Travel writer and author Zac O’Yeah delves into India’s rich culinary traditions in his new book Digesting India

Travel writer and author Zac O’Yeah delves into India’s rich culinary traditions in his new book Digesting India

Eating for a living is a serious danger,” says Zac O’Yeah, Bengaluru-based travel writer and novelist of Swedish origin. His latest book, Digesting India, is a testament to how lethal this exercise can be on one’s innards. “I travel with aspirin, imodium and antacids,” he says. “But even that doesn’t always save you.”

Part memoir, part travelogue with lashings of history, literary references and unbridled fun, this collection of eight essays takes the reader on a whirlwind ride through India and the food (and alcohol) it holds. From a rather beer-sozzled traipse through Bengaluru’s colonial history to a (very) brief brush with asceticism at the Gandhi Sevagram Ashram in Maharashtra, a glimpse into the highly-cosmopolitan cuisine cultures of New Delhi and Goa and detailed descriptions of dubious dives, dangerous curries and deadly lavatory experiences, Digesting India will leave you chortling and hungering for more. Edited excerpts from an interview:

When the pandemic started, I had just got back from Italy where I went in 2019; later, it was discovered in autopsies that people had COVID-19 there already then. I was supposed to go to Hollywood for work in early 2020 but all this news of the pandemic made me drag my feet, which in a sense is lucky because if I had gone, I would have been stuck there for months. I’d probably be sleeping on a park bench since the employers only gave a freebie week in hotels. And get arrested for vagrancy. So, from a travel-writing point-of-view, it was a major disruption.

One can remain cheerful for a bit and write up recent travel experiences. But then as one runs out of stories, what does one do? I decided to spend the lockdown thinking through what I had done in the past and if there was any ‘red thread’. I’ve written about many things such as cultural heritage and historical monuments, but it struck me that more than anything else, I’ve been obsessed with finding good food. So that’s where it began. I realised that my life had been a great food adventure through the cuisines of India and then I figured it might be something worth writing about.

Somebody once told me that in India if you travel a hundred kilometres, the food will be completely different from the previous town. So, in my book, I look at just this. I travel and then I eat, and I’m in a new paradise. And what that paradise is about is often some interesting history behind its food.

In Tamil Nadu, for instance, you can go to any place in the Kongu Nadu region, which is the heart of the State, and find gourmet dishes that are probably cooked the same way today as millennia ago. Then you move on to Puducherry and you’ll find dishes that blend French colonial and Tamil influences into some kind of haute cuisine.

I got off the train in Bengaluru thinking I’ll figure out where to go next. Then I just decided, why leave? I stayed for one or two months in a lodge in Majestic and felt very much at home there. The town is full of bookshops and good restaurants, so in my mind, I thought I was in heaven; no need to die to go to heaven, just stay in Bengaluru and avoid getting smashed by a drunk driver.