Aluthkade/Puthukada
When the influencers discovered Hulftsdorp, my FYP on TikTok was filled with videos from Abdul Hameed Street, Aluthkade. Videos of flame-licked sandwiches, telegenic colourful drinks with strange names, bamboo biriyani and paani puri abounded my timeline.
I first wrote about Aluthkade seven years ago. Uncle Dudley, mentioned here, passed away during the covid years. The first time I went to Aluthkade was during Ramadan. We prayed Tharaweeh, hopped a cab and came to Abdul Hameed Street. It felt like we entered a portal of some sort. Outside the area, everything was dark and desolate. But once you began winding your way through to Puthukada (Aluthkade in Tamil), you were met with a flurry of activity, lights, bustle, people. There were stacks of jaggery, rose syrup and vermicelli for sale on the streets. Dominated by men, mostly after Tharaweeh prayers, the food stalls which lined the road was brimming with activity late into the night.
Since then, every time I have gone to Aluthkade I find new stalls. Puthukada has also caught onto its internet fame and evolved to keep up with it. There are cooks who wield their blowtorches with extra panache for the gram, unfazed by the videos in their faces. The last time I went, we devoured chocolate pani puri which was calmly set on fire by a sweet-faced boy with kohl-rimmed eyes. The drink stalls have unique names to match their shocking colours: Ding Dong Miriand, Jil Jil Jiga, Sweet Girls Only, Injection Juice, Dark Room Fighter, Kulukku Sarbath.
The key to enjoying Aluthkade is to go with an open mind, empty stomach, a sense of curiosity, and then pace yourself. Basically how you would navigate any street food. Not all jaunts have been pleasurable and we’ve come away with mediocre food experiences. But this happens. My favourite is the barbecue chicken place which has been consistent everytime I go there. Tenderized and spiced chicken quarters are fanned over flaming charcoal and served up in a large sawan with a white sauce and tomato sauce, salad, a wedge of lime and the softest pillowy roti and makes for ideal communal eating. The flamelicked sandwiches have been underwhelming — the performance of how it is made has never matched the taste. The kebabs we once had did not live up to its seller’s hype. But the mandi rice from Mandi Dharbar has been excellent — a little away from Abdul Hameed street and located on Smith Street, Mandi Dharbar serves up smokey mandi rice and chicken for hungry crowds. Regulars will of course be familiar with the beef soup stall and the ghee roti and curries like goat brain and baabath at Razicks/uncle Dudley’s. I haven’t been to both in a while and am sadly not adventurous enough for oxtail soup, brains and baabath.
What I like about Aluthkade is the variety and the constant innovation, especially despite everything going on in the country. If you can afford to, tip well. The food industry, particularly in an economic crisis, is laced with precarity. Sri Lanka’s food is superlative but its street food can be patchy, depending on where you go. This is changing and I’ve been seeing more food carts and street food court set ups pop up in Colombo and its suburbs. I have a dream that one plucky, enterprising street food vendor will break the issovadai/naan/achchaaru/kotthu/manioc chip monopoly that grips Galle Face Street Food. I have dreams of eating short eats and having a faluda by the beach, perhaps even ribbon cake – there is only so much triple fried isso vade one can take. But until then, we will always have Aluthkade.
Costco
To enter Costco you require a membership card. Once inside, I do not know where to look. It's a warehouse masquerading as a store for everything. It is a spectacle of excess. I get whiplash from craning my neck from aisle to aisle because I do not want to miss anything. There are rows and rows of stacked croissants, their plastic casings gleaming under the fluorescent light. Display cases filled with desserts, produce. The shopping carts are large enough for a tall woman like me to curl up comfortably in. There are still larger shopping carts if you have heavier purchases. There is an entire area for dairy. There are pianos in case you feel like picking up a piano while grocery shopping. The biggest bags of chips and nuts and dried fruits and chocolates I’ve ever seen.
