hawkers—my one gauge of urban likeability—made me oddly nervous.

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Waking up one humid morning in Colombo, ten months ago, I couldn’t believe I had come this far in pursuit of an audacious dream. Chasing the romance of a life lived constantly on the move, my husband and I had volunteered to sever links – at least temporarily – with Mumbai, the city we had called home for several years, to move to Sri Lanka. I felt daunted and rudderless – our life, once so well-defined, suddenly seemed like putty in our hands. It was a heavy existential soup to be swimming in – but breakfast got in the way.

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For a new migrant to Sri Lanka, the palate proves to be an unexpected shoehorn

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ith the lamprais in the backseat, I could barely focus on anything else. The modest parcel of food wrapped in a banana leaf, freshly baked and still warm to the touch, was demanding my complete sensory attention. The mildly woody smell of the banana leaf mingled with the unmistakable aroma of meat, and like a gentle cloud the fragrance wafted up and settled comfortably in the car for the remainder of my journey home. They say you eat with your eyes first, but in this case, it was the aroma of the lamprais in my backseat that had me hooked.

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