The food post -- Part 1

1.

My friends know well that I do not drink much. In fact, I know nothing of the nuances: which glass suits which wine, the subtle differences between beers, the myriad cocktails. I am even worse about hard liquor, which I haven’t tried beyond a few sips.

But with food it’s a different story. I have a hard time understanding those who want to “get done” with the chore of eating. To me, every meal has to be deliberated on, even if the options are limited and even if I am busy. When I am on the road and alone (and especially so), I search earnestly for a place to sit and enjoy a hearty, elaborate meal.

I am picky though. I prefer vegetarian because that is the way I was brought up. Meat turns me off with its texture and odor. I am willing to reconsider if I am at a Pakistani restaurant that is known to make exemplary chicken curries. I prefer foods that are “liquidy”: soups and moist dips. Dry sandwiches are okay but they have to be nothing short of spectacular, else they risk condemnation. That is why the bagel is my least favorite food: it turns my mouth (and throat) into an arid, oasis-less desert. No, it does not matter how much cream cheese I add -- sorry!

2.

Indian food was all I’d tasted when I first came to the US. I was unwilling for a few months to try anything outside what we graduate students cooked (and I was afraid of credit cards: I had never used one and it seemed like the most complicated process, what with signatures and all). Someone suggested a restaurant called Haji Baba. At the time, I had a subconscious anti-Muslim bias and the Arabic lettering outside the restaurant frightened me. The irony is that the same place later became a favorite, and a way to signal to my more “parochial” friends how “cool” and “multicultural” I was.

So it was a gradual and tentative opening out: the inauthentic yet ubiquitous Chinese restaurants with food soaked in sugar syrup to please the super sweet American tooth; the excitement and later exhaustion with the dull Indian buffets with mass produced northern fare; the repulsion upon first encountering pasta and raw broccoli (Newman, the postal officer in sitcom Seinfeld, rightly calls the latter a “vile weed”, though recently I’ve figured out how to use it well).

In time, I discovered my flavors. The farther north and west of India the cuisine's origins were (but not quite as far as Europe), the better I liked the food. In any American city, if I spot an Afghani or Iranian restaurant, I will not have the slightest hesitation. But it is not the famous kababs that I like, rather it is the simpler vegetable preparations. Eggplant dishes such as kashk e badejmaan and mirza ghassemi for example bring out the essence of the vegetable much better than the Indian version, the baingan bhartha.

And the rice! Rice made the Iranian way (polo, which may be the etymological root of the Indian pulao) is something else. My favorite is the adas polo – rice with lentils, raisins, dates, saffron – at Persian Room, a somewhat upscale restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. At that high ceilinged place with blemish-less white napkins, it was easy to forget, because of the quality of food on offer, that I was a poor graduate student.

There are dozens of such Middle Eastern restaurants in the Phoenix metro area (Arizona). The Lebanese restaurant, Haji Baba, I’ve already mentioned. Dipping pita bread in garlicky mashes, hummus and babaghanouj, or having falafels with tahini sauce: these are the usual pleasures. But an under appreciated dish, and one I love, is fava beans, seasoned with sumac and served curry style, along with buttered long grain rice.

3.

Farther west and in a different continent is a cuisine that has captivated me for years now. To most, Ethiopia suggests only famine and poverty. But the tragedies stick in our minds longer of course, and we forget the day to day. I find an echo in Ethiopian cuisine of Indian styles – in the spices, the lentils and the vegetables – but I do not mean to lessen its distinctness or originality by making that comparison.

For starters, Ethiopia is the place where the nutritious yet largely unknown grain teff was domesticated (coffee too is first traced to Ethiopia). Teff is used to make injera, a sour, porous and spongy flatbread (like a dosa). It is a mystery why this African grain, so rich in ingredients, never leapt continents to become as popular as wheat, rice and maize.

Injera is served on a large circular plate. On top, are arrayed small sized vegetable and lentil preparations (I always order the veggie combo; meat is the farthest thing from my mind at an Ethiopian restaurant). The meal is supposed to be communal and eaten without silverware. The lentil preparations – misir watt, kik misir watt – are striking; I rate them much higher than the ubiquitous dals of India. Among the vegetables, my favorite is the the gomen watt, a collard greens dish.

I attribute my love of Ethiopian food to Blue Nile, a restaurant that opened very near my apartment in Tempe, Arizona. So taken was I from then on that during my travels, I made a conscious effort to look for Ethiopian meals. In DC, where the community is the strongest, I’ve tried Meskerem and Etete; in Minneapolis, Fasika; in Las Vegas, Merkato. Then there are two restaurants whose names I do not remember, but whose food I do. In Tucson, I ate the spiciest Ethiopian meal I’ve ever tasted; I remember enjoying immensely even as I sweated throughout. And in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (during this trip), a hole in the wall place unexpectedly turned out to be memorable.

