Tamarind and Garlic: A. Muniyandi
The food stalls at Burma Bazaar sell near-authentic Burmese food, and continue to employ a growing number of immigrants from Myanmar
Nimit Dixit, Subiksha Ramakrishnan
Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Despite his Tamilian roots, Muniyandi only speaks the language as fluently as the Tibetan who sells momos at the stall next to him on Jehangir Street in Burma Bazaar, Chennai. And this despite being a resident of the City since 1996 when he had arrives as a pilgrim, eager to discover his ancestral home.
Today, it has been twelve years since he completed his apprenticeship at his brother-in-law’s Burmese food stall, an older establishment located at the junction where Jehangir street meets Rajaji Road, in view of the shoppers in Burma Bazaar and the passengers using the back gate of the Chennai Beach train station on their daily commute through the city. Muniyandi’s stall, a few hundred metres further down the street, gains traction when the more popular stall gets crowded beyond convenience.
“One plate Atho!”, his first customer for the day, likely a government employee on his way back from work, shouts over the sound of the horns of the cars navigating cautiously between the lines of two wheelers parked on both sides of the narrow road. Muniyandi sighs. “Atho is short for Laatho, which is how it’s pronounced in Burmese which we speak in my hometown, Domoso,” he plucks orange coloured noodles from a large container on his stall and begins to toss it in a bowl, adding garlic oil, tamarind water, chilli powder, salt, and groundnut mix intermittently. “Laath means hand in Burmese and it’s called Laatho as the dish is made by tossing the noodles by hand,” he explains
As his customer consumers his first bowl of Atho, Muniyandi cracks the skin off three boiled eggs slicing them open in a bowl. As if performing a card trick, he raises the bowl to the customers eye-line and sprinkles caramelized onions on to the sliced eggs topping this off with a generous dose of chilli and garlic oil.
The customer is sold. And with the same flair, the eggs are planted on his half-eaten plate of noodles. “This is not how they make it in Burma. There we use more vegetables. Here, people want masala and fried onions,” he explains, pleased with the success of his first performance.
The smell of pejo soup, now heated, envelops the stall. A second trick looks imminent. Muniyandi examines the large pot containing a yellow mix, so thick that the white noodles simmering under its surface are hardly visible. “My mother would make this soup for breakfast on school days. She would teach us the names of the ingredients in Burmese. In the village, even the Tamilians spoke to each other only in Burmese” he recalls.
Muniyandi’s entire village in Myanmar was a community of Tamil migrants — some brought in on ships by the British to work in the fields, some as soldiers brought in to fight the Japanese that had encroached Myanmar during World War II. His father, a second generation migrant, chose, like thousands of others, to stay back after the British left, and found work as a manual labourer working in farmlands.
An auto-rickshaw pulls up right in front of the stall, displacing the crowd waiting for their Atho, Pecho, or Egg Masala. Muniyandi does not seem to mind. Babu steps out of the vehicle and smiles at Muniyandi for all two seconds before stepping out behind the stall. He picks up a knife and starts cutting cabbage into a large plate.
Babu is a friend, one of the few that Muniyandi has made in Chennai. Both residents of Vyasarpadi, their families attend community functions together. Muniyandi’s two children are friends with Babu’s and the wives spend evenings planning dinners and outings, which often ends in complaints about how their husbands never have time to actually materialize these plans.
Muniyandi wipes sweat off of his forehead. The evening is cool but the steam from the soup, hot, thick, and grey, blows into his face as he prepares more Atho. His faded white shirt is spotless, in spite of the array of colours he is immersed in. He bends over to reduce the flame and reveals a receding hairline — flyaway and unkempt. “I have started catering at marriages. Tamilians love Burmese food, or at least local food with simple Burmese twists,” he points at large jars of chilli powder, gram dal, and garlic.
Muniyandi points at a truck where three younger Tamilians are cutting vegetables and tossing noodles while conversing in Burmese. A work force comprised of other immigrants from his home country who were either forced back to India in search of employment or have returned to stay with their relatives in their ancestral villages in Tamil Nadu. “As my business grows, I will continue to employ my brothers and sisters who come from Burma in search of a better life. We are stronger than family!” Muniyandi proclaims.
