I'm back home.

And that's all for now. The fat crow will be back in about a month's time, peppy and ready for the summer. See you then!

Little gifts

Today brings an appraisal of some of the brightly colored, (non-edible) bite-size morsels that make India so delicious. These are the habits and norms that I’ve seen in action every single day here: some of them have grown in charm over time; some have become so regular to my eyes that I hardly see them anymore; some struck me on my very first day in India, and have never lost their spark. In no particular order –

1. Affection between men. Co-ed friendship is a novel phenomenon in India. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that the vast majority of friendships here are same-sex ones, and perhaps that’s why these friendships are particularly close and openly affectionate. On the streets of India, one of the most touching sights to see is a pair of men holding hands: it happens all the time, and it’s completely normal. American-style bear hugs, back-slaps, and shoulder-punches are far less common – holding hands, I think, just isn’t considered emasculating, or even particularly effeminate. (And little do Indian men know that if they walked, fingers intertwined, down an American street, passerby would see them as a couple. Shocker!)

2. The natural body. Ornaments, clothes, and grooming seem to hold great importance in this country – more on that later – but underneath those concerns lies a general love of the human body as it is naturally. My guess is that many people associate physical exercise with the poorer classes: historically, a thin, toned body has been the product of hours engaged in manual labor. Gyms, where one would do this kind of labor voluntarily, are very new here. From what I’ve observed, it’s not that the ideal is gross obesity – it’s that like one’s family, caste, and community, one’s body is given at birth and so is not meant to be altered drastically. Whatever the class-ist implications of Indians’ willingness to let the human body take its course – not to mention the health risks facing many exercise-averse Indians today – I often pause to appreciate the body-acceptance that flows from this attitude. (I have more of a problem with longstanding physical ideals like fairness of skin.) You only need to watch a small collection of Bollywood movies to see that women of all shapes and sizes are considered beautiful. America’s obsession with thinness hasn’t completely hit India, and I’ll take refuge here until it does.

3. Dairies. I love being able to buy fresh cow’s milk, paneer (simple cheese with the consistency of firm tofu), ghee, dahi (slightly sour, watery natural yogurt), and even buffalo milk from the small dairies that pop up all over Indian cities. It’s great to skip all the processing and packaging that plagues American dairy production: here, you can get your dairy products almost directly from the cows themselves. Thank you, small dairies, for bringing city girls like me one scrumptious step closer to the countryside.

4. Meal timings. Trains are late, and so are meals. The only one that isn’t is chhota-breakfast (small breakfast), which takes place almost as soon as you get up. That’s just tea and biscuits. Then there’s real breakfast, taken at around ten or eleven. There’s a tea break (again, with biscuits) a couple of hours after that. Then there’s lunch between two and three o’clock – and none of this soup-salad junk, either. We’re talking about a full meal. A couple of hours later calls for more tea and biscuits. Then there’s a larger snack around six or seven, when workers and students have finished for the day. That’s when hordes of people crowd chaat stands and snack joints, all clamoring for spicy fried delicacies. Several hours later is the biggest production of the day: dinner. Most restaurants crowd at nine or ten, with entire families pushing to get in. Once, a friend and I ate at a popular Punjabi restaurant late at night – we must have started dinner shortly before midnight. Joining us were two huge Punjabi families, complete with babies and toddlers, staying up into the wee hours in pursuit of sunset-hued tandoori chicken and glistening skewers of paneer tikka. But the fun doesn’t stop, because after dinner, there’s dessert…

5. Lovers’ lanes. In Delhi, I’ve noticed that any clean, public space is a haven for young couples seeking some precious time alone. Boys play with the edges of their girlfriends’ dupattas on the steps of the Metro; couples sit with their heads together on the benches of the Lodi Gardens. They linger for hours at tables in Café Coffee Day – not working on their laptops, as is often the case in Cambridge, but gazing into each other’s eyes and saying nothing in particular.

6. There’s room for everybody, even when there isn’t. In Mumbai, I’ve seen a lot of commuter trains come and go. Each car is packed with people, including those riding perilously in open doorways and on the roof of the train itself. Women’s scarves flap in the wind as the train hurtles toward Mumbai Central or Victoria Terminus. On the Delhi Metro, it’s the same story: people will push and push and push until every last person is squeezed inside. Three passengers cram onto two seats, and seven onto five seats. When people have places to go and jobs to attend, personal space becomes an unnecessary luxury.

