Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  But not every story was so romantic. One of my coworkers had his marriage all set until the girl backed out—because, according to the rumor mill, her parents found a guy with a higher income, a more promising career path, and a car of his own. (My co-worker only had a motorcycle.) And when a sister of one of Jenny’s co-workers chose to marry for love—against her parents’ wishes—the father cut off all ties with his daughter. He forbade anyone in the family from contacting her, and he refused to relent even when the sister called from the hospital with a new baby in her arms. Only when Jenny’s co-worker went on an allout hunger strike did her father finally relent to accepting his estranged daughter. Years had passed in the meantime.

  But of all the things we learned about marriage in India, our biggest surprise was that arranged marriage was not dreaded. In fact, most of the people we spoke to were in favor of the system. Newsweek reports that ninety percent of all urban Indian marriages are arranged.2 Before we came to India, we would have expected that statistic to mean that ninety percent of all urban Indians were coerced onto the altar, but that wasn’t the case. My co-worker Sonia told me that while most Indian girls grew up dreaming of love, they nevertheless looked forward to an arranged marriage. That’s because, while Bollywood movies do indeed glorify love marriage (the hero and heroine fall in love, her father promises the heroine to some jerk, and then the hero wins over the father at the end), those are just fantasies. It’s analogous to American boys who grow up fantasizing about winning the Super Bowl: we’d all love to have been America’s greatest athlete, but we’re still perfectly content with how life turns out even if we don’t become the next John Elway.

  Jenny and I cannot imagine a relationship based on anything but our own choices. It’s safe to say that both of us would have preferred to live our lives searching for love than to have our parents find it for us in a database. But a proponent of arranged marriage would wonder why we’d leave such an important decision to the whims of mere emotion, without a dispassionate examination of the potential spouse’s career trajectory, religious compatibility and family background. The odds of finding true love are actually seen to be better in an arranged system because they seek the ideal spouse scientifically; we just stumble through life, hoping that our perfect match just happens to be sitting on that bar stool over there. What could be a more irrational way to make the most important decision of our lives? No wonder that in America, forty-five percent of marriages end in divorce; in India, that number is around one percent.3

  Still, this rational approach to marriage has an emotional cost. One of my co-workers was head-over-heels, standup-in-a-restaurant-and-shout-it in love with her boyfriend. But when she told her family about him, they gave her a stark choice: if she married him, they’d disown her. Unlike Jenny’s co-worker’s sister, she couldn’t choose love over family.

  In America, love is more powerful than blood. Americans will marry against their parents’ wishes, or sometimes explicitly to spite them. But in India, family is everything—and for this particular girl, and for so many others, family is the only choice.

  As Jenny and I orbited Delhi culture (observing from a distance, touching down for a closer look, retreating to analyse what we saw), the inscrutable slowly acquired clarity. The things that baffled us from the first day began, with repeated observation, to obtain significance. We came to understand and even mirror some of the cultural nuances, which in turn led to deeper engagement with the country around us.

  Indian standards of personal space, for example. This cultural nuance was especially difficult to accept, because it required adjusting to more than just being pressed against in queues. I had to develop a much higher threshold for touching, hugging, and other forms of nonchalant guy-onguy contact that would violate all norms of masculinity back home. Loose hand-holding was perfectly common among buddies. As was it common for guys to wrap their arms around each other in casual friendship. Male coworkers would sit on each other’s laps when there was nowhere else to sit, and this act had no greater significance beyond pointing out that we needed more chairs in the conference room.

  So while at first I’d jerk away when my colleague Dipankar would give me surprise back massages—picture Angela Merkel’s reaction to George W. Bush kneading her shoulders—I eventually learned to appreciate it for what it was and what it wasn’t. (Which allowed me to surrender myself to his skilled hands—my god, can that guy give a back rub.)

  In fact, male-on-male contact was sometimes used to signify hypermasculinity, which is exactly the opposite of how Westerners interpret it. When two teenage boys would see Jenny coming down the street, they’d clutch at each other’s waists and sing softly in her direction. To them, this was probably the height of macho; but for Jenny, she couldn’t help but giggle as she interpreted it through her own cultural perspective.

