Hotaa

a guide to eating out like a goddamned average maldivian in male’

i think one of the best things about male’ is the number of hotaas around, like proper shitholes that do no one no good but bestow on mortals gifts of gas and diarrhoea. ok, we do have a food and drug authority, one that’s recently closed a bangladeshi hotaa in a fashionable henveiru neighbourhood that at least one native bangla-speaker has said did their cuisine justice. and i mean REAL justice, not the kind you get in our courts.

so, let’s get some introductory bits out of the way. all right, first, male meehun are those with land in the capital, usually, and/or people who’ve spent most of their lives here – well, the latter are neither here no there and there’s this naipaul like unbelonging about them but this is not our present concern. male meehun look down on raajjetherey meehun who’re people from the islands, never mind male is an island but all the same, people from the islands are said to be funny, and not in an amusing way. and male meehun look down on bangladeshis of course, how could they not, because male meehun empty half a can of deodorant on their person before heading out, and a normal bangladeshi has to wait their turn to even take a shit, let alone shower, in a ‘guesthouse’ with awful ventilation and too many people.

but the poor bangladeshi does all the menial stuff, even i get a bangladeshi to come clean our apartment three times a week, although it’s more like once every other week, not his fault, it’s mine because i’m usually busy, really busy with important stuff, like typing up this piece as it arrives malformed and palpitating to the mind. yes fifi, and fifi doesn’t do a real good job but he does enough and who the hell are we to judge anyway cos god knows he could do with more of our money. nevertheless, fifi recommended this hotaa to me and so i called up a friend who’s a lawyer and a total ass most of the time though we hang out very frequently, i think too frequently, i don’t vibe with the guy on occasion, we’re just outta sync some days, his jokes fall flat, and his expressions make me grind my teeth…anyway, so this is the hotaa…it’s not called a hotaa, instead it is called cafe mint plus. mint plus. plus what? these are the kinds of questions our country’s most esteemed writer of english might ask, but i won’t, i would instead ask him why he is asking those questions of a goddamned bangladeshi hotaa in the first place.

CAFE MINT PLUS – DINNER

let it be said again that fifi recommended this cafe, it’s in a narrow street that’s perpendicular to rah dhebai magu, a famous road. half of old bihuroazu kamanaa mosque stands on the same street as the cafe/hotaa, which is next to a shop called the red banana, and there’s a neon lit banana sign to tip you off. to make matters more interesting, i’ve heard from an excellent source there’s a brothel in the area that won’t let in drunken gangsters in the early hours and these horny boys end up howling into the night and forcing the neighbours to call the cops.

ok, so my lawyer friend and i go upstairs to the cafe and there’s this real overpowering smell of damp though it’s clean for a hotaa, but the stench is almost choking me. you need to go right up to the counter to order, by the way. they understand a little english here, enough to know what you want and if they don’t, you can always point. bangladeshis sit on the bright green plastic chairs behind us and eat with great determination. hard labour means hardcore loading up on carbs and protein.
so we go through the offering, there’s vegetable, chicken, beef and CAMEL!
and the bangladeshi seytu (a shopkeeper or cashier) says, yeah camel, like it’s the most ordinary thing this far east of arabia. and with a plate of rice it costs exactly 50 rufiyaa. goddamn!

so we take our seats by the wooden window that lets in sweet sweet night air, how i need this, and the cashier brings our food to the table. we share the rice because it is a LOT, but not by bangladeshi standards. we are male meehun though, so we eat, i am suspicious of this meat but my friend declares it edible, in fact nice, so i take some of the dry curried camel and mix it up with my rice with my spoon, most people eat with their fingers so you need to request for cutlery, and my god, the curry is amazing – spicy and the mixture of spices is different from what us maldivians are used to, it’s a bit more oily, a bit heavy, some curious notes in there, but good, and the camel is tough but tastes like a cross between goat and beef, and it really IS delicious. wow!

‘you won’t be able to tell us apart from bangladeshis when we’re done eating,’ remarks my friend and it’s his puerile attempts at humour that really get to me sometimes, there is something utterly wrong with him, i don’t know what it is but anyway, i mean what does it say about me that i hang out with a person like him? i’m no better than him, i know that, i’m just different, but he’s like one of my oldest friends and i can overlook a ludicrous sentence that carries a slight whiff of, no, a moderate cover of xenophobia, from a friend who’s seen me through pretty hard times and lets me party with friends at his place, often to great personal detriment. i finish off our meal and pay the seytu. they only accept cash at mint plus and i bet your dollar would go far here for, and i know i’m generalising, bangladeshis need to send precious dollars home to their families.

regardless, expect to part with 55 rufiyaa or about 4$ if you eat a meal with meat for one, but really enough for two, here along with a bottle of mineral water, which i think you should get at all costs cos tapwater in male is shit.

