He has priceless
background music
that switches on and
off, depending on the
tide. He has a sea view
he doesn’t have to pay
for and waits for the
produce of the sea to be
brought in by the boys
of his fishermen’s village as their canoes come back home.
He has a view to die for, and this is the view he has lived
for; the wide arch of the ocean from Vasco to Dona Paula,
the masts of ships and yachts bobbing in the middle of
the expanse and other new sights like a resort and other
homes, where his house and that of his neighbours once
stood. He still does live somewhere close, seemingly
dreaming of what might have been; but he lives in the
here and the now, as happy as he has always been. This
contentment doesn’t come through conventional riches.
So here’s the story of this character, Rajendra
Kunkolkar, resident of Odxel and a permanent resident of
the fish market, seaside and the kitchen of his small shack
and restaurant buried in the recesses of Odxel village,
but now more noticeable after a big resort has developed
literally in front of his nose. His time has been trapped in
a time warp frozen to circa 1960 and he lives life that way.
He is the front office and the back end of his village shack,
roams around bare-chested and with shorts in the kitchen
(he sometimes wears trousers with no shirt in deference
to some ‘special guests’), supervising his lunchtime thalis.
A perfect piece of fish with rawa, fresh tisrio with thick
coconut sauce, the obvious prawn curry where you see
big prawns and not taste a water curry and his ultimate
piece de resistance, the mango seed curry, slightly sweet,
slightly pungent. The mango seed curry mixed with rice is
a serious challenger to mango pickle with boiled rice and
Rajendra Kunkolkar offers both.
In business and in life, he has kept it simple. Fresh
fish from the sea, fresh veggies from the village, a little
shack restaurant on his own property, a mother who loves
mixing the masalas and keeping the taste consistent and a
wife who loves to cook. Above all, and that’s the key, both
the ladies work in harmony, making Kunkolkar a happy
man, with hungry souls like us living off his happiness
as he feeds us. His fresh urrack, sourced again from
the village, is a must at lunch and dinner and perhaps
breakfast too, because unlike other more plebeian drinks,
urrack runs out of stock by June, even if it doesn’t run out
of fashion. Every meal is cooked fresh and therefore takes
a long time. But time is completely relative here, not far
from where the ocean meets the sea and the water often
caresses his kitchen.
Goa and the quintessential ‘goan-ness’ is kept alive by
those who are not in the business of restaurants but lead a
life in a way this land truly allows them to.
On a weekday night last week, after finishing work way
past midnight, this wanderer decided to hit the old roads
in the quiet of the night with the strains of Emiliano Da
Cruz’s Latin Romance playing on the car system. Through
Betim, on the other side of the Mandovi with two major
casino boats in their finery not far from the river bank.
That’s where lakhs, nay crores, were being lost, the money
going into the treasuries of casino owners who feed and
control the system, making it a very cosy club.
But moving on, yours truly drove past the Coco beach
area, the INS Mandovi and the winding road cutting across
fields straight through to the Pilerne panchayat. The
moon was high and the silhouettes of the palm trees, the
marshy swamp and some cottages hugged the path. From
the junction of the Pilerne panchayat, the car turned left,
used to the ways of the driver, and virtually stopped on
its own 200 metres away at the edge of a little lane, right
next to a board which signposted my destination – Mafia
Cocktail – the home of Tony, who is a character from out
of this world.
Tony has been the protagonist in a couple of these
columns, but they were about the eccentric place Tony
and his sister run, with a telephone with no dial tone as
the centre piece of attraction. But this night was different.
The door of Mafia Cocktail, Tony’s house, was ajar, so
a fellow eccentric buddy from Bombay, Yashesh, and I,
walked in and almost walked out, thinking everyone was
in bed and the kitchen was shut. Out of nowhere someone
jumped on us and asked if we wanted to eat. We nodded
and within seconds, Mafia Cocktail came alive, except the
phone which was as dead as a dodo. A little later, Tony
woke up from his deep sleep, asked what we wanted to
eat, ambled into the kitchen and 20 minutes later, came
out with plates of the juiciest prawn rawa fry and chicken
xacuti with hot rice and pickle. Seriously, where in the
world will you find a place which opens up at 3 am, with
the owner waking up and cooking a gourmet meal in 20
minutes. If he does this in his sleep, imagine what he
cooks when he is not sleeping. He could have kept sleeping
when we were walking out, but, in principle, Tony doesn’t
let anyone go away from home without eating.
Which is why Tony and Raj can and will never be
restaurant owners or in the ‘business’ of food. They simply
run warm homes with kitchens as their heart and soul.
Post Script: 4.30 am. We sleepily move out of Mafia
Cocktail, satiated to the brim, and Tony calls out before
he goes to bed again, “Anything else?”. Let the best
Michelin star restaurant in the world beat that for spirit
and affection.