  The cultural acceptability of guy-on-guy contact permitted dance floor moves that, as signs of manly posturing, were hilarious only to unenlightened us. I’ll never forget one office party—a night of booze and madness in the office canteen—when the pulsating music inspired a particularly large colleague to dangle a particularly small colleague upside-down over his back, with the large one holding the small one by his right foot as they paraded around the dance floor and writhed their rear ends against each other.

  As our time went on in Delhi, other gestures also acquired clearer meaning. Body language that we’d been unable to interpret when we first encountered it fell into patterns as we saw it again, until implication slid into place and the movement suddenly meant something. Sitting at Sagar Ratna’s in Defence Colony, for instance, Jenny elbowed me to lift my face from my dosa to watch a distinguished old lady in a muted salmon sari stand gracefully as her grandchildren spilled out of their chairs and, one by one, genuflected before her as if to—what? Were they bowing?

  Clarity came as we saw this same act performed by sycophants stooping before politicians and beggar children prostrating themselves on the floor of our stopped autorickshaw. This was how Indians showed respect: they’d touch someone’s feet.

  However, just because we understood a gesture, it didn’t mean we knew how to use it. I once tried to touch Mahua’s feet as a humorously exaggerated reply to some minor HR-related favor she’d granted me at work. But as I stooped before her, she grabbed me to prevent me from following through. I then guessed that this was also part of the ritual: maybe truly humble people prevent others from debasing themselves in their honor? This was what I expected the next time I tried it, as another show of ironic gratitude, this time directed towards my co-worker Sonia. I bent down and then halted halfway in my stoop, waiting for Sonia to grab my shoulder. Except Sonia made no move—perhaps she felt I owed her this respect, or maybe she just thought I was reaching for a fallen pen. Either way, I was suddenly off balance and unsure whether it would be ruder to pull away or to start groping her shoes. In my hesitation, I was spared one humiliation only by another: I fell over.

  Other guestures Jenny and I observed required far less coordination to mimic, like touching our foreheads. This reverent gesture, commonly seen in temples, was also performed by co-workers to show mock respect and by shopkeepers to show genuine thanks for the first sale of the day. Another gesture was the way our office guards would salute us as we passed, raising their hands to the vicinity of the forehead with their palms facing out; the crispness of the motion suggested that it was derived from the military. There was also a loose-fingered doorknob-turning gesture that vendors and shopkeepers would perform at us to communicate “maybe” or “kind of” or “I have no idea what you’re saying.” And there was an apologetic gesture that was performed by touching one’s chest with one’s fingertips, although I only ever saw my co-worker Soumya perform this; it could be that this was just his personal habit. He’d make that gesture every time my feet would accidentally brush his, which was quite often because I’m apparently as clumsy at controlling my own feet as I am at touching others’.

&n
bsp; And then, of course, there was the head bobble. The Indian head bobble has been written about everywhere from the Lonely Planet to Shantaram, a novel about the Bombay underworld that is as ubiquitous on the tourist circuit as multicolored hippie jodhpurs. However, the guidebooks generally describe only its most exaggerated form: as a signal of vigorous affirmation that’s enthusiastically performed by shoeshine boys outside the Taj Mahal who know how adorable Westerners find it, and how much they tip when they see it.

  But there are subtleties and variations of the head bobble that go far beyond the reservation confirmation of the fivestar hotel clerk. The head bobble can mean “hello,” or “thank you,” or “you’re welcome.” It can communicate peaceful intent among two men whose eyes meet in a cash machine vestibule. Auto drivers use a curt derivation of the bobble to end a fare negotiation, rotating their heads laterally in a manner that I’d usually misinterpret as Delhi shorthand for a Brooklyn-accented “Get da fuck out of here wit’ your ‘fifty rupees to Khan Market!’” Only after I’d start walking away would they call after me and clarify their meaning.

