by Dave Prager
Once I knew this, I would make a big show of offering my food to anyone within earshot. I wanted to fit in, after all. But behind my smile, I’d grit my teeth as my precious baingan bharta would disappear from my plate.
This communal approach to food was as much about sharing company as it was about sharing sustenance. Nobody ever wanted to eat alone. Jenny’s co-workers would coordinate their daily schedules to ensure they all ate lunch at the same time. And while official business in my office was conducted in English, the conversation in the canteen was almost entirely in Hindi, a more casual language for the laughing and gossiping that danced around me as I fakelaughed when everyone else did, wishing I could participate while quietly studying who was taking from my plate so I could take equal amounts from theirs. Such was the power of this social occasion that even those co-workers who hated each other would joke together over their shared dal.
(But I soon gave up on community lunches. I preferred instead to eat at my desk while reading the New York Times online. I know that some co-workers found my mealtime isolation to be aloof, or even arrogant. But their lunchtime camaraderie made me homesick for my friends and family who were nine-and-a-half time zones behind me, asleep and unavailable on instant messenger at that time of day. The New York Times was the next best thing.)
One of the few items that my co-workers would never want to share was the carrot sticks that I’d snack on to avoid the temptation of pre-lunch raids into my tiffin. So naturally, I made a big show of trying to share them so people wouldn’t realize how stingy with my food I really was. And I’d tease my co-workers Anurag or Soumya when they refused, telling them, “In America, it’s considered an insult to my ancestors if you refuse to eat my vegetables.” They’d reluctantly agree and then scrunch their faces as they chewed. “Who snacks on raw carrots?” they’d ask me.
Well, nobody in any country truly enjoys snacking on raw carrots. But in India, they actually tasted better than they did in the US. In fact, all of India’s fruits and vegetables tasted better. That’s because in the States, fruits and vegetables are bred to meet Americans’ demand for unnatural perfection. Consumers prize produce that looks uniform and shiny like it rolled off a factory floor; taste is a secondary consideration. We have huge white onions that weigh a pound each but are bland enough to eat like apples. We have perfect pink tomatoes with flawless skin and tasteless flesh. We have green peppers that form rows of identical spheres but taste indistinguishable from celery.
In Indian vegetable markets, the imperfection of unmediated nature is on full display: the vegetables are smaller, uglier and more frequently blemished than those in America. But they’re far more flavorful. The tomatoes may be splashed with green and yellow patches, but they crunch deliciously in a salad. The onions may be golf balls instead of softballs, but no American onion has ever been sharp enough to make me cry when I cut it. And even plain green peppers—called “capsicum” in the local markets—were so full of flavor as to almost taste spicy.
The superiority of Indian vegetables reflects the demands of that particular marketplace: Indian shoppers care less about the vegetables’ appearance than about their flavor and value. They typically bargain for their produce with the sellers, which means an ugly tomato that tastes the same as an attractive one may actually be more desirable, because the flaws are a point of negotiation. Jenny and I would watch dramatic back-and-forths between vendors and housewives, with the housewife pointing out the flaws in his offerings while the vendor extolled their hidden virtues. She’d demand a lower price and he’d plead for her to consider his daughter’s upcoming wedding. He’d root through his stock to pick out items to fit her expectations, and she’d reject them immediately and berate him for trying to pawn off his lousy produce on her. She’d then haughtily pick out her own selection, which is what the vendor knew she’d do anyway.
(A blogger called Thequark sums it up well for us. “A vegetable-buying experience is not a mere act of give and take, or a supply meets demand,” he wrote, “but rather a creative fiction between two talents and an eye for picking out the right kind of vegetables. It’s the buyer’s talent to negotiate, and you would not believe the kind of arguments thrown to the vendor to reduce the price—you certainly wouldn’t find them in game theory or other economic texts. It is the vendor’s talent to not let price go down, to ensure he is not left with the worst lot if every one picks the freshest ones. Try picking out fresh ladyfingers individually and face their wrath!”1)
Jenny and I never felt comfortable bargaining for our produce. That’s mostly because we had no idea what to consider a good price, and also because we always forgot to consult the newspapers’ price tables to know a good deal when we saw one. So instead of bargaining, we’d bluff half-heartedly and hope the vendor would take pity on us. “How much?” We’d ask him, handing him a basket of carrots.
