Society

Burmese Day

It isn't just the taste, it's the variety. Ah, it's a border town—en route to a noirish world.

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Burmese Day
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Tamu (A Myanmar Border town with India). The town is restricted to theforeign travelers due to the occasionally outbreak of robbery. This has become a story forthe present generation because the Myanmar regime managed to incorporate all the armsgroup to the legal fold. Today Tamu is prevailed with law and order that is attracting thethird party citizen. To tell it true, traveling through the demarcation is sampling thetwo different tastes in one dish.
—Burmese travel website 

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It really was exceptional. But I was also very relieved. My wife and I had spent the previous day in Moreh, listening to the melancholy tales of Burmese Tamil refugees, sinister rumours of slorc spies disguised as beggars, and learning the grandiose acronyms of the various UG armies patrolling the denuded forest on either side of the border: UNLF, RPFPLA, KCP, KYKL, PREPAK, KNF, KNA.... It was a creepy little town, with nothing much to recommend it. The only entertainment was one cinema hall and a large video parlour with speakers broadcasting the soundtrack of Bhojpuri, Nepali, Meitei and martial arts sex films onto the streets. I was drawn into a screening of Lethal Panther and stunned by the sight of entire families—men, women and suckling babies—watching a nude ninja straddling her gurgling lover, and then disembowelling him in media res.

But the cheap thrills on screen were only the penumbra of Moreh's main attraction: the smugglers market of Namphalong Bazaar, ten feet away from the Indian border checkpost Gate No. 2. And for Rs 10, you could get a day pass to visit Moreh's Burmese twin, Tamu, a short tonga ride away in the Kabaw Valley. "Neater and wealthier than Moreh..." was my first impression. "...and even sulkier."

All that changed, that afternoon at the Kabaw Hotel. Memory has magnified the delight of that meal to such an extent that even the seedy streets of Moreh, its sleazy hotels and shady characters acquired a crepuscular glamour. I thought of Moreh when I watched Orson Welles' grimy classic A Touch of Evil. And I saw myself in Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston!) taking his American bride Suzie (Janet Leigh) through the mean streets of 'Los Robles'. "All border towns show the worst of the country," he said comfortingly. I thought of it more recently, when I read Raymond Chandler's last great novel The Long Goodbye. "Tijuana is not Mexico," says the world-weary Philip Marlowe. "No border town is anything but a border town."

Last month I talked my way into an assignment to revisit Tamu-Moreh. It was for a culinary piece (you're reading it) but my real agenda was to savour the noirish charms of Tijuanaland again. After the flight to Imphal and a four-hour road journey, I reached Moreh, too late to visit Tamu but with plenty of time for a recce of Namphalong Bazaar—now bristling with everything from power tools to iPods. I befriended a liquor stall owner who told me that the pistol-packing proprietor of Kabaw Hotel was dead. "Char number se mar gaya," he said, which turned out to mean AIDS. We discussed his whiskies, which ran from Thai-bottled Vat (750cl, Rs 350) to Scotland-bottled (Rs 600) to Burmese Two Dog and our own RC. "Everyone wants to drink foreign liquor," he said sagely, "Two Dog is foreign in Moreh and Bagpiper is foreign over here." Then he recommended three restaurants for me to visit in Tamu the next day. One Chinese, one Tamil, one Burmese.

Dusk fell as I made my way back down Moreh's main street, and the Assam Rifles were on patrol. Perfect strangers warned me not to stay out late. The town was still skittering from the murder of an Assam Rifles JCO by a UNLF assassin in July. Every storyteller was fascinated by the same ghoulish detail: He had been shot in aPCO while he was talking to his wife. His name was Tuk Bahadur Pun. "Do phool wala." A Subedar.

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I repaired to a lamp-lit bar and ran through a peg of Two Dog, another of Cutty Sark and a can of Dali beer from Yunnan. That's right—one Burmese, one Scotch, one beer; accompanied by tapas of boiled mustard stalks and small fish called 'fiftin', cooked whole and served with onion and salt.

I was up at dawn the next morning—5 am on this fringe of the country—and by 8 I was in a motorcycle tuktuk on the road to Tamu—except that it was 9, Myanmar time. Ten minutes later, I walked into the Float restaurant, a Tamu landmark ("any national, any religion can come and have"), only to find a raucous wedding party in progress. The groom himself invited me to come and have but I wasn't dressed for the occasion and departed with directions for Meik Li Yint a few minutes away in a sidecar cycle-rickshaw. Though later in the day I did have an honest Tamil spread (complete with fish, mutton, pachadi, mulagapodi and more) and a small Burmese meal of sesame chicken noodles with broth and spicy cabbage (Sankhaoswe, Heiyi and Kofi Chen), it was the Yunnan cuisine of Meik Li Yint that made my day this time. The menu ranged from'Pig Ear Salad' and 'Sour Hat Meet' to 'Seramblod Eggs' but I had 'Rahoit Greens', which were stir-fried Chinese broccoli spears (leafy with tiny florets) with a few blanched tomatoes, spring onions, chillies and garlic. I pointed at 'Meet with Sour Mustard' on the menu but was served a more mundane chicken dish instead. Soup was served last, an enormous two-litre vat of 'Twelve Young Vegetable Soup'. I tried counting the vegetables swimming around in this pellucid aquarium, but after the snow peas, broccoli, cauliflower, baby carrots and greens, I snared some brown tofu and then boiled quail eggs, and decided to just eat instead.

When I left for Imphal the next day, my notebook was sated with its usual complement of conversation, anecdote, alcohol and a silent porn film called Love is Poison. Look, the food is great but Tamu is no culinary Mecca. It's just a border town. But, if you want some noirishment with your nourishment, you really do get two different tastes in one dish.

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