A surreal Nepalese meal (London)

 

(This blog is inspired by a recent conversation with old friend Chris Dillon who mentioned that he used to go to these restaurants in the 80s.  I’m sharing the nostalgia as some of the readers might recognise them.)

There were two Nepalese restaurants on the stretch of Euston Road by Warren Street Tube station.

    My Heart of the Dragon* office on Fitzroy Square was round the corner, which was how I came across them.

    I later discovered that both the little one and the bigger one (called सगर माथा Sagarmāthā / “sky head” / meaning “the head in the great blue sky” in Nepali) shared the same owner — a gentle and genial chap calling himself David (which I suspect is for Davendra / Davindra).

    The food was nice, the service even better:  from the waiters, the cook and the proprietor.  They made one feel so welcome, which is how it should be anyway, as you’re giving them business.  (Not everyone thinks that way, though, in my and other people’s experience of being at the receiving end of the inexplicable rudeness from some of the staff at ethnic supermarkets.)

    David the Nepalese restaurant proprietor would ply between the two restaurants throughout the day, just to look in on how things were going.  If he found me there, he’d always make a point of staying until my order was ready, then serve it to me in person.  How special does that make a customer feel, I ask you?  (I didn’t get the feeling that he was doing it just for the sake of his own business.  He came across as a genuinely nice person, and sincerely pleased to see me.  Ditto the rest of the staff.)

    I’d go to these two restaurants with friends and colleagues, sometimes in a big group.

    It once amounted to 17 people, including me.  Tables were put together in a low row, four per table, with one end left free for the waiters to serve the head of the table from, and the other end against the back wall was taken up by me.

    At one point early on in the meal, one of the waiters came up to me and asked me to read his palm.  I didn’t remember telling him I could read palms (only rudimentary, though, taught by my eldest sister who features in two of the Interpreting dreams series).  Anyway, it was just a bit of fun, so I read his palm.  

    He was pleased with what I had to say, and came back with a half pint of free beer.  Another waiter then asked me to read his palm (for which I got another half pint of beer), with two others waiting in the queue!

    I was glad they only had four waiters in that restaurant (with about 12 tables), or I’d be there all night reading palms (and quaffing free beers).

(London, 1983)

*The Heart of the Dragon:  Channel 4 TV’s 12-part documentary series on China, first aired in January 1984 to inaugurate the launch of the nascent station (alongside two other sister series:  The Arabs, and The Russians; we were to be called The Chinese, but a Canadian team finished their six-part series, with the same name, ahead of us, so we had to change our name).

The brain works in wondrous ways: 11 (Recognition in a split second)

 

Old friend Simon from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) days chanced upon a copy of the coffee table book I’d worked on in the early 80s.  It was to go with The Heart of the Dragon, a 12-part Channel Four TV documentary series on China, launched in January 1984.  (Yes, 40 years ago already!!)

    I then stumbled across the series on YouTube, uploaded only a year ago by one of the three editors, Laurence Williamson.  (Thank you, Laurence!)

    The opening episode, Remembering, is a summary of the history of China pre- and post-1949.

    In the pre-1949 section, old documentary news footage of the civil war in China in the 30s and 40s was used as a backdrop to the narration.  

    Among the scenes of people fleeing, shots of wartime equipment (military trucks, e.g.) and soldiers (including non-Chinese ones), especially in Shanghai (I think), also flashed across the screen, but only for a few seconds before the narration moved on to another historical slot.

    After that episode was aired on Channel Four in late January 1984, we got a letter in the post from an old woman (white, British) who said she recognised her husband in one of those quick flash-by archive footage shots, asking if she could have a copy of that shot of him for keepsake.  

    I went through the footage and found the segment she was referring to.  It was a split second shot, and only featured him from the side, yet that lady recognised him immediately — and some 50 years back as well when he was a young man.  

    The brain is an amazing organ, indeed.

(London, 1984)

First thing seen upon waking up (China / Toulouse)

One of the episodes in The Heart of the Dragon was about Chinese science, featuring acupuncture, among other things.  