It has been a few weeks since I have been in the US. It is my first time here. It is odd to be in a country that has for years usurped – despite your best efforts – your cultural imagination. I do not know if I will find my niche if I were to move here. I am terrified of losing myself. I find myself bubble-wrapping myself to protect myself as we travel around. Everyone is so polite. The food portions are alarmingly massive. Oddly I have been unmoved by the art museums, the national park, the cities, the buildings, the tourist attractions that we have woven through. There is a sterility that undergirds the cities and the suburbs. But I found delight in the sauce-slicked braised squid and tender beef served up in a small family-run Korean restaurant in LA, watched over by a picture of Jonathan Gold on the wall. I found contentment in a crowded park in San Francisco, the smell of weed hanging in the air, my face lifted towards the cloudless skies as S and I read side by side. I have loved walking through small grocery stores crammed with a variety of wonderful things. I can and have spent hours at Target, browsing, browsing without buying. And at Costco, I found awe in the spectacle of consumption and excess on display. These are things I have not vocalized because people will side-eye you strangely when you say such things and I am already Fresh Off the Boat and my gouache-ness feels like a tangible spectre that follows me everywhere when I fumble with crisp dollars and I am afraid of saying dumb shit so for now, I parrot the answers people want to hear about conventional attractions and sights.
I have to stop doing mental somersaults, converting everything to Sri Lankan Rupees or I will not buy anything. At Costco, I turn towards items I can take home for family and friends. The cookies and desserts and cheese will not survive the long journey home. But the chocolates and nuts and peanut butter will. As we wheel our purchases out from the cashier, we stop for a snack at the eatery inside Costco. $1.50 will buy you a hotdog topped with onions, ketchup, mustard and relish and a large drink with free refills of your choice (481 LKR!). It is exactly the kind of salty-sugared postscript needed after an hour of shopping. It is UX genius to have a fast food eatery and benches just after the cashier. Everything in this country is designed to heighten consumption. The bun is milky and soft and it is exactly the kind of no-frills hotdog I did not know I was craving. Sated, we wipe the crumbs from our mouths, and lug our cart out to the parking lot.
3. Hoppers
Friend, are you in a rut? Is there something you’ve been trying to do but it hasn’t taken off the ground? Are you self sabotaging yourself? These are ofc notes to myself. I have two writing projects due for two people I have long wanted to work with and I have ripped up draft after draft while twisting myself into knots over the writing.
While writing, I think about umma and her hoppers. A few years ago umma got into hoppers. Like she really got into hoppers. Every week she began experimenting heavily with hoppers, trying to perfect it. She experimented with ingredients, fermenting time, cookware. As a result, in the past years, as her neighbours, we have eaten a lot of hoppers.
This picture is umma's attempt at hoppers five years ago. In her early experiments, she couldn't get the crisp shell so she only made hopper centres and served those up defiantly. Baby hopperlets. Hopperlings. Inchoate hoppers. When I look at my half-formed writing drafts I remember these half-formed hoppers and her persistence to get them right. Am I my grandmother’s granddaughter or is she her granddaughter’s grandmother? These things work both ways.
Now she knows which brand of flour works better. What not to do. Her more recent hoppers were with a crisp shell and a milky soft centre. The way God decreed hoppers to be. She sent it to us with seeni sambol in a tea cup because at her age she knows that a tea cup can be a seeni sambol cup if you want it to be and not just a vessel to serve tea in.
I increasingly realise that my lessons of subversion, perseverance and resistance have always come from the women before me. Even if they don't always realise it. Even if they don't fit into the templates expected. Even if they are not conversant with or are suspicious of the vocabulary of modern feminisms. Sometimes perseverance is doggedly mastering a recipe even when everyone is teasing you. Or lugging through a project long after everyone has forgotten about it and no one is waiting for it. Sometimes subversion looks like an octogenarian serving seeni sambol in a tea cup.
Enjoyed every word, as always. And this - There is a sterility that undergirds the cities and the suburbs - is what I felt for the first time over thirty years ago, but didn't have the words to say. Unfortunately for me, my bubble wrap is long gone, and the feeling only a memory now.
Thanks for sharing your words.
Loved it all! Now hungry for hoppers. You have a wonderful talent of making the mundane, sound so exciting. Making me as the reader want to experience all that you have written.