I’ll stop here for now, but the journey isn’t quite complete. In the continuing piece, I’ll turn my eye, briefly, to cuisines to the east of India. And rather than talk of the history of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia – I’ve bored you enough with that – I’ll talk of my meals there.

Chance masquerading as skill: A personal take on T20 Cricket

For those who don’t follow cricket, the second part might not be of interest.

1. Not quite chess

As an only child, I had many ways of keeping myself occupied. I couldn’t play a game of chess by myself, so I had to create artificial teams that competed against each other. But the game could not be played the regular way – how can you outwit the opponent when you yourself are the opponent? So I created “dice chess”; I worked the specific rules out slowly, but the idea was simple. You moved a piece only as many squares as the outcome of a die roll. You could choose which piece to move, but there were restrictions. A pawn couldn’t be moved unless you rolled a one; a horse couldn't be moved unless you rolled a three or a six. More radically, you might have checkmated your opponent, but the game wasn’t over until you rolled the number that actually finished the job – the king could therefore escape even from a hopeless situation. This resulted in some very thrilling comebacks and unexpected results.

The dice meant that I could play by creating two artificial teams; I could now think for both teams, since the outcome of the die roll decided my moves. Given a roll, I did the best for each team. In all other respects, I was just a passive observer and commentator (yes, I did actually speak out loud when the games were going on). In my commentary, I put up the pretence that dice chess was a serious game and that there was serious skill involved in winning. My teams were typically based on the books and comics I read. Walt Disney had a team; Indrajal Comics had one; the Hardy Boys were in what I called the Franklin W Dixon (FWD) team; as I started reading more novels (around the eighth grade), Agatha Christie had hers. I would design elaborate tournaments, with the usual league round robins, semi finals and the finals. There was also an imaginary audience that cheered the teams (yes, I mimicked the roar of the audience too, when a something momentous happened on the board).

To be sure, there was some skill involved. For instance, a bishop might be two squares away from the opponent’s king: rolling a two would finish the game; the chance of winning was one in six. But if you had a bishop within two squares of the king and a horse within striking distance (the horse in fact turned out be an unusually powerful player in dice chess), it would mean rolling a 2, 3 or 6 could finish the game – you now had fifty percent chance of winning. It was all about maximizing your chances.

I conceived the game in fifth grade, and for fifteen years I kept it to myself-- until graduate school, when I introduced it to my lab mates. They were excited about it, and for a while, we were playing mini-tournaments in the afternoons and avoiding research.

A few key aspects I had not thought carefully about became evident as I played with others. First, the game was so dependent on the die roll that it was no longer chess. Yes, it was based on the rules of chess, but you had to think less. You reacted to the die roll rather anticipating what the opponent would do. Those who did not like chess because it is a mentally daunting game – I include myself in this group – found dice chess a much more relaxing option. Second, there was much less skill involved than I had thought; the victories were victories of chance and very little of skill.

Viewed less charitably, dice chess was a colossal insult to and a diminution of the original game. Chess champions like V Anand would laugh at it, and yet if they were paid millions of dollars – because large numbers of people liked it – it would be no laughing matter; they might feel compelled to play the significantly diminished game. And if separate schedule of a few months were to be carved out for dice chess, they might have less energy for the intense concentration and powers of extrapolation that the original game demands.

2. Not quite cricket

The analogy is obvious, even if not precise. T20 Cricket is not all chance, but most of it is – and this is precisely the reason it is “unpredictable” and “exciting”. It opens up the possibility that any team can win. There is no question that there some skilled players and they do their best within the limitations of the format; and some new strategies are now being used. But to claim that it is cricketing skill that decides T20 outcomes more than chance is to delude oneself. Most viewers, in fact, are aware of this, but just as dice chess thrilled me into excited commentary as I conducted my “solo” tournaments, so too are viewers, myself included, knowingly lured by the temporal pleasures of T20 cricket.

That randomness plays a greater role in T20 than in cricket’s longer forms can be inferred from the simplest statistical ideas. Every game of sport, whether cricket or soccer or tennis, is a random experiment, even if one team or player is stronger and more likely to win. In statistics, you conduct the same random experiment many times to make sure that the data you are collecting has validity. It matters how many times you do the experiment. But equally important is the length of each experiment. If the length is short (think, equivalently, of a one set tennis game or a twenty minute soccer game, or a one day golf tournament), then you cannot be confident of the outcome you are measuring, no matter how many times you measure it. So although a lot of T20 games are played – as in the IPL – there is little meaning in the outcome of each individual game.