He’d throw a few more carrots into our basket before weighing it and quoting a figure. “Seventy rupees.”
“Seventy rupees?!” we’d repeat, feigning incredulity. “Come on, man!”
“Haan ji,” he’d tell us, “seventy rupees. One kilo, seventy rupees.”
“Really?” we’d demand, our hands on our hips, our heads cocked, channeling George Jefferson.
“Haan ji.”
“Oh.” Pause. Defeat. “Oh. Okay. Here’s seventy rupees.”
Beyond our lack of market rate knowledge, we couldn’t bring ourselves to argue over individual rupees with men who spent their nights sleeping on cots outside the very stands they spent their days working in. Besides, we didn’t think the vendors were cheating us that much.
Although in that second belief, we may have been alone. Our neighbor Anya regaled us with horror stories that mirrored a nationwide mistrust of the food chain: rumors that they inject syrups into melons to make them redder and sweeter, that they put chemicals on apples to ripen them quicker, that fish sellers have some sort of illicit lotion they use to make rotting scales shimmer like new. The newspapers periodically reported even further horrors of food adulteration: steroids or oxytocin injected into plants to make them look fresh and fluffy,2 vegetables coated in wax or pesticides to make them shiny,3 brick dust added to chilli powder,4 and many other tales to make shoppers indignantly view each transaction with the suspicion that the vendor is out to poison them. From that perspective, every trip to the market is undertaken with the underlying fear that one misjudged mango or under-examined cucumber might turn their children into Frankenstein’s monsters.
We assume that most people have at least one preferred vendor in their local market whom they trust to keep the prices reasonable and the produce non-toxic. We held secret try-outs when we first arrived, seeking reasons to prefer one vegetablewallah over the other but failing to spot any points of distinction. Eventually, we settled on the vegetable stand diagonally across the sidewalk from where we bought our mobile phone top-ups simply because he usually had the biggest queue; we assumed that meant he had the best stuff. But when we mentioned to Anya which veggiewallah we preferred, she was surprised. “Why would you choose him?”
When Jenny explained that his goods attracted a crowd, she laughed. “Those are all maids! He’s known for writing fake receipts so they can skim a few rupees off the top!”
Like most American tourists, Jenny and I were obsessed with avoiding the local water. That’s why we were so horrified when we saw Slumdog Millionaire. We’d strutted into the theater with the cockiness of veteran travelers, but we both gasped out loud as we watched Salim, while working in the Bombay restaurant, fill a bottle of Bisleri water from the tap and then reseal the tamper-proof cap with super glue.
It wasn’t the refilling that shocked us. It was the resealing. We closely scrutinized every drop we drank to ensure we didn’t ingest raw municipal water. In our Hauz Khas flat, we relied on the musical electric water filter our landlord had installed; it played an eight-bit version of Beethoven’s Für Elise as it operated to protect us from all wat
erborne threats. But outside of our kitchen, our entire line of defense consisted of confirming that the tamper-proof cap hadn’t been tampered with. We’d put our full faith in those caps to protect us from bottles that had been refilled and resold because we’d never conceived that it was possible to spoof the seal. On the rare instances when we were sold a bottle that opened without tamper-proof resistance, Jenny and I held an immediate whisper conference. Depending on how many people were around for us to look silly in front of, we’d either hand the rejected bottle back to the vendor and demand another, or accept it with no intention of drinking it and then look for another vendor out of sight of the first.
The only time either of us ever knowingly drank from a suspicious bottle was on one extremely hot day when Jenny was touring the Red Fort without me. The sun was an angry god, all the shaded seats were occupied, and the water in the bottle looked so cold and delicious that she decided not to worry about how easily the cap had come off. Of course, she got sick.
