I am bouncing through the streets of Old Delhi in the back of a cycle rickshaw, squashed side by side with a character plucked from a Salman Rushdie fable. 'I've had jaundice twice,' Rahul Verma tells me cheerfully as our elderly rickshaw wallah — leathery and wrinkled, yet with the stamina of a Tour de France front runner — stops beside a hole-in-the-wall stand selling kakori kebabs, made from ground lamb tenderised with papaya. 'It's an occupational hazard, you might say.'
Verma, a gourmet communist with a penchant for fine single malts, is showing me around his favourite feeding posts in this most overlooked of global food capitals. He is one of India's leading food writers, and Delhi street food is his specialist subject, at least when he is writing for The Hindu Delhi newspaper. When he writes for The Hindu Kolkota, it is on that city's fine dining scene.
'The food is generally more refined in Calcutta,' he says, 'but I love the vibrancy of Delhi.' Verma breezily dismisses the paradox of a staunch communist writing about posh restaurants with a shrug — 'Well, I have to make a living, you know' — and accepts a bottle of Talisker as his fee for my tour. It's a price I am happy to pay to delve deep into an urban food scene that many Westerners might otherwise avoid.
'Vibrant' can often be a euphemism for squalor, of course, so let's tell it like it is. The effluvia is an affront, the odours frequently nauseating. If I'd had one, I'd have fluttered my hanky like a Merchant Ivory extra. And the congestion - vehicular, bovine and pedestrian — is absurd. Stick to the pavements and you'll be there all day. I stick instead to Verma as he darts with surprising spryness for a man of his self-confessed decrepitude — 'It's my knees, I'm afraid' — in and out of handcarts, cows, crowds and piles of fearful, unidentifiable detritus. We stop only to sniff the air. 'Ah, ghee, can you smell it?' he smiles.