In contrast, test matches are played over five days; the game is too long in the view of many but the length is precisely why we are able to infer something concrete (and some of the most exciting test games have been played over the last few years). The length is also why the format is the hardest; if you are skilled, it will eventually show. If you are not skilled, you will not survive test cricket. It is almost impossible for a really weak team (say Zimbabwe) to beat a strong team (say Australia). There are good reasons why New Zealand, a 2009 T20 World Cup finalist, has performed poorly, home and away, in the longest form of the game.

In T20s, the skilled will be successful over time – as Tendulkar and Kallis have demonstrated in this year's IPL – but the short format allows those without skill (read a few lusty blows, or a few freak wickets) to have an unusually high influence in determining a positive outcome for their team. Chance, in other words, masquerades as skill in T20 cricket. It is not a simplification to say that the IPL is a nationwide lottery, a kind of frenzy that urban Indians and the diaspora revel in. It is an exhibit for the worst excesses of capitalism and celebrity worship. It leaves little room for nuance.

At the moment, the murky financial side of IPL is unraveling. One hopes also that a more objective assessment of the format will be made. Even with twenty overs, there are more intelligent ways to design the game. Have 11 players in your team, but the batting team can lose only five wickets (a total of six batsmen), rather than ten; the remaining five will not bat, but are specialist bowlers. It won’t necessarily solve all problems, but at least, the contest between the bat and ball will be more even. Risks will have a high cost. Sixes and fours, which have been devalued in the current format, will gain some meaning.

Just as dice chess is not really chess, so T20 as it is now is not really cricket. Think, in contrast, the epic innings that the serene Hashim Amla played in vain in the second test at the Eden Gardens. That innings, played just before the T20 frenzy began this year, is the perfect antidote to the IPL’s numbing onslaught.

On not being a morning person

They say you are either a morning or a night person. I am certainly the latter: it is a pity to miss the freshness of dawn, but it seems an even greater pity to miss a few extra hours of sleep. No matter how early I get to bed, my eyes just won’t open earlier than eight – so much for the old adage about rising early.

I wonder if I ended up this way because as a child I had to be in school only at 11:30 am. This was back in the eighties; my parents lived in Gujarat, in the Naranpura area of Ahmadabad. We were tenants in the small upper section of a house owned by a large family. The living room doubled as the bedroom; attached to it was a small kitchen. My mother would wake me up at eight, well after my father had left, and with eyes barely open, I would begin my journey to the toilet.

I call it a journey because the toilet was downstairs and was shared – we didn’t have our own. I made the descent lazily, leaning against the railing, contemplating a nap every step of the way; so slow was I that on some days it took me thirty minutes to get down. The stairs were out in the open and faced the backyard, most of which was under the canopy of a neem tree. To the left was a narrow pathway, a kind of neutral zone between houses that led to a nearby temple. The pathway was frequented by stray dogs, cats, and especially cows, which came to chew on discarded pieces of paper or rummage through trash. It was during those slow morning descents that I started observing domestic animals – to the point of being mesmerized. Even today, I can watch dogs play and interact for hours on end.

I got back around nine. Then, as I sipped Bournvita or Maltova (chocolate drinks) I felt the texture of my mother’s sari with my fingers. This meant she had to sit on the floor next to me for the entire time it took me to finish. It was a strange ritual, one I find hard to explain today. But I do remember distinctly that the drink tasted heavenly when her sari’s texture was somewhat rough.

Such laid back mornings – minus the chocolate drink and strange ritual – were still the norm during high school in Nagpur. At college in Trichy, though classes started at 8:30 am, I routinely bunked the first two, so I could have a leisurely breakfast of tea, eggs, bread and jam at the mess until 10:00. Early morning classes were harder to miss in grad school, where the quality of education was just too high to be ignored, but once course requirements were done, I reverted to the late start schedule. For a while, my breakfast consisted of enormous quantities of whole wheat bread, almond butter and soy milk.

And the pattern continues to this day. One of the pleasures of being an academic is that I don’t have to be in my office at 9; in fact, I don’t have to be there at all unless necessary. On the days that I don’t teach, I wake up, make my coffee (flavored hot milk really), and settle to read the the blogs listed on this page. It’s only around noon time that I really get going. The flip side, of course, is that I do most of my work at night, which thankfully is capacious enough to accommodate my worst procrastination excesses.

