Indian Food

With people I know it is like this: one either likes Indian food right away or hates it forever!

Heading for India we were set on trying new things. It made us easy to go from ‘Oh, this is so... different’ to ‘We definitely like it’, and then - to ‘We like it a lot!’

I mean traditional Indian food, full of flavors, spicy and completely vegetarian.

My first introduction to it happened in the middle of the night in the Delhi airport, while waiting 6 long hours for our flight to Chennai.

At a pretty ordinary food stand I bought a cup of coffee with a pretty ordinary-looking pastry named ‘Samosa’. The first bite surprised me though.

‘Why is this stuff so hot? It seems unsuitable with sweet coffee’   

But after a while I forgot about spiciness and started enjoying the yummy factor. Strangely enough through all those exotic flavors I recognized bold and earthy taste of my grandma’s beef-and-potato stew. Was it caramelized onion, or beans in this pastry? I could not tell. My grandma’s stew was never vegetarian, and yet…

Learned that we liked Indian food our hosts In Chennai, where we provided seminars, started enthusiastically introducing us to it.  In the morning they offered us a really strong coffee or black tea with milk and some fragrant seeds. At first we stuck to our habits and asked for these drinks to be straight. But often we forgot to make the requests and then we just had it Indian way.

There is something special about Indian milk and cheese. Those skin-and-bones extraordinary peaceful cows that walk and lay freely in the middle of any mad urban traffic (and all the traffic in India is mad!) apparently do a very good job.

 Maybe it is a trade-off:

‘You do not eat me, and I give you a really good milk of a free-roaming, naturally fit and content creature’.  

Every lunch in India was a feast of great variety. Because the rule was followed in so many different places, not only in hotels and restaurants, but also in small offices and at huge manufacturing plants, I dare to assume that hospitality was only part of the equation; another part of it was table tradition. Lunch in India is important and good variety of dishes is expected.

Another pleasant surprise of the vegetarian - Indian style, was the feeling of satiety that usually came pretty quickly and then lasted for hours without fail. It was quite sudden, like ‘yes, I had enough’, but without a brick feeling in your stomach that is almost an eminent companion at our ‘western’ parties. Where this signal of ‘enough’ comes from at Indian meals I do not know, but it always seemed to be more of emotional rather than of physical nature.  

Every meal in India includes sweets. They do not make any break between non-sweet and sweet food, just follow one with another. Indians believe that sweets aid digestion and I shared this belief with enthusiasm.  Desserts are usually small and often honey-based.

One sweet thing called Jalebi felt like kids’ ultimate dream and had been confirmed as such by our partner in Delhi – the burly man with thick mustache. We tried it in a street eatery at the Delhi bazar.

It was a nice, breezy evening. Amazingly bright fabrics in garland-illuminated stores, and crowds of people around proved of perpetual festival.

The lace-like Jalebi came straight from iron grill; it was sizzling hot, crisp on the outside with honey liquid inside.

And yes, I could not resist another one.

Indians seem to give digestion a very thorough attention. For this purpose they like to end every meal with plain yogurt. I also often saw the sets of small boxes with various seeds in them, which people would approach after breakfast or lunch and partake liberally. These seeds were to assist digestion and to make breathe fragrant. One of the seeds I recognized – it was fennel.

Another interesting digestion/breathe remedy was a minty leaf smeared with honey and spices,  and some seeds wrapped in it. You were supposed to chew it like a gum for about 30 min. rather than eat it right away. They also clean your teeth. 

Raw food was present on many occasions but I dared not to try it particularly warned against anything uncooked in India. Even locals did not encourage us to eat raw.

 ‘You have different immune system’ they said.

It looked very good though. I gazed with envy at the sprouted beans and cabbage salad, which my husband tried without hesitation. He said it was spicy (and he was completely OK afterwards).

In the very nice hotel in Bangalore I tried passion fruit and Indian melon.

To the end of our trip I was ready to go back to our usual food and was glad when on Delta flight Amsterdam – Detroit dinner came completely ‘European’. 

But in 2 weeks afterwards I started missing Indian and looking on the Internet for a restaurant in the area.    

The Flattering Power of Sari

At 2:00 a.m. in the Delhi airport, India I saw more sequence and glitter than in my entire life.

With my husband we had just arrived in India for business and were awaiting our first domestic flight to Chennai. I was trying to get some sleep on the side of the  bench surrounding  octagonal pillar; my head was close to a turban of a tiny old man, my feet - to a family of three (they were using their side of the bench in turn). 

Women in saris were coming and going – old and young, slim and not.  I was practically screaming ‘look at this!’ at every passing gown. There was not even one sari that I liked less - each and every of them looked amazing!

My husband completely agreed with me on that.

The vibrancy of colors, often calculatedly matching, but also in bold combinations (for example, a yellow blouse,  dark blue sari with magenta-and-gold  borders) and large number of bracelets, anklets and necklaces made me think that we had arrived at the advent of a major national holiday.

But I was wrong. This was totally casual attire of an Indian woman.

Later I saw ladies in sari in offices and café', on motorcycles (behind the driver, or as a driver) looking very comfortable and at ease in their elaborate gowns and jewelry.  Not just a few women, but most of them. It was an apparent dress code.

Now I had a chance to look closely and here are my findings:

Sari is the most strategic and universally flattering gown in the world. The young proportionate woman looks a goddess in it. But all the rest of us – short, heavy, bowlegged – somehow appear very dignified (and pretty too).

The reason, besides glitter, is a variety of strategic folds and angles at which  fabric is draped.

Two embellished borders of a sari cross the body in front: the inner border comes across the chest; it accents the X shape and makes  shoulder line stronger and wider thus giving the figure better proportion. The outside border starts in front  below the hip. This one crosses the entire body at a long diagonal, visually slimming it and making legs look longer. Not too bad, a?

Then, there is a folding gathered at the waist and strategically positioned slightly off-center. This folding keeps  fabric at the woman’s tummy perfectly loose, making the entire ‘tummy issue’ irrelevant.

There are no protruding female tummies in India!

It made me wonder of the advantages of growing up and never giving yourself a judging side-ways look into the mirror followed by sucking your stomach up hard, and then, as long as you can manage without breathing, watching it perfectly flat, hoping it stayed that way…

Apparently Indian teenagers are free from such experiences; their mothers and grandmothers – as well.

And I am not finished with the folding yet. When a woman moves folded fabric precedes her every step framing her foot like a long conical bell or fan. The leg underneath seems endless and its movement – regal. No wonder, high heels are not popular in India. Who needs them when such gracefulness can be achieved in flip-flops!

I could not help myself comparing the flattering power of sari to our western clothes and must admit that we are at disadvantage here. If I can trust my travel observations few women look good in  business suit. It makes us bulky on the top and shows no mercy to our ‘normal’ bottoms by exposing imperfect width or shape of our hips, those treacherously protruding stomachs and true length (or should I say, shortness) of our legs. We try to compensate for all this cruelty by good,  expensive fabrics and muted 'earthy' colors.

But next to a woman in sari we look like little grey hens near a peacock.

During our visit to a construction company in Delhi, my husband and I passed a young female worker carrying a cement block on her head. She was wearing a cotton gauze green-and-indigo sari smartly tacked for convenience.

-  Look at this gorgeous thing - I said to my husband, - I would've loved to have it for a very special occasion!

-  What, a cement block?