7. Total grooming. Unless they live in extreme poverty, Indians are rarely unkempt. Hair is always combed, oiled, and braided. Jewels are donned. Shirts are hardly ever ripped, and most often collared. Pants are tailored. Salwar kameez are washed and pressed. Shoes are shined. (None of America’s messy ponytails, baggy pants, and ripped sweatshirts! Amazing!) I admire India’s love of physical presentability: it seems, somehow, more respectful of oneself and one’s community to look clean and neat. Only occasionally do these efforts come across as vain; most of the time, they simply show that people care about being seen as responsible and respectable.

Anything I missed? The fat crow is always open to comments and suggestions --

Delhi, edible

There are little more than a handful of places where I go to eat in Delhi. This might seem tragic in a city where food is cheap, abundant, and yummy – but the truth is that I keep coming back to the same restaurants because they’re just so gosh darn *good*. If you plan on visiting Delhi, eat at one of these places. Trust me: I’ve visited them enough times to know that they’re always, always delicious.

1. Sagar: the cheapest, best, and most popular restaurant in Defence Colony. The dosas, idlies, uttapams, and dahi wada are tasty, of course, but it’s the full-scale thali that takes the vegetarian cake. (A thali is a pile of food neatly organized on a platter: bread and rice in the middle; multiple vegetable preparations, soupy lentil daals, yogurts, and sweets around the perimeter. The thali is perfect for the person who can’t decide what to order.)

2. Haldiram’s: I know, I know. I’ve often written about how much I adore this multi-level food paradise nestled in the heart of the old city, but Haldiram’s is such an essential stop on Delhi’s food trail that I believe it deserves one more mention. The ground floor is lined by glass counters filled with goodies to take away. The left wall is devoted to endless variations of traditional Indian sweets: three kids of jalebis, ten kinds of laddoos, seventeen kinds of barfi, and on and on. The back wall presents a funny combination – on the left side are the Bengali sweets, and on the right side are the chocolate eclairs and upside-down pineapple cakes. In the back-right corner is the kulfi seller: he offers ten flavors of pure milk-made Indian ice cream, sold on sticks like popsicles. On the right wall are the savories and snack foods, best among them the Gujarati dhokla and the freshly fried samosas. (There’s much more than that at the snack counters, yet somehow I never seem to make it past the sweets on the opposite wall.)

But, as you know from previous raves on this topic, the fun starts one flight up. By now, I’ve tried almost every single type of chaat that Haldiram’s has to offer – and they’re all delicious. After all, all chaat dishes are prepared from the same basic ingredients: some doughy fried bread, crispy crackers, or puffed grains as a base, sweetened yogurt to drench them in, green chutney to spice them, tamarind sauce to make it all sweet and tangy, and baked potato cubes, chickpeas, or lentils to fill it out. The miracle is this: though the dishes are made out of these same ingredients, each one tastes completely different from all the others. Further miracles await: there’s much more than chaat at Haldiram’s, and it’s worth your while to extend your tastebuds farther. The North Indian thali, served like a T.V. dinner on a compartmentalized white tray, is a good place to start. It includes rich daal makhani, spicy vegetables, cool raita yogurt, rice, and roti bread freshly smoked in a tandoor oven. Beyond that, I’m a fan of the crowdpleasing paneer tikka – generous cubes of firm cottage cheese, rubbed with spices and baked just enough to make the edges crunchy and the inside soft. It goes well with the two kinds of paranthas (one plain, one laced with mint and coriander) available; each is a flakier, more buttery version of this heavy flatbread popular in the North. Finally, the chole bhature – two giant puffs of fried dough served with spiced chickpeas – is a particular joy, especially if you have the nerve to join the local breakfast crowd in consuming all that fatty goodness before noon.

3. The samosa and chai stand behind Khan Market: a favorite of my dad’s, and for good reason. Five rupees will buy you a hot, fresh mini-cup of chai; a little bit more will buy you a spicy samosa served in a banana leaf bowl. You eat standing, along with all the taxi drivers and shopkeepers, and if you’re a woman, you’ll definitely be the only one there. This corner is also a great spot for people-watching – it looks right onto Khan Market and all of its well-dressed inhabitants. The samosa man also serves something he calls “bread pakoras”: fried slices of white bread. Let me know if you’ve ever had one of these, or plan to.

4. The Turtle Café, also in Khan Martket: only for consumption after you’ve assuaged your upper class guilt by dining “with the people” at the five-rupee chai stand above. This one occupies the top floor of an English book store, and does not feature Indian food at all. (I knew I’d been in the country long enough when I started enjoying the overpriced Western goods at the Turtle Café a little too often.) In any case, if you have a yen for carrot walnut cake, safe salads, or pesto pasta, race to an outdoor table at the Turtle and let your tastebuds forget you’re in Delhi. And hey, don’t beat yourself up about it – as soon as you get there, you’ll see you’re not the only firangi dying for a slice of lemon cheesecake or a plate of baked ziti.