Grants, writing and a poem

Apologies for the sluggishness this month. I got busy with a grant application to a federal agency under the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This type of writing is not fun. You have to sound very assured and gung-ho about your research but that’s not how you feel inside. That is why grant writing and writing for technical publications can never have the same tension that writing of the personal kind has. The term “personal” is to be interpreted in the broadest sense: I do not mean writing about oneself, but writing honestly about topics and themes one feels deeply about.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been planning two pieces. The first is about the dogs, both pets and strays, I came to know while living in Nagpur for five years. We lived in a third floor flat and our place had four balconies. I could observe neighborhood dogs closely early in the morning when I was supposed to be studying. I became familiar with two generations of dogs; there are many small stories I want to weave together and tell.

The second is about my first year of college in Tiruchirapalli -- at the Regional Engineering College (now National Institute of Technology). The experience was special. By design, regional engineering colleges are meant to bring together students from the local state and students from all parts of India. So we had representation from every state. We had people of all complexions: there was an incredibly fair guy from Kashmir, and my austere and studious roommate for the first year was very black . All the major languages of India could be heard in the corridors of hostels. It was my first lesson in diversity.

These are going to be long pieces. It will take me a while to write them, and maybe in the process, I’ll get bored and distracted, as so often happens. But my hunch is something will materialize. Pardon the lethargy meanwhile.

Since this is a post without much direction, I have the license to ramble a bit. Let me share with you a poem I wrote in my third year of college. I was a prolific poet then and spammed online bulletin boards with my work: early indication that I would become a blogger. This is a dark poem, very cheesy: it expresses my rage against deforestation. Keep in mind, before you nitpick about my very "black and white" view, that I was 18 or 19 then!

The wood-cutter and the woodpecker

Chunk! Chunk! goes the woodcutter's axe;
Peck! Peck! attacks the woodpecker.
When the two pairs of eyes met,
there ensued a conversation:

"Why, dear man, do you cut the tree?" the pecker asks;
"For the same reason that you peck the tree."
"Your answer does not satisfy; it puzzles me."
"A living exists for us because of this tree;
you pick insects and thus subsist
while I sell timber and get money."

"But does not the tree die
as the axe hacks the bark away?
Does not the squirrel flee
to another tree miles away?
Do not the eggs break on falling
much to the mother-bird's dismay?"

"True - but for the living of one
another has to succumb.
It is this rule of survival
that we experience every day.
Woodpecker, do you not eat
insects embedded in the bark of trees?
do you not kill them?
impale them with your pointed beak?
Talk not of my cruelty;
think of your own shame."

Shocked by what had been said,
the woodpecker withdrew.
Lashed at by man's vicious tongue
decieved by his sincere talk
and cloaked in guilt and shame,
it never ate insects again;
and of hunger died one day.

Today, in the forest, there remain only stubs
of the trees the axe brutally cut.
All the woodpeckers have died of shame;
all the squirrels have run away;
and all the birds have flown away.

Today, in the forest, remains barren land,
in the middle of which wooden houses stand.

In light of Joe, the Plumber

There’s been much talk about Joe, the Plumber, in the soap/drama that is the US Presidential election. For those who may be unaware, Joe the Plumber is an actual plumber - albeit with a different name - who earns about $40,000 but has aspirations to buy a 250,000/year earning business. Joe met Obama while the latter was campaigning in Ohio and is now a celebrity, ever since McCain mentioned him some dozen times during the third presidential debate.

For the two Presidential campaigns, Joe is a convenient stand-in for the “honest, hardworking” American – just like other generic stereotypes: Jill the engineer; Molly the dental hygienist; Jack the electrician; Chuck the truck driver. In my travels to American cities – Chicago, DC, Seattle, Minneapolis, Philadelphia – I’ve come across plenty of these so-called “ordinary” Americans, whom the Obama and McCain campaigns invoke at every turn. Here, then, are a few of my glimpses – a few of the many such I’ve met over the years.


1. The Shuttle Driver

A few days ago, I took a ride on a shuttle from Amherst, Massachusetts to the airport in Hartford. The shuttle service was called Bluebird. Joe, the driver, picked me up at 5 am. He was a tall man, perhaps in the early or mid-sixties. As we drove, I learned Joe owned Bluebird. He was in fact, the owner and the only driver. The minivan, fitted with a GPS, was his only vehicle. Joe used to work with Valley Transporter, a larger service with many employees, but had quit and begun Bluebird recently.

“So you must be one of the small businesses that the Presidential campaigns constantly refer to,” I said with a laugh.

Joe smiled and said yes, but there was a bit of a pause.