Many brands of water add extra security by shrinkwrapping plastic around the tamper-proof cap. The plastic, too, is usually a good measure of purity, except for when we bought water from a vendor outside of Raj Ghat: the plastic slid right off. My parents were with us at the time, so I switched into my tough-guy act to impress them, protesting loudly to the vendor about his attempt to poison us. The vendor stared blankly, so I shook the bottle and gestured sharply at the cap. The vendor exchanged a glance with the guy manning the adjacent ice cream cart, but said nothing. After a helpless moment that I attempted to disguise as a manly stare-down, I slammed the water bottle on his cart and walked brusquely away, knowing that I’d taught him a lesson: he could keep his water and my money.
Traveling up the sanitary continuum from peddlers to restaurants (from filthy plates to obscene bills), we became wary of water for a different reason: the fancier the restaurant, the more they’d charge for bottled water, and the more likely we didn’t need it at all. Any five-star restaurant charging a 1,500 percent mark-up on a fourteen-rupee bottle of water will also provide filtered water for free, grudgingly, if one asks, and if one doesn’t mind the waiter’s disdainful sniff.
Ultimately, though, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to avoid local water forever. Too many times we watched our pure Himalayan bottled water get poured into a glass so freshly cleaned that there was still a quarter-inch of city water in the bottom. We decided to see this as for the best. We were in Delhi for the long haul, so a wet glass here or a moist plate there would help prime our stomachs for that sleepy morning when we accidentally opened our mouths in the shower.
Many travelers avoid water altogether by drinking beer. In fact, we read in one of our travel books that drinking local beer helps the stomach acclimatize to new places, which was all the excuse we needed. While there wasn’t much choice beyond Heineken, Guinness, and a handful of identical-tasting lagers (Tiger, Fosters, Carlsberg), the beer scene was dominated by Kingfisher. We’ll always remember India’s most popular beer for the legendary hangovers it brewed: our morning headaches would hammer at our skulls even before we went to bed the night before.
The reason Kingfisher was so proficient at ruining our mornings after, we were told, was that they added glycerine to keep it from spoiling in the heat. I suppose we should thank them for beer that stays fresh no matter how hot the unplugged refrigerator in which it’s stored, but sometimes it felt like we were spending as much on Paracetamol the next morning as we were on beer at the bar.
Travelers in Goa have developed a trick to remove the glycerine: they turn the Kingfisher upside-down into a glass of water. The chemical will seep out while, thanks to the magic of atmospheric pressure, the beer itself stays in the bottle. It’s an effective trick (and it’s satisfying to watch that loathsome glycerine weep into the glass), but when there’s a dozen bottles on the table and as many people racing to top up their mugs, who doesn’t suddenly feel like this might be the one time they’re immune to the Kingfisher curse?
Whenever we’d order a bottle at a restaurant—be it water or beer—the waiter would hold it out for us to check its temperature. At first, though, we didn’t know that’s why they were extending it to us; only after observing others did we learn that they expected us to touch the bottle to confirm it was cold. Which meant that we spent our first weeks assuming that waiters were presenting us our water the way a sommelier presents wine. (“Oh, yes,” I’d say, bending over to scrutinize the label on the bottle of Kinley. “That’s a fine brand. Very nice. A product of the Coca-Cola Company, I daresay. Jenny, would you care to taste?”)
Aside from Guinness, most beers were extremely affordable. They’d cost around forty-five rupees for a big bottle in the liquor store and only two or three times that in a reasonably priced restaurant. But the best combination of taste and value, to my palate at least, was whisky. India offered a variety of mid-range brands I’d never heard of (Teachers, Vat 69, Blender’s Pride, Royal Challenge) that were indistinguishable to my uneducated tongue from the imported blends. But I learned the hard way to beware anything claiming to be high-end that wasn’t priced as such. In the upmarket liquor store near GK-II, I came across a single-malt Scotch priced at one-sixth of the cheapest bottle of imported stuff. The clerk assured me that it was legitimate, and the stiff cardboard tube was indeed printed with pastoral Scottish scenes, so I bought it and drank a single glass that evening.