5. The HaveMore, in Pandara Market: it’s time to head back to India, and to the gravy-rich North in particular. Join the massive Punjabi families (and all their cute kids!) in enjoying the hot kebabs, creamy vegetable dishes, and crispy-yet-chewy breads on offer at the quasi-luxurious HaveMore. If it’s winter, get the sarson-ka-saag (spiced and pureed mustard greens) with makki-ki-roti (buttery, firm flatbread made of cornflour). Yes, you will want to have more, though your arteries will protest.

A few others:
a. Gulati, an upscale place next to the HaveMore, where the kebabs – and the tourist-watching – are even better.
b. Saravana Bhavan, which is a chain of South Indian restaurants similar to Sagar. They originated in Chennai, and they have two outlets in Connaught Place – one on Janpath, and one near the Regal Cinemas building. Here, again, a thali is a great way to go: Saravana Bhavan crams even more dishes onto their thali trays than Sagar does. It’s a little overwhelming.
c. If you’re staying in Paharganj (which I sincerely hope you’re not), try the restaurant on the roof of the Hotel Rak International, just off Main Bazaar. Word to the wise: don’t order off the menu. Instead, poke your head into the kitchen and ask the chef what he’s making fresh that day. A big bowl of masala mixed vegetables or palak paneer and a plate hot, fresh rotis is cheap and filling – plus, you get to bond with the European backpackers and watch the commotion on Tooti Chowk three stories below. If you show up around seven thirty in the evening, you’ll also get a concert of bhajans floating up from the temple next door.

Bon appetit!

Patience: India's greatest virtue?

A lot of people don’t like waiting – especially people from cities (like New York) and countries (like America) where everything is served up *fast*. But in India, time moves slowly: people don’t walk, but amble; traffic doesn’t speed, but sputters; plumbers don’t arrive, but call to say they’ll arrive tomorrow; public works projects never finish (if they start at all); shows start two hours after they’re supposed to; court cases lag for years; trains depart fourteen hours late. The amazing part is that, from what I’ve seen, many Indians don’t seem to mind waiting. They linger over cups of chai and amuse themselves with card games and conversation. They live one more day without hot water. They don’t protest when the government doesn’t deliver on promises of better sanitation or building public parks.

(Here’s a side note. Those last couple of examples show how the great Indian capacity for waiting – while it may be the product of some fantastical inner peace – doesn’t always work in Indians’ favor. Perhaps if ordinary people demanded more immediate action from their elected officials, and were less contented to wait behind endless rows of red tape, the government would learn to be more efficient. Perhaps if consumers refused to employ lagging plumbers, those plumbers would realize the importance of showing up on time – and of actually fixing the plumbing, instead of solving the problem partway in an effort to guarantee themselves future business.)

(And here’s a second side note. There are a few situations in which most Indians are scramblingly impatient. Lines have this effect: people will wait on line at the train station or the bank, but they’ll cram themselves against each other as if physical proximity to the service counter will speed up their waiting time. This makes most lines in India highly, highly uncomfortable for the person who values a few inches between herself and the people behind and in front of her in line. Sadly for India, I haven’t yet learned to bid adieu to such worldly attachments as personal space. Indians are also incredibly impatient when it comes to public transportation: they’ll push and scramble to board trains, leave planes, and find seats on the Metro. This leads to a lot of crushing and some minor, good-natured violence.)

In any case, I have started to love waiting. My reasons are simple, really, and I’m sure you could read about them in any old self-help book: we all lead busy lives, so every now and then it’s important to *just do nothing*. In that respect, then, a wait is a blessing. It’s an opportunity for a person to lift her eyes and look at everything going on around her – to observe people, places, interactions, and signs that perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. It’s an opportunity for her to think, imagine, dream. It’s an opportunity for her to reflect on just how much she really wants (or needs) whatever it is she’s waiting for. She waits, she breathes, the world turns just fine.

The glorious autorickshaw

On this blog, I’ve often written about autorickshaws – little three-wheelers that, though present in other countries (such as Thailand, where they masquerade as “tuk-tuks”), I will always consider uniquely Indian. Since September, I’ve taken approximately 500 rides in autorickshaws. (That’s seven months in India, thirty days in each month, 2.5 rickshaw journeys per day, and rounding down from there.) If each ride is an all-inclusive, pocket-size vacation to the vibrant streets of this country, that’s a lot of *India* that I’ve seen through the grubby front windows of her three-wheeled chariots.