“I get one or two calls per day, but it’s been awfully quiet the last few weeks. I thought I wouldn’t get any more calls.” he said. “It must be the economy. Everything is expensive. I pay a hundred dollars a month to Google to ensure my shuttle reservation website shows up among the top results when prospective customers search on the internet.”

Joe lives in South Hadley, a small Massachusetts town very close to Amherst. His family consists only of his daughter, who went to college in the area, and is now attending hairdressing school.

I asked Joe where he stood politically.

“Well, I don’t prefer either of the candidates. Both are not liberal enough for me. I’d like someone who is a lot more liberal. Someone who’ll get us out of Iraq quickly. I still cannot believe we are in this mess. But if I vote, I’ll vote for Obama.”

Nothing surprising there: this was Massachusetts after all. In fact, I’ve seen only one McCain sign so far in my drives around the towns here. I was surprised, though, that Joe didn’t mention anything about the economy affecting his choice of candidates. Especially since Joe himself was feeling the pinch.

But perhaps Joe was thinking broadly: if billions hadn’t been spent in a meaningless war, perhaps they could have been put to better use at home.


2. The Mechanic

In April this year, while traveling on an Amtrak train from Washington DC to Baltimore, I met Joe, a short, potbellied man in his mid forties with somewhat ragged clothes and large, calloused hands. My first impression was that this was one of the “working class men” that the television networks were constantly talking about at the time. The Democratic primaries were still going on; the Obama-Clinton contest was still undecided. The general wisdom floating around was that to win states like Pensylvania, the candidates would have to win over working class voters.

Joe was talkative. He had a wily look about him; he came across as someone who knew well the ways of the world. He had been in the military, loading bombs during the first Gulf War. He had traveled to India too, to Kerala; he’d also been on a secret plane that had flown over Russia, and had almost been hit by a Russian missile. He said all this with an easy pride.

Joe earned his living now as a mechanic. He had grown up in Philadelphia, in the south side, near “hardware docks”, where things were assembled and disassembled. That experience had fascinated him. He had a special love for cars and trucks. “Automobiles,” he claimed, “ran in his blood.” He worked in what seemed like a high intensity environment, where cars and trucks had to be fixed quickly. He bragged of a rough but macho life: those who worked with him were tough. Sometimes, in accidents, mechanics lost the tops of their fingers, and yet pretended that nothing had happened. They covered the fingers with tissue and kept on working.

As he talked, I began to sense something different. This wasn’t a “working class” man - at least he wasn't anymore. He was paid more than 100 dollars an hour. His boss, in order to keep him from moving to a more lucrative job elsewhere, pleaded with him to stay and kept increasing his pay. Joe dictated the terms of his increase every year.

“In America, everyone wants to blame others for their situation these days,” he said, talking of political and social matters. “They say: I am in this situation because of you. Pointing fingers. It’s all a blame game.” I couldn’t help wondering if he was referring to the black community.

His views were very conservative. “I hate liberal democrats,” he said. “Global warming is something democrats have cooked up to take our money, tax us. In the Midwest, right beneath American land, there is oil there for the taking. But the democrats won’t want take it; they want to steal money from us. So my advice is: Never vote Democrat.”

It made sense now. Joe was well off; he had probably earned his wealth the hard way and was now protective of it. A Democrat government meant taxes, and that might mean some of his wealth would be siphoned away.

We got off at Baltimore Penn Station. When I’d first seen him in the train, his ragged clothes had suggested that he might be frugal, that upon reaching Baltimore, he’d get home in a bus. But at the station, as we parted ways, Joe said he would call a taxi. He said it in a tone that suggested he called taxis all the time, without hesitation.

How mistaken initial impressions can be.


3. And finally, Jane

I’ll finish with a note about a lady named Jane I met in Minnesota. Jane was 52. Unlike the shuttle driver in Amherst and the mechanic in Baltimore, Jane had nothing political to say, but she was full of warmth and spoke with great earnestness. She talked to me – while we rode on the shuttle van from Minneapolis to Rochester, Minnesota – of her family, and of how she had left Rochester only twice in her lifetime, this trip of hers to Minneapolis being one of them. I was fascinated by that fact: it contrasted sharply with my own life. I had moved a lot, even while in India. The other trip Jane had made outside Rochester, Minnesota had been to the Appalachian country in Kentucky. That to her had been like a visit to a foreign place.

Jane was one of eleven children. Her father had grown up during the Great Depression and had struggled. But he had worked hard to provide for his children. Jane was the third child, and she had only brothers after her.