MOON CAFE – LUNCH

i’m waiting for two friends near the cemetery which is right across from this cafe of myth, lustrous as the its namesake in the outer space of male’s cuisine. it’s been here for twenty years at the very least, i recall a visit right before our high school concert, when i was a cleanshaven lad of seventeen, and alienated and thinking our concert was just pure shit, why can’t we do something cool like a grunge gig, but this was at the close of grunge, after chris cornell’s euphoria morning bade that scene adieu, rip chris. and we had hedhikaa aka dhivehi fingerfood, and it was great and i still felt like killing myself.

x and y arrive and we enter the dim interior of this establishment. it’s lunch time, but early, we’ve beaten the crowds.
‘what do they have here?’ asks x, and she is understandably ignorant because hotaas, i have forgotten to say, are very male spaces, meaning if you’re a woman, you’ll likely get eyeballed by old men. be warned.
‘what do they have here?’ repeats x.

‘the best dhivehi keun in male,’ i tell her. dhivehi keun is roughly translates to food of the maldives, and that’s what it is. so we take a look at the buffet. it’s typical but the quality of the food at moon cafe is hardly ‘the usual’. so you get boiled sweet potato, coconut milk, coconut scrapings, rihaakuru dhiya (my favourite, a brownish liquid, made with coconut milk, fish paste, onion, chili) garudhiya (clear fish broth) lonu mirus (local chili paste) and plates of fresh chili, onion, lime. and of course, boiled rice.
we take our seats, y orders a side of grilled reef fish, and begin. so, just to let you in on our feeding habits, you make the rice mushy with the boiled sweet potato, and add the rihaakuru dhiya, lonu mirus, onion, and lime, and i promise you it’s a combo that’ll floor you.

‘i ate from this very hotaa twenty years ago,’ i tell them. ‘we had our SEC concert at olympus.’
‘i would’ve been in europe at the time,’ remarks y.
‘don’t get him started on europe,’ laughs x.
‘i saw this huge sign in brussells that said ‘the future is europe”. y says.
‘recently?’ i ask.
‘yes.’
x laughs. ‘is it even up for debate? does africa have a future? asia?’
‘i have a future,’ i say.
‘you won’t if you eat like that.’ says x.
‘it’s so good.’
‘i agree,’ x admits.

we eat our meals in relative silence, and x, with a boyish haircut and in a t-shirt & jeans, has probably passed for a guy cos no one spares her a second glance. when the bill arrives on a scrap of paper, it’s only 193MVR.

‘holy shit!’ exclaims y. ‘and after that chunk of grilled fish. we should do this more often.’

outside, we see the shop next door has a sign in english on its window.

– “50 KAMAGRA ORAL JELLY AVAILABLE” –

WTF!

note: please take cash. lunch here is approximately 5$ per person or 65MVR.

DHON MANIK SKYVIEW – EVENING TEA

i’m waiting on two friends again – let’s call them a and b – who’ve lived abroad and have recently returned to the maldives. i am yet to know why, however, but i think i will, eventually. they’re my classmates from some twenty years back and we still get along pretty well.

we meet up by a posh seaside cafe called shell beans that’s very popular with certain strata of society though i only go there to empty my bladder. the food is horrendous but the bathroom is big and clean.

‘where do you wanna go?’ a asks.
‘i have a place in mind,’ i tell them. ‘boys, they make fresh hedhikaa right in front of ya, it’s gonna be good.’
‘that’s awesome,’ says b. ‘male’s really come up since my last visit.’
evening tea is a serious ritual in the maldives, especially here in the capital, and you’ll see exactly what i mean if you venture out into the teashops, the hotaas, even some restaurants that serve hedhikaa – our finger food that should be marked as a health hazard cos we like them fried deeply, and the crunch of a handulu gulha to male’ millennials is probably second only to that nostalgic sound of chalk against blackboard.
‘where are we going, man?’ asks a.
‘calm down, we’re almost there.’
and then i spot it, the hotaa is on a flank of kaanivaa past the bus depot, but actually, i do NOT see it because it’s no longer there.
‘er! something’s different,” i say but keep on looking cos right next to the old hotaa is a restaurant that’s owned by the same group and it has the same name now. but this isn’t a hotaa. it’s a fairly upmarket place that’s known for their THAI cuisine. now what the hell’s happened? i can see some people by the balcony and it’s way too early for dinner. maybe, just maybe, they are serving tea here, like they did with their hotaa.
“OK, boys! let’s go up.’

the stairs to the restaurant are in the doorway that faces the ‘ring road’ – the tar-ry ring of asphalt that encircles most of male’. to the right of this place is the king salman mosque that the saudis have built for us, more on this later.

and to my great delight, they ARE serving hedhikaa here, and i breathe a sigh of relief, thank GOD, it won’t have looked too good if i, the city boy, had made a mistake and led them to a shithole that didn’t serve our ‘short eats’, but here we are in this washed out beachy bohemian restaurant. and over yonder, at the counter at the far end, the bangladeshi chefs are frying up OUR hedhikaa, there’s something poetic about this turn of events.