That single glass was the only point that my diet had deviated from Jenny’s in the previous three days. So there is no other possible culprit for my subsequent food poisoning, which was so severe that I was pooping blood by the end of the week.
We generally avoided Indian wine after a few educational bottles taught us all we needed to know about its taste and its subsequent hangovers. Indian wine is a relatively new industry. It needs a few more years to mature before it’ll compare favorably with imported brands—even though the state-run liquor stores are doing their best to level the playing field by storing imported and domestic bottles on dusty shelves in sweltering stores. Half of the imported wine we splurged on turned out to be vinegar.
These government liquor stores seemed almost purposely designed to make buying booze as dehumanizing and frustrating as possible. (After all, the government would surely want to discourage the rampant drunk driving that plagues Delhi after sundown.) To buy booze at the Hauz Khas market’s liquor store, we’d have to shove through a narrow doorway clogged ten people deep and past the counter where surly employees slapped into their customers’ hands the most undeserving fifty-rupee plonk ever to have the label “whisky” applied to it. In the back of the store, where nobody ever seemed to go but us, bottles of wine were covered with months of dust. Outside the shop, autorickshaws screeched to a halt; their drivers would dash in with exact change in an outstretched fist and their free palm itching for the bottle that would warm them better than any blanket on the cold winter nights. We learned very quickly not to hire any auto driver who was parked in front of the liquor store. Although in retrospect, it may have been better to be driven by someone at the beginning of their nightly binge than after they’d already spent a couple of hours working on it.
In all the times we went to the Hauz Khas market liquor store, Jenny was the only woman we ever saw buying booze. Which worked to our favor, because the men always let her jump the queue.
The more respectable members of the community looked down upon liquor stores. One day I chatted with my neighbor Dr. T. as I was leaving the house to pick up some beer. When I told him where I was headed, he remembered that he, too, needed some booze to entertain an evening house guest. He took a few steps towards the market with me, stopped, and thought better of it.
“No,” he said, “I can’t go to that store. Too many people know me here.” He got into his car instead and drove to a liquor store in a neighborhood where he’d be more anonymous.
We drank about as much alcohol in Delhi as we did in Brooklyn, which meant we’d finish perhaps a
bottle of wine a week and a bottle of harder stuff every couple of months. We’d put our empties on the shared terrace along with the rest of our garbage for Shilpa, the building’s maid, to remove in the morning. One day, while hanging our laundry, we stumbled upon a cache of our bottles hidden under a ledge, behind a pile of bricks. Shilpa had been stashing them.
Anya told us why: our trash was Shilpa’s revenue stream. She only earned 300 rupees per month from each of the flats in our building, so she supplemented that income by going through all our trash and selling the good stuff to the kabadiwallahs. Shilpa was hoarding the bottles, Anya said, because the more she sold at one time, the better the price she’d get for each one. Obviously, Shilpa had recognized our consumption patterns and was holding out for us to continue them. Or maybe she knew Christmas was coming and that our holiday party would mean a celebration for her as well.
“You didn’t peel off the labels before you threw them out, did you?” Anya asked. “If you did, she couldn’t have resold them.”
The labels were the key. Unlike the afterlife of plastic water bottles, which amounts to simple recycling (cooking oil, after all, comes in the same kinds of bottles as mineral water), the post-consumer economy for liquor bottles is driven by something else: the desire to look wealthy without necessarily being that way.
Liquor is big in India.5 And foreign whisky is especially coveted: India drinks forty percent more whisky6 than the US. My commute through Gurgaon took me past dozens of billboards promoting Ireland’s finest export with vague headlines about “living the good times” and “making it” alongside photos of bikini-clad beach-goers or Saif Ali Khan looking smugly satisfied with the good times he was living as a direct result of making it.