It’s two days into my long-awaited trip to Myanmar and I’m a tad dejected. No one seems to have the slightest inkling when I speak of erstwhile Burma’s greatest ‘gift’ to India — and one of my favourite on-screen dancers of all time — the Anglo-Burmese Helen Richardson, known to us as the mononymous ‘Helen’. Not my Bollywood-obsessed taxi driver who I hail at the super swanky Yangon International Airport. And certainly not Sanda, my loquacious hotel receptionist who can always be found humming the latest filmi ditty. But one mention of Salman Khan, Helen’s stepson, and every face lights up with unabashed adulation, coupled with starstruck wonder.
India Calling
In fact, the Nay Pyi Taw Cinema, still sitting pretty amidst all its faded grandeur on Yangon’s main arterial Sule Pagoda Road — and a stone’s throw from where I’m staying — is showing Race 3 , Salman’s latest dud to jam-packed houses, in Hindi. Myanmarese hoi polloi devour every new Bollywood offering, and need no dubbing.
I begin my Yangon exploration with the most hallowed of its pagodas — the sublime 2,500 year-old Shwedagon Pagoda, glinting in the mid-day sun in all its golden splendour. Three hours later my trusted travel app lets me know I’m just a few meters away from the site with a rather interesting desi connection. Believed to be the site of the grave of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, the dargah on Zi Wa Ka Road, built in his honour. It is off-limits to my shorts-clad self, but the caretaker is happy to take a picture of the sanctum sanctorum that houses the tomb with my phone.
But it is the local food that best reveals this apparent Myanmarese-Indian bond. The highly-authentic Bombay-style mutton biryani (with potatoes) at the Nilar Biryani Shop on Anawratha Road comes with a little dose of home sickness; its septuagenarian owner fondly tells me that his grandfather emigrated to Yangon from my home city of Mumbai in the late 1800s.
The next day, I saunter down to the paan stall-packed corner of Yangon’s Maha Bandula Park, where street food hawkers peddle a dish that defies convention: yes, the samosa salad. The ‘samusa thohk’, with its decidedly Indian underpinnings, is a tea-time snack that is a delicious sum of chopped vegetable samosa, stewed chickpeas, fried shallots, cabbage, and sliced boiled potatoes peices. To this is added a ladle of fiery broth , making it a sort of a spicy soup-salad.
For dinner, I choose a chitti kala meal that’s said to be an interpretation of Chettiar cuisine and one that is very popular in Yangon. My thali-like dish is made up of a flaky htat taya palata (layered paratha) , a piquant chicken curry and the green peas stew called pé-byohk. I wash this down with a near-authentic falooda-like drink called hpaluda and chase all this with a single malaing lohn, or Myanmar’s version of the gulab jamun.
Hamara Bajaj
A few days later, I find myself whizzing past pagoda after pagoda in the ancient, holy city of Bagan, nestled in the heart of the country. My autorickshaw driver Win Min Oo, while declaring his undying love for his India-made Bajaj tuk tuk, lets me in on one of the greatest culinary surprises I’ve encountered. No feast in Myanmar can ever be complete without the danbauk, a dish he insists is Indian. It’s only a few hours later, after some intense culinary research, that I realise what Win was talking about. Apparently, the Mughlai slow, oven-cooking method of dum pukht is what the people of Bagan call the regional variant of biryani served with mango pickle, fresh mint and green chili.
Marvelling at how films, culture and most importantly food can be great equalisers — never mind the chasm both in time and geography between old Awadh and modern-day Bagan — I settle down for my sunset dinner at one of Bagan’s many Irrawaddy riverfront restaurants. A plate of fragrant danbauk in front of me and my ears tuned in to an 80s Bappi Lahiri song.
The Mumbai-based writer and restaurant reviewer is passionate about food, travel and luxury, not necessarily in that order.
Published - October 27, 2018 04:31 pm IST