  More inscrutable than that was my boss Murali’s head bobble habit: a singularly incomprehensible motion that defied everything I thought I knew about head bobbling. He’d close his eyes and shake his head horizontally as I’d present work to him; to my Western eyes, it appeared as a combination of refusal and ecstasy. In my first weeks of knowing him, I had to clarify numerous times if he hated my ideas or if he was getting off on them.

  And then there was the office boy at work, who would accept my lunch order (“Veg or non-veg?”) with a sharp jerk that finally brought clarity to the mysterious gesture performed by the waiter at Nathu’s Sweets on my very first day in Delhi. He wasn’t saying “gee”—he was saying “ji,” which meant “yes, sir.” And his gesture, which I’d interpreted to be disdainful because I had no other context for it, was just another variation of the head bobble. It turns out that I don’t order food like a douchebag after all.

  1. And glory be to the old man who farts in services! His impromptu organ solo bounces around the sanctuary and brings tears to the eyes of every man and child who tries desperately not to let his wife or mother see him giggling. He’s suddenly truly reverent for the first time all morning as he prays with all his heart not to burst out laughing, or at least not to be the first one to do so.

  2. http://www.newsweek.com/id/137472

  3. http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsWorld.shtml

  5

  The Food: Oh My God, the Food

  Jenny and I moved to India for the food.

  When we first considered going abroad, Jenny was more interested in China. But when I thought back to all the weird dim sum we’d encountered in New York City’s Chinatown—every roll and dumpling wheeled past our table seemed composed primarily of gelatinous seafood—I feared we’d spend most of our meals in China staring distrustfully at our plates and then heading off in search of McDonalds. Our experiences with Indian food, on the other hand, left us wanting more every single time: more ghee on our naan, more raita on our biryani, more trips to the buffet.

  We first learned to love Indian food at the touristy restaurants that once clustered on East 6th Street in the Village. We soon grew beyond their mulligatawny-and-curry set meals to frequent Lexington Avenue vegetarian restaurants and downtown dives popular with taxi drivers. We once bicycled to Jackson Heights, the Indian neighborhood in Queens, and ate so much that we were physically unable to ride back home; we fell asleep on the subway with our bicycles chained to our legs, our bellies distended and joyfully churning, dreaming of what curries and kormas must taste like when they’re not dumbeddown for the American palate. One year, my co-worker Sunita invited us to her home for a Diwali party; and for the promise of home-made Indian food, we actually traveled to Jersey City. After that journey, moving to India only seemed slightly more drastic.

  When we fantasized about life in India, we didn’t imagine ringing bells and honking horns. We imagined the food. And we specifically fixated on the real deal: we wanted to eat someone’s mother’s home cooking.

  And soon after we arrived in India, we hired a woman named Ganga to cook and clean for us three days a week. In her early thirties with two school-age children, Ganga’s English skills had helped her ascend into the well-paying niche of working for foreigners. But Ganga could have spent her days lying on our couch eating bonbons for all we cared, because we were really only concerned with one aspect of her resume: that she cooked for us.

  We were in India, eating someone’s mother’s home cooking. Every single day.

  Consider where we were at that moment in our lives. We’d just packed up our apartment in Brooklyn, enlisted a half-dozen friends to lug everything we owned into a storage locker in Queens, taken a fifty percent cut in our income, said goodbye to everyone we knew, flown 7,000 bleary-eyed miles over twenty-four cramp-legged hours, spent five frantic days in Gurgaon trying to move out, and plunked down twice as much for a flat as a person with darker skin would have paid for it. But the first taste of the first dish Ganga made for us—paneer in a creamy tomatobased gravy—made it all worth it.