One of Jane’s brothers worked as an electrician; another as a brick layer; yet another as a carpenter; one had been in the navy; her sister worked as a beautician. Jane herself worked as a nurse who cared for the elderly. Remarkably all of them lived in Rochester. Jane did not have to call a service when she wanted something fixed at home; her brothers would do it for her. They were a close knit family.

Joe the Plumber was just one person, one example of your “ordinary, hard-working American”. But here was a family whose occupations sounded like a roll call of the unspectacular, plebeian jobs. If the Presidential candidates had known of Jane's family, they might have come rushing to use them as an example.

This, they would promptly claim, was the type of hardworking American family they would fight for when they were elected to office.

Framed by a Mughal motif: My first glimpses of Hispanic America

As a student at Arizona State University in Tempe, I lived in a neighborhood that consisted mostly of cheap apartments. For five of my six years there, I stayed at different points on the same curving street – Orange Street – flanked by spindly palm trees, and patches of green lawns maintained laboriously by sprinklers.

It was here that I began to understand illegal immigration from United States' porous southern border, an intensely debated national issue. In the days after I arrived (the Fall of 2000), I heard other Indian students using the term makkus to refer to Mexicans – or any Hispanic immigrants for that matter. It was mostly a derogatory term, though many used it benignly, in the same way they used gultis or gujjus. The general consensus was that one shouldn’t live in a makku area, for there would be many bike thefts and muggings (there was, of course, some truth to this assertion: even the most uncomfortable prejudices are generally well rooted in reality). But in the Phoenix metro area, immigration, illegal or otherwise, was so rampant that Indian students had no way of getting away from makkus. Indeed, the southwestern cities in the United States can sometimes seem like an extension of Mexico.

Like many others, I arrived with no idea of this. It made sense that Arizona had Mexicans – Mexico after all shared a border with the state – but of their history and culture I knew nothing. I did not even know they spoke Spanish. Later, I would develop a fascination for Mexico's explosive sixteenth century history, and begin to slowly understand the forces that made the country what it is today, but those early years as a student in Arizona, I knew very little. It was only through everyday encounters with Mexicans who worked odd jobs and were my neighbors that I formed my initial impressions.

And my strongest impression, interestingly enough, comes from the immigrants I met at Copper Kettle, the Indo-Pak restaurant in the neighborhood.

Copper Kettle was relatively cheap – five to six dollar meals – and the food, while never consistent, was occasionally excellent. It was a popular haunt for students. The interior was dark; sub-continental themed paintings and tapestries hung on the walls. There was a fatigued look to the place, and from the faint but unmistakable smell of bug spray, I felt cockroaches were teeming beneath the faded carpet.

On the wall behind the cashier’s bar, where we placed orders, was a large opening in the shape of a Mughal motif. The kitchen was partially visible through it. Framed, then, by the contours of this stylish motif – which curved elegantly on either side to converge at the top: like the dome of a mosque – were the Hispanic immigrants who worked in the kitchen, cutting onions and garlic, stirring curries and washing dishes. There was something unique and affecting about this; it remains an enduring image from my time as a student in Arizona. It is also what inspired me to write this post.

The lady who ran the restaurant was a tall, middle-aged Pakistani woman, fair-skinned, with eyes that slanted upward. She was dressed usually in a salwar-kameez. She bustled around, carrying food to tables and settling bills. She was cranky, often complaining to customers of how tortured she felt listening to the same songs that played in the restaurant for hours on end. She vented on the Hispanic busboys with a somewhat feudal air, slapping her forehead and shaking her head, upset that Jorge or Gerrardo hadn’t carried the plates out in time. They in turn stared back at her blankly. They probably did not understand a word, and this only incensed her more.

She seemed to trust Luis, though. He was even allowed to handle payments, which was surprising. I talked with Luis a bit, since he was the only one who spoke English. He was a short, dark man, always in a baseball cap, and ever ready with an endearing, gap-toothed smile. He lived a few blocks away. Like other immigrants, he worked multiple jobs. I ran into him once at Four Peaks, a popular local brewery and restaurant. It was a large, noisy place, with a lot more staff and waitresses. There, Luis seemed puny and insignificant, yet was just as cheerful. He said he worked there on Tuesdays and Thursdays while other days he was at Kettle.

_____

There were plenty of Indian restaurants within a five mile radius of the university. Since I craved incessantly for curry, I visited all of them frequently. And therefore became familiar with the Hispanics who worked at these places: the articulate, short man who worked at Delhi Palace; the guy with a troubled, brooding look, who seemed to switch Indian restaurants every two weeks; the waitress with curly hair and large glasses at the Udipi place, whom I spoke to in Tamil first – I was so certain! – and was mystified to learn later that she was Mexican.

