Slumdog Millionaire Shortbread

Shantaram is the semi-autobiographical account of life in Bombay’s underbelly, and the literary fire-starter that fueled a thousand gap year tragedies. My own gap year tragedy occurred twenty years before I first read it this week, and though mine took me home with one less toenail (which has never come back), it never took me to India.

If I’d read it back then I would have hated the book because, frankly, it’s ridiculous. The characters are all “preternaturally” something-or-other, and never a line is uttered between them that doesn’t wrestle with the full weight of the human condition. But cut to 37 year old me, and I’m more like a member of the crowd in Gladiator, just grateful to be entertained.

Yes I am actually, that was really good. Thank you.

And Shantaram’s India is entertaining — a collage of colour, contradiction, and cliché. Honesty in corruption. Smiles in destitution. Slums and skyscrapers pressed together on the same baking street. And it is these slums, above all, that have lodged in my mind as I haven’t been able to stop thinking: this might actually be the perfect environment to raise my children.

I’ll admit much of this thinking has occurred during a bout of food poisoning severe enough to qualify as a spiritual experience. Furthermore at its peak while I was sprawled on the floor clutching my sides, my two butt-naked infant boys began bouncing themselves off the bed and onto my abdomen. Repeatedly. My very real pain only made it funnier to them and all I could do was look up at them and whisper, “Why? Why do you do this to me?”

So yes, the idea of sending my boys to a Bombay slum is born both of reverie and revenge — but it’s not entirely mad. There is something lost to us in the slum that Shantaram sells. It’s a world where reputation matters, where virtues are cultivated in adversity and punishment is communal. A drunk who beats his wife to a pulp is made to stay out in the baking sun and force-fed whiskey until he repents. He never drinks again. Hindu and Muslim friends who fight over religious slurs are tied together and made to clean the latrines until they learn to stop slipping. Justice is severe, poetic, and delivered by those who must live with its consequence.

Any sane parent reading the above is already nodding at the obvious good this would do for their family. The book itself even goes on to explicitly endorse that “every child, beginning with the sons and daughters of the rich, would benefit from the experience of slum life.” This is in response to the story’s richest character sending his nephew to live in the slum, because he too knows it’s a good idea.

The millionaire knows it’s a good idea. The author knows it’s a good idea. I know it’s a good idea.

We all knows it’s a good idea.

However as far as I can see there are three things stopping me from doing this:

1. I don’t know anyone in a Bombay slum
2. I can’t afford the flights
3. I am not completely insane

The last reason is the most devastating. It’s recalled to me the only idea of Jean-Paul Sartre’s I know; that we are condemned to be free. Meaning, basically, the prison is always open — but I’m choosing to maintain this Play-Doh and Paw-Patrol mediated existence as if it’s preordained.

This understanding of freedom is, in fact, the realisation with which Shantaram begins. The tortured author sees that in his shackled, bloody helplessness, he was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing him, or to forgive them, and that even in a single freedom there lies a universe of possibility.

I want to shake my pregnant wife and tell her to wake up, not because she’s actually asleep, but because we are letting our life fly by in a daydream listlessly assembled from the absent-minded routines of others. I want to say, I know you’re heavily pregnant, and the idea of humid 40 degree weather all year round and fetid and infested slums do not exactly sound like a cup of tea - though the tea ironically will be very good - but I have a vision. And you need to trust me. It will work out very well for the children I’m sure. They will learn about consequence and reputation, trust and generosity, striving and suffering - more education than the Ofsted mill could grind out in a hundred years.

Yet some finely-honed husbanding instinct tells me this conversation would not end well.

Instead, I curl up on the floor again. I keep it to myself. My children continue to jump on me while I vacantly stare at the cherry tree in the garden. I know that tomorrow, there will be no Bombay slum for them, nor any punishment for their abuses. I know tomorrow we will pick those cherries, and we will make cherry fool and eat it with shortbreads.

And that it will have to do.

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Almond Shortbread & Fool

The below is an adapted recipe from Elizabeth David’s unsurpassed compendium ‘An Omelette And A Glass of Wine.’

Fool

• 400g cherries

• 3 tablespoons sugar

• 250ml double cream

Stew the cherries gently in a saucepan with a tablespoon or two of water and the sugar, just until they collapse. Drain off surplus liquid that would make it watery and then lightly mash or pass through a sieve, but never aggressively blitz. Some texture is desirable. Cool completely. Whip the cream until it holds soft peaks - not stiff, just enough to give body. Fold in the fruit though don’t overmix; it should be marbled not homogenised. Serve cold in glasses and with shortbread on the side.

Almond Shortbread

• 85 g plain flour

• 85 g unsalted butter

• 45 g caster sugar

• 25 g ground almonds

• 7 g (½ tbsp) rice flour or cornflour

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Instructions:

1. Crumble the softened butter into the flour, sprinkling in the rice flour or cornflour at intervals, as and when the butter seems to be getting sticky.

2. Add the almonds and the sugar.

   • The ingredients should not be worked too much. Grainy pieces will disappear in the cooking.

3. Spread the mixture into a 6-inch (15 cm) sandwich tin or tart tin with a removable base.

   • Press it down lightly and smooth over the top with a palette knife.

   • Prick the top surface with a fork.

4. Bake in the center of a very slow oven, gas no. 2, 310°F (~155°C), for an hour and a quarter, until the shortbread is a very pale biscuit color.

5. Leave to cool in the tin, but before it is completely cold cut into small neat wedges.

Serves 4.