  And every subsequent bite we’d take for the next eighteen months was an equal joy. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we would put 300 rupees on the counter as we left for work and return home to three freshly cooked entrées waiting in our refrigerator. For just six dollars, Ganga would buy everything she needed to make us enough for two lunches and two dinners—eight full meals—and still have change left over. As a native of the state of Andhra Pradesh, her culinary portfolio was north Indian with a Hyderabadi flair: paneer makhani, aloo gobi, rajma masala, malai kofta, egg curry, masala baingan (lord, how we miss her masala baingan!), sautéed bhindi with crunchy onions and just enough fire to justify an extra spoonful of her creamy boondi raita, vegetable biryani, palak paneer, and much more. Even her white rice, spiced with fragrant cloves or mixed with browned onions, was delicious enough to eat on its own. Sometime during her career she’d picked up presentation skills as well, and our Tupperware full of dal makhani would be topped with a decorative swirl of cream, a garnish of cilantro and a few slivers of raw ginger artfully arranged at oblique angles to the rectangular container walls.

  When we first interviewed Ganga for the job, we asked her to cook for us whatever she would for her family. She assured us that she’d dial down the spice for our sensitive Western taste buds. “No!” we protested. “We want it exactly like you’d make for your family.” She looked worried, and I think she imagined Jenny and I running around the apartment holding ice cubes to our tongues, smoke coming out of our ears, making plans to fire her as soon as we could talk again. But she did as we asked, and a few months later she told us that none of her friends believed that her foreign clients could handle food as spicy as she was known for making it.

  I gained ten pounds in my first couple of months in India, all thanks to Ganga’s food. Every morning, I’d load up the four metal canisters of my electric tiffin (a Thermoslike lunchbox that warmed its contents when I plugged it in) with what was probably a pound and a half of food. There was so much food that I’d have to plug in the tiffin an hour before lunchtime because it would take that long to heat up. One day my tiffin short-circuited and melted under my desk, which was a blessing for my waistline because I actually had the self-discipline to replace it with a smaller one. But even during those days when I was gorging on four full canisters I still ate every morsel and wished I’d brought more. (I was so embarrassed when my co-workers would gape at the size of the mound on my plate that I began opening just two canisters at a time; I’d wait until nobody was looking to surreptitiously open the other two.)

  We were living our dream with every meal. But the very culture that facilitated my gluttony also provided a steep impediment to it: when it comes to food, Indians like to share.

  My first introduction into India’s culture of food sharing came on my third morning in the coun
try. I’d sat down to meet with Murali, the creative director of the ad agency at which I’d now be working. Later described by Jenny as “boisterously bombastic,” Murali was the kind of guy who became the immediate center of attention in every room he entered. I was assigned to be his Creative Group Lead for copy, which meant I’d oversee the department’s dayto-day operations so he could spend his time smoking cigarettes with the clients. (Murali believed that far more business was conducted during cigarette breaks than in actual meetings. And judging from the way he and the client would return from the smokers’ balcony slapping each other’s backs and informing everyone of the decisions they’d made, he was quite clearly right.)

  I shook hands with Murali and sat on his couch. We chatted as he opened a plastic container and took out his breakfast: a kebab of some sort, with meat and vegetables wrapped in a paper-thin roomali roti. He dipped it in some green chutney and prepared to take a bite, and then paused to say something before it made it to his mouth. And as he spoke, one of my new co-workers appeared at the door, grabbed the roll from Murali’s hand, bit off a third of it, placed it back in Murali’s hand, and walked away.

  The co-worker hadn’t said a word. And Murali hadn’t even looked up to see who took his breakfast. Murali just dipped the remainder of his kebab in the chutney and, this time, managed to take a bite of his own.

  What I’d witnessed, I’d soon learn, was not out of the ordinary. In my office and in those in which Jenny worked, anybody’s food was everybody’s food. Anything that was on the table—whether brought from home or ordered from McDonalds—was open for anyone to grab a few spoonfuls or take a few bites. If someone had sent the office boy out to buy samosas from the chaiwallah, nobody needed an invitation when he returned to rush over and eat one. Many desks had water bottles with their owner’s name on them, but anyone thirsty would simply reach for the nearest one. And anyone walking by my desk while I was stuffing my face with Ganga’s finest felt no social compunction against grabbing my fork and helping themselves to a bite or two.