‘this is cool,’ remarks a. ‘it reminds me of one of those places in thailand, like a large seafood restaurant with seating for 200.’
‘i thought you were taking us to a hotaa,’ says b offhandedly, taking off his glasses and cleaning the lenses with his faded blue t-shirt.
we order a bunch of hedhikaa, the havaadhulee bis which is coated with a spice mix, it’s like a fish dumpling, cutlas (which are fish cutlets), fuh jehi kavaab (a deep fried fish ball with an outer layer of yellow dough) and gulha (a deep fried dough ball with a fish and coconut mix inside).

the man by the counter gives us a token that we can put on the table, and off we go. i take a spot by the salman mosque side, overlooking the courtyard with its date palms and the water behind. the day is dreary but i like the grey sky and the navy blue sea, it comforts me.

‘dear god, what the hell is that?’ asks a, pointing at the mosque. it is massive, and looks kind of like a cylinder with stained glass windows. five tall, sharp-pointed minarets stab the sky cruelly.
‘it looks like a cupcake,’ says b. ‘look, that frilled bit, the roof, is the cup, and the mosque itself is a cake. it’s upside down.’
‘word,’ says a. ‘that’s exactly it!’
‘i heard that it was designed by an expensive turkish firm,’ i say, trying to get into the conversation.
‘looks like it was designed by an intern,’ laughs b and a snorts.
‘what i don’t get,’ says a, ‘is that we have a dearth of space in male’ and yet we build these huge mosques. why can’t they just make mosques in apartment complexes and save space for housing?’
‘yeah, like they do in malaysia,’ says b.
this chat has become too issue-focussed for my taste but right on cue the food arrives.
‘dig in, boys!’
thus we dig in. and lo, it is astonishing.
it sets us back by 190 MVR, or 13 USD for the whole meal and the boys forget themselves for a while, basking in the afterglow of fresh hedhikaa.
‘god, it’s great to be back,’ says a.

FOOD MALE – BREAKFAST

this used to be a nepali cafe in the shell beans goalhi, an unassuming place that picked up an odd mix of clientele. i’ve seen judges whispering in a quiet huddle within the airconditioned interior, and i befriended a japanese diplomat who loved food male’s chow mein, i’ve met businessmen, and recognised the mugs of certain gangsters, and on fridays, hoardes of young nepalese workers come all dolled up for their day off.

it’s now owned by a fellow maldivian, and before the nepalese left, leaving him in charge, they trained the current bangladeshi chef in the fine art of momo making. this is the best place for momos in male, doubts be damned.
i am here for breakfast, though – mashuni! it’s the maldives variant of pol sambol from our neighbour sri lanka, from whom we also quite possibly inherited buddhism and our language.

breakfast is a meal that i enjoy alone from time to time, and i am by myself today. the place is grimy, even the airconditioned, non-smoking area seems like it is in need of a major cleanup.
a casually dressed bangladeshi waiter takes my order. no uniforms here, it’s not that kind of place if you haven’t guessed already. there are a few people, mostly office workers with their long sleeved shirts and neckties smoking outside the glass curtain separating the inner sanctuary from the outer.

when i was in the judiciary, in the early days, i used to work fairly hard. i didn’t take tea breaks like the freaks outside, hell i didn’t even know that they were possible – i later learned that you could leave the office on any pretext, all you had to do was write it down in a logbook along with the time of your departure, and upon your return, the time you got back and your signature.
there was some guy in my office whose job it was to examine this book but man, after i’d got the hang of it, i once wrote that i was hearing voices to take a break to play fifa 09 on the playstation with my fellow judicial co-worker, a high ranking officer from the nation’s supreme court who was fiercely competitive when it came to games. ah, youth.
‘here!’ says the bangladeshi. why must he be so loud?

the thing about this mashuni is that they’ve got a really good ratio of fish to coconut. also, the chef knows just how much lime the mix needs. no single ingredient overshadows the other, everything is in harmony unlike our judiciary with its simmering internal politics, conflict, the friction among the arabised, sharia inclined ghaazees and the western educated judges, between secretaries and their superiors, the chief justice and the media officer. no, this mashuni is a goddamn revelation, existing quietly amid this grime, this chaos, in perfect balance.

you can have this for $4 or 60 MVR. and have a plate of momos if you wanna stick around and lose yourself in this dingy corner of the city.