A rabbit’s nose was exposed to a heat lamp, and the time taken for the rabbit to turn away was recorded.  Then, acupuncture was applied to one of its meridian points — the heat-bearing one, presumably — and the rabbit’s nose was once again exposed to the heat lamp.  This time, the rabbit was able to withstand the heat for a bit longer.  The experiment was to prove how acupuncture could take the place of ether as an anaesthetic.  

For the human experiment, an old woman (in her 80s?) who’d been blind for a few decades underwent an eye operation, using acupuncture instead of ether.  Our British film crew went to the hospital to film the bandage-removing ceremony a few days later, to record her first reaction to being able to see again after such a long time.  So the first thing the old lady saw when she opened her eyes were these human beings with big noses, pale skin, hairy bodies and faces, and blue/green eyes.  She must’ve thought, “How the Chinese race has changed in the last few decades!”

Throughout this 12-day visit to France, I was helping an ex-student in Lisbon proof-read a handful of articles on tea that he was editing for a magazine he’d set up (called eighty ˚).  Back and forth, back and forth went the questions, comments and suggestions, sometimes for a few hours in one stretch, sometimes late into the night.  I certainly always checked last thing at night and first thing in the morning to see if he might’ve left more amendments for me to read.

On the day I was flying back to London, I got to Toulouse airport really early.  Sat in front of one of the Departures screens, to make sure I didn’t miss the call for checking in.  Dozed off at some point, and woke up to see the screen saying there was a flight to Tenerife on VOLOTEA.  Couldn’t believe my eyes.  Never heard of Volotea, so I thought I was dreaming after 10 days of reading tea articles!  It turned out Volotea was the carrier — a Spanish carrier.

(China, 1982; Toulouse, 2018)

Translating blind (London)

The rushes from the first shoot for The Heart of the Dragon were being edited.  They were for Episode 2, Caring, which was about caring on different levels.  

(The Heart of the Dragon : Channel 4's 12-part documentary series on China, aired in 1984) 

On the family level, the director wanted to show caring up and down the generations (between parents and children, and between grandparents and grandchildren), and along the same generation (between husband and wife).  (The grandmother in this episode is featured in blog entry The verb.)

On the state level, the director chose a mental hospital and a prison to find out what happens in the Chinese system when one “goes mad or bad”.

I was given the recordings on audio tapes to translate into English.  At one point, I got to an inspection tour of the prison dormitory.  One could hear the inspecting officer and the entourage going around — shuffle, shuffle, shuffle — with the inspector making comments here and there: “Very clean.”  Shuffle, shuffle: “Good ventilation.”  Shuffle, shuffle: “Well lit.”

Then, shuffle, shuffle: “No shit smell.”

Huh??  I played the tape again.  Yes, definitely those three sounds: “No shit smell.”  (没便味儿 méi biàn wèi’r)  

What was shit smell doing in the dormitory?  I played the tape again, and again, and again.  Each time it sounded the same.

Worried I might end up melting the audio tape playing it so many times, I went to the cutting rooms and asked for the rushes to be played.  Ah — they’d moved on to the lavatories.

(London, 1982)

The mandate of Heaven (London)

I worked on a 12-part TV documentary series on China in the early 80s which went out weekly from January 1984 on the then-new Channel Four.  It was part of a series of series: a ten-parter called The Russians; a ten-parter called The Arabs; we managed to negotiate a 12-parter because we shot more material than originally anticipated.  We then had to change our title from The Chinese to The Heart of The Dragon because a Canadian six-parter with our original name aired a few months into our two-year project.  

Each 54-minute episode (with a commercial break) was based on a theme and named accordingly, e.g., Eating, Working, Living, Discovering.  The first was Remembering, an introduction to the history of China, with the first half focusing on pre-1949 China, and the second on post-1949 China.  In the pre-1949 half, the commentary said emperors in imperial China were believed to have been given the mandate of Heaven to rule.

A few weeks before the first episode was to be aired, we invited journalists to view the video copy in our office so that they could write up previews.  One of them rang me after her viewing, and said, “I’ve just viewed your pre-broadcast fine cut, and need to fill in a bit of detail.  Your narrative mentioned that in imperial China, people accepted emperors as their rulers because they believed emperors had the right to rule over them by dint of their having been given the mandate of Heaven.  I wonder if you could let me have a photocopy of that mandate?”

(London, 1984)