Perhaps it’s only because I’ve spent so much time in them that I believe autorickshaws offer the most, and the best, of urban India to the curious traveller. There are other ways to get around, surely: taxis (as they do in Mumbai, where I’m sitting right now), public buses (not for the faint of heart or, for that matter, the female), the Metro (recently built, and only in Delhi). Yet only the autorickshaw can capture, in the midst of city traffic and urban congestion, the freewheeling spirit of the open road. Only the autorickshaw serves as a sightseeing vehicle of wonders large and small. Only the autorickshaw offers opportunities for conversation and interaction without forcing them upon the passenger. For me, these are the foundations of living in India: base-level connections without which I’d be cloistered and closeted.

First, the open road. Anyone who grows up in New York City doesn’t really know much about the open road (whatever that is), but maybe it’s precisely because of this ignorance that careening around in open-air vehicles – even through oodles of urban traffic – never stops feeling special. That rush you get when the driver revs up the engine or takes a curve at a precarious angle: it doesn’t go away. It’s like riding on the back of a motorcycle, but you can fool yourself into thinking it’s safer. Those frequent, minor brushes with danger breed sighs of relief at the end of autorickshaw journeys: you feel as though you’ve accomplished something monumental simply by sitting in a backseat and letting someone drive you to your destination. An autorickshaw ride is at once functional, personally satisfying, and entertaining.

It’s also the best way to see the city. Sightseeing tours cart visitors from monument to monument, each journey placated by the glass windows that separate the passengers from the outside world. In a rickshaw, those barriers vanish. A rickshaw can take you to the Jama Masjid: better yet, it can wheel you slowly through the marketplaces that surround Delhi’s gorgeous mosque, exposing you to the sounds of Quranic recitation and screaming children, the smells of freshly slaughtered chickens and fried vegetables, the sights of coarse gray beards and bright young heads topped with knitted white skullcaps. To me, it’s the most interesting sort of sightseeing; in a rickshaw, you can experience it only inches away, for free. (And all this, without having to navigate the streets on foot: a nearly impossible task. A rickshaw may have fewer barriers than a taxi or bus, but there are still some barriers in place – and that can be a good thing.)

Rickshaws throw their passengers into close contact both with their physical surroundings and with other people. The first interaction a rider experiences is with her driver: will he take her where she wants to go? Does he know how to get where she wants to go? Will he charge her the local price, the foreigner price, or the outrageous foreigner price? After these matters have been settled, it’s possible that there might be no further conversation: this is a situation that I have long since come to appreciate. I take it as a huge compliment when a driver doesn’t wish to find out my native country or whether I’ve been to the Taj – I may be paying the foreigner fare, but to him, I’m no tourist. Of course, the driver may want to talk to his passenger (or the passenger may wish to converse with the driver), but I’ve found that these conversations can be controlled in subject and in length. Because rickshaws are so exposed to the outside world – and because the driver has to swivel around almost entirely in order to face the passenger – conversations cannot run too deep, or too long. If a passenger is unresponsive, the driver will generally take the hint, and focus on the road. Yet important questions can be asked and answered, too: the semi-dangerous nature of the ride (not to mention the language barrier) simply necessitates that those exchanges be kept succinct.

There are a number of other human interactions that are wonderful – and sometimes painful – to experience in an autorickshaw. I like to witness the cameraderie between drivers: if two are stopped next to each other at a traffic light, they’ll probably have a short conversation. Perhaps they already know each other; perhaps they don’t. Then there are exchanges mediated by the passenger herself: with its lack of walls and windows, the autorickshaw lends itself particularly well to beggars and hawkers. This can be a frustrating drawback, but it can also be an opportunity to give a smile or a handshake – even if all the beggar wants is a ten rupee note. Rickshaw travel means that humanity is all over the place, in your face, until you speed away: in the end, that’s probably more valuable than the relative peace that a taxi would afford.

So next time you find yourself in an Indian city, don’t hire a taxi for the day. Hop in an autorickshaw: smell the country; talk to her people; learn something; have fun.

*This is the first in a short series of posts about why I love India. It’s a simple theme, but a meaningful one: this is my last week here, and I’m eager to leave on a high note. Among other topics, I’ll be writing about the joys of Indian newspapers, same-sex friendship, waiting for things, grooming habits, riding the Metro, the use of public space, and some great places to eat.