And I can go on and on, beyond Indian restaurants: the short, stout men from the south of Mexico (or so my friend Jesus told me) who worked at construction sites, and wore striking, orange jumpers; the families who were my neighbors, whose kids rode tricycles in front of the porch; the crowds I saw at Food City, the cheapest of all grocery stores, where the bill was never more than ten dollars no matter how much I bought, and where I discovered cayenne pepper and tomatillos.

Awareness or curiosity doesn’t always come easily - how we tend to take the milieu around us for granted! So while I lived in that neighborhood for a long time, it was only after three years that I began asking some questions. Who were these people I saw each day? What had caused some of them to make the long trek across the Arizona desert, risking death by dehydration, capture by the Border Patrol and intimidation by armed gangs? Why did they not look Caucasian, though some looked almost so? What was Mexico’s history? Who were the Aztecs and the Mayans – always mentioned in reference to Mexico – and where were they now?

I know more now than I did then, but perhaps one day, I’ll be able to write a longer piece – a travel, history and current affairs piece – that ties all these questions together. For now, there’s much to learn, and lots of travel to do.

The price of pencils

I happened to win the second prize in a writing contest organized by Helen Chen (thanks very much to her for putting it all together) and sponsored by the Rochester Public library (in Minnesota). The contest was open to the public; it was judged by some writers who live in the region. The theme was family, broadly interpreted, and the entry had to be no more than 1200 words. My submission is below; it is a memoir from my days in Ahmedabad in western India.

It was through pencils that I came to know of the financial insecurities of my parents. I was in primary school, and we were allowed to use only pencils for our daily work. I was careless and lost so many of my pencils that my mother hid them in the closet; she scolded me severely every time she lent one to me. I learned to value pencils: each one sharpened unevenly with a knife and used until it was a stub that you couldn’t grip anymore. But I learned to value them even more after my father made it clear to me one afternoon – unequivocally and in dramatic fashion – just how much their price was and what that price meant to him.

That afternoon, I rode my bicycle to the stationery store to buy a new packet of pencils. I chose the usual bonded lead ones; the red and black stripes on them smelled wonderfully of paint over wood. When I returned home, the change I thought I had brought back was missing. It was only five rupees – just more than ten cents today, but money nevertheless. My parents weren’t happy. My father and I went back to the stationery store; something in his demeanor suggested that my folly had been a serious one. We asked the cashier, a dark man with glasses, if I had left behind my change. He searched the cash register perfunctorily and shook his head.

My father took me just outside the store.

“Where is the money?” he asked me.

I was trembling; I had no answer. My father scolded me only rarely but I had always feared his silences more than I feared my mother’s frequent reprimands.

“Where is the money?” he asked again, louder this time, and slapped me.

I began to sob uncontrollably. The stationery store and the shops around were busy with people who were now beginning to look in our direction. I was conscious of their presence; it worsened my humiliation and helplessness. My father slapped me again.

The cashier, who had been watching all this and who perhaps wasn’t too enamored of publicity of this sort, called us and said that he wouldn’t mind giving us the money. My father might have taken the money – I am not sure. Strangely for such an eventful day, I do not have any memory of what followed afterwards. The incident itself stands out in my memory, but nothing immediately before or after it has stayed with me.

_

It was only later – the passage of time having put distance and perspective on things – that I began to understand the anxieties that had swirled to a focus that afternoon.

We lived at the time in Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat in western India. My parents had emigrated to Ahmedabad from the south Indian city of Chennai, in Tamilnadu, a few years ago. For nearly three years we had been tenants on the upper floor of house owned a joint family, but my parents had always wanted a place of their own. Veedu, or home, was at the heart of their middle class aspirations.

My parents soon bought a cheap, small flat in an area slightly away from the city-center of Ahmedabad. But almost immediately after we moved into the flat, my father had trouble at work and lost his job.

And my parents began to have doubts about their decision to buy the flat: it was unsettling to them that the owners of the other flats in the complex included a chauffeur and a maidservant. My parents were Brahmins, and their caste had given them a high sense of their worth; they felt uneasy living among people of other, traditionally underprivileged castes, who, in the decades after India’s independence, had slowly begun to assert themselves. Had my parents been in Chennai, walking its familiar streets, speaking a language they knew well, their extended families in the area always a comforting presence; in Chennai, such social changes might have been easier to absorb. But in Ahmedabad they felt they were alone.

