[Chennai, 12/25/22]
After a month in India, I’m back in Bangkok.
My last four days in Chennai were eventful in unpleasant ways. I finally ate or drank something that kept me bedridden for most of two days. Finally strong enough to seek much needed nutrition, I went to a nearby restaurant, Liza, for a proper meal. I had had reasonable luck there.
Noticing their noodles with shrimps could be prepared four different ways, “Schezwan,” “Manchurian,” “Singapore” and “Thai,” I opted for the Lion City, only to end up with a dish so greasy I woke up repeatedly that night with a sore throat.
Great, I thought, with a bad stomach and a tortured gullet I will fly to Bangkok with a marathon layover in Bengaluru! “When a man dies, he will pass through his own bowels,” Da Vinci wrote in a notebook. I’ve quoted that before, I know. So what? Few, if any, have.
My last full day in Chennai, I still had to eat, so I walked nearly a mile to a momo joint. Steamed dumplings seemed the safest option. Since it had rained, many streets were flooded. I waded ankle or shin deep through copper colored water. Waiting for my order, I was engulfed in by the smell of urine, which didn’t improve my constitution.
Carrying my momos back, I passed a dozen scrawny white horses in their sad stalls just off the sidewalk. A skinny man scrubbed one. Kept apart, a downcast pony had mange. In my $20.31 a night room, I ate then lay down. To keep Sheraton Grande smelling reasonable, incense sticks were constantly burnt in hallways, but this fragrance, too, became overwhelming.
In Bengaluru, there’s a cosmopolitan oasis around Church Street, with its sushi, tacos and excellent burgers at Seigneur. Its Paris Delice with beef patty, beef bacon, grilled mushroom and cheddar cheese “drizzled with Franco-Honey Sauce” tastes like a Philly cheesesteak combined with a first-rate cheeseburger. At Amintiri, you can get Lamb Bolognese, Cajun Prawn and Green Apple, Vegetarian Dagwood or Caramel Baked Cheesecake, etc.
Just on Church, there are several pizzerias, a Chinese buffet, an Iranian restaurant, rock and roll clubs and Rasta Cafe. Though I wandered all over Bengaluru, only around Church did I see so many foreigners, predictably, but why come to India only to escape it?
With its Indians, many still in traditional dress, Church Street is India enough. Plus, you still have street vendors selling chai, samosas and momos. There are some beggars looking ragged enough. Granted, there are absolutely no cows, none, but foreigners can see and smell enough of them away from Church Street.
In American English, a meat and potato man is basically a Joe Sixpack. He needs his beef and mashed or baked potatoes, then a sixpack of Bud or Miller as he watches a ballgame. In Oriental countries, meat generally means pork, so the Vietnamese rice vermicelli with grilled meat [bún thịt nướng] is served with pork. It’s a given. Braised meat [thịt kho] means braised pork.
While we all know Muslims shun pork, few are aware beef abstaining Hindus also avoid pork, since pigs eat shit. In India, the most commonly found meat, then, is chicken, with lamb also offered, but often in tiny quantities, since it’s expensive. If you pay just 12 pennies for a “lamb samosa” on the street, how many milligrams of such meat can you expect, cheapskate?!
Lying on my Chennai bed, I started to fantasize with great bitterness and self-pity about several hunks of roasted pork with crispy crackling over a bed of white, unseasoned rice, with stalks of boiled, unseasoned bok choy on the side. A bowl of clear broth with bits of uncooked scallion completed my hallucination. Inhaling deeply, I filled my lungs with stifling incense.
Though death with its fecal breath was surely seconds away, I couldn’t, for the life of me, crap my soul out. There I lay broken hearted. Tried to shit, but only farted. OK, OK, I’ll cut this shit out.
On my day of departure, I took the subway to Alwapert to have breakfast at Bread and Chocolate. My only other time there, I had its Mezze Platter for 475 rupees [$5.73]. With its pita, hummus, tabouleh, tzatziki, beet and lentil salad, boiled egg, caper berries, toasted almonds, carrot, cucumber and squash, it’s a light, subtly flavored meal, so certainly very welcomed, though without olives, a grave omission, but I wasn’t in Beirut or Cairo. This time, I ordered “Turkish Eggs.”
Waiting for my order, I emailed an Indian friend living in the US:
I fly tonight to Bengaluru, then Bangkok in the morning. Considering my low energy and rather confused state, India was very stressful, man. There’s no way I can last here for two or three months, much less a year.
Bengaluru was more pleasant than Chennai. I’m sitting in Alwapert, a sophisticated and relatively calm oasis in this messy city. Near me is an Oriental guy, probably an employee from the Thai Embassy. Like the Indian elite, expats or foreign employees survive in Indian cities by staying mostly inside more comfortable enclaves. I saw not a single foreigner near my Chennai hotels during +9 days.
As a restless walker, I tend to spend hours on the streets each day. In India, this is almost suicidal. As of 10