The Stomach Is Color-Blind.
two day weekend Sep 12, 2009 11-36 AM
Originally uploaded by conformerAs my repatriation day approaches, there's a certain equilibrium that's fallen upon my shoulders. I'm increasingly eager to return to the United States, while at the same time trying to keep up with an accelerating pace of events at work, not the least of which is making sure that the staff here in the Hyderabad office has been sufficiently schooled by me to the level of independent self-starters. For the most part, I'm satisfied with the way everyone has absorbed the information; all that remains is to insure it's put into the best practices.
So, while the hours haven't let up much, or the workload, or the requests for assistance, I'm nevertheless already starting to fall back into my old stateside habits; planning visits to domestic friends, blocking out holiday time, dreading the return to maintaining a comparatively expensive Western lifestyle, and most significantly, cruising the internet for random recipes to replicate in Cat Spit Kitchen.
I may be an aberration in the world in more ways than one, but never more so when it came to this visit to India. While the days leading up to my eventual departure were filled with rigamarole over work visas and passports, anxiety over displacement and culture shock, and angst over being away from home for an extended period of time; everyone else who was clued in seemed more excited about the food.
Again, I don't not like Indian food; it's just not something I actively seek out. Not to mention it has a reputation for certain gastrointestinal side effects. However, and not to put too fine a point on it, if you follow the advice of some dieticians who advocate the eating of more of a troublesome food, (beans, for example) in order to gradually acclimate the body to its more colorful aspects, then it makes a certain kind of sense that when you're in an exotic environment other than your home to expose yourself to as much of the local fare as possible, if only to begin to reset your body's expectations in the same way you adjust your laptop's time and date. The only problem with this idea is that it has a bit of a quacky ring to it, like the ill-formed shortcut of deliberately ingesting contaminated water in order to invoke dysentery; the idea being that the earlier you get sick, the faster your body will learn to recover.
Doesn't matter anyway; despite the flourishes of other world cuisines, Indian food is pretty much is the dominating force in India. What did you expect?
Anyway, despite my weird dietary lifestyle and indifference towards curry, I've still been taking in a fair amount of northern and southern Indian food when the need comes to refuel. In fact, I've had lunch in a typical Indian household, which goes a little towards emphasizing the differences between East and West, as well as the potential dining hang-ups of Your Humble Narrator.
The biggest cultural divide is that of flatware; Westerners use it, but not so much in India. In India, a clean hand is the preferred utensil. Sometimes bread is used as well, but when I had lunch a few weeks ago, it was all about mashing up rice with other stuff into a clumpy enough mass to pull off conglomerate blobs from. Basmati rice makes up the base, and then there are at least three additions that get layered into it, much like separate courses all on the same plate. First, a chutney, like the coriander one we had; bright green and savory. Next, usually a dal, which in our case was accentuated with a garnish of dried pumpkin and puffed rice flakes. Finally, curd, which is what they call yogurt here, and fruit, like one of the sweet, tiny bananas they grow here. And all along the way, your plate is refilled with more rice to make a sticker mass, seasoned here and there with tamarind water or ghee or more chutney.
And then you just get up and wash your hands, letting the ladies of the house clean up, another cultural difference I will never get used to.
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