I miss 4AM dosa

I currently live very close to Singapore’s Central Business District (CBD). Many of the establishments around here wouldn’t be out of place in Brooklyn or SF - cold brew with oat milk, sourdough avocado toast. But there are another set of parallel stalls which remind me of Bangalore or Hyderabad - the mamak stall.

They serve dosa, prata, Maggi and are almost always run by men, hence the name ‘mamak’ - a Malay-ization of the Tamil for uncle (maa-ma). Much of the food they serve is recognizably South Indian but some dishes are modified with a few more flavors I would associate with Malay and Chinese cooking. Menus at these stalls often include noodle dishes and Chinese vegetables. Sambal and Kampong nasi goreng (Village fried rice) are also common, which are more Malay dishes. Recently many of the mamak stalls also serve North Indian/British Indian fare - usually some variant of butter chicken and naan.

When I first came to Singapore I lived on the periphery of Little India. I am occasionally wracked with insomnia. Or I would argue, my body follows a natural biphase sleep that people have followed for millenia until goddamn industrialization fucked it all up. During these graveyard times I would be truly a child, drawn to what comforted me most when I was young - dosa, sambar. Sometimes tea. If I felt adult after all of that, a coffee. Near Little India, the variety and quality of dosa was more than enough to satiate the inner hungry 7-year old Saurya a few times over.

Now that I am a bit far away from the competitive dosa industry of Farrer Park, I have only one or two choices within a 5 minute walk - both mediocre options which vary from day to day in quality. I bemoaned this fact in journal entries to myself months ago before leaving for the US. What a goddamn fool I was. I wish I could eat even a mediocre dosa and drink ginger milk tea as I look out at people talking at 4 AM, wondering why the hell I’m up but enjoying it nonetheless.

This experience is one of the reasons I fell in love with Singapore. A marriage of the hipster Western and hipster Indian world within a 2-minute walk. Farrer Park with its 20 varieties of dosa on one block also had pour-overs and bingsu on the same street. I fucking love this place and I wish I could have shared it with more of the people I love, shown them what I love about it - how it feels so perfectly like the merging of two parts of me that I struggle to bridge sometimes.

I hope I get to do my favorite little haunting one more time before I have to leave.