The only Tamils who lived in close proximity to us were migrant workers who stayed in a messy slum that sprawled adjacent to our flats; they lived in huts that were a haphazard patchwork of sackcloth, wooden poles, and tarpaulin. They too had made an uncertain journey like my parents from southern India. But their poverty meant that we would always avoid them. Their Tamil, my parents said, was the Tamil of the slum: coarse, rough and loud. And we couldn’t speak our Tamil loudly for we feared that if they heard us, they would come knocking at our door, asking for money that my parents were struggling, and mostly failing, to save.

These things – the feeling that the neighborhood wasn’t nice; our forced lowering of voices, to stay incognito from the Tamil migrants who lived in the slum– these things were seemingly minor annoyances, but they weighed heavily on my father. My father was the only one who earned; he felt acutely responsible for how things had gone. He had invested savings from his previous job in the flat but he was now out of work. He pedaled twenty-five miles every day on my bicycle to an industrial town called Naroda in search of part-time jobs; he came back dejected and sweating profusely.

The incident with the packet of pencils happened around this time; and to my father, my carelessness, the easy way in which I lost my change, was an insult; it mocked the situation we were in. And it probably also mocked his efforts in a very personal way.

_

Our troubles continued in years that followed: my father found and lost jobs and we hopped through other cities in western and central India, each move necessitating difficult adjustments. All this time my father never spoke to me of that afternoon. It was only much later – more than a decade and a half later, just three years ago in fact, when our position was relatively secure – that he brought up the topic.

“Do you remember the afternoon when I hit you?” he asked, his face and his voice full of regret. His intent in asking the question partly might have been to see if I’d retained any rancor from what had happened. Since I was aware of this, I tried brush the whole issue aside, so I could convey, indirectly, that I had not carried along harsh feelings.

Our conversation, because of the awkward nature of the topic, didn’t proceed further. And so I wasn’t able to express to my father that that afternoon in Ahmedabad was important. Until then, I had been only peripherally aware of the difficulties that my parents faced; I had shut them away as only children absorbed in their own worlds can. But from then on, my parents’ situation was mine; their hopes, concerns, excitements, disappointments were mine as well. In its own inadvertent way, the incident with the packet of pencils had brought me closer to their world. And if only my father were to know of this, the guilt of that day might weigh less heavily on him.

My grandfather and my name

My name causes much frustration for those who have to type or print its full snake-like length; it elicits wry smiles from those who realize that even an attempt to say it right would be futile. My long cumbersome name which recalls popular and powerful deities might have been shorter had it not been for my grandfather’s insistence.

I last met my grandparents a year ago at their rented house in a residential alley of Perambur, in Chennai. I knew my grandpa wasn’t well, but that hadn’t prepared me enough: I was shocked to see him shriveled and bed-ridden, resting uncomfortably on a water bed against a stack of ten pillows, wincing at every movement, his skin wrinkled and gray. He called me to his side, took my hand, kissed it, and with respect, touched his forehead with it. I was overwhelmed by the sentimentality of the moment, by his unexpected show of reverence, and it was only with some sustained effort that I controlled my emotions.

My earliest memory of being with grandpa is at the Menambakkam airport where through a meshed grill he showed me great winged things that, twenty odd years later, still fascinate and terrify me in equal measure. I had accompanied him then on his morning walk, a part of his unshakeable daily routine. And after all these years, segments of his routine are what I remember most. Every night, soon after the news ended at nine, my grandfather would hang the yellow tote-bag at the gate for the milkman, remove his dentures, spread his mattress on the floor, place a torchlight by his side so he wouldn’t have to grope in the pitch darkness of early morning, and go to bed. As he slept, his fingers would move intermittently of their own accord: subconscious, still-persisting rhythms of his working days when he had typed, for a meager monthly income, hundreds of documents as a clerk for India Pistons.

The precision of his routine was equaled or surpassed only by the precision with which he dealt with financial matters. He was sometimes known to be cold and calculating when it came to monetary issues. And so when I handed him an envelope with some money from my earnings, my grandma, still at her witty and sardonic best, lightened the somber ambience: "Now that he’s sniffed dollars, there's nothing stopping him from prancing around despite his fractured leg."

I left that afternoon, wondering if my grandpa would get to his 90th birthday next January, or whether I’d be able to see him again. My grandpa did make it to his 90th birthday. He died on his birthday, on Jan 14 this year, also the day on which Pongal is celebrated. His memory will live on in many ways: in the minds of those who had been close to him; in framed photographs and albums; in the Brahmanical ceremonies organized by his sons, ceremonies that will time and again commemorate his passing away. The Jagannathan in my name (often confused as a middle name) is always referred to by my parents as grandpa’s special contribution; and it will be one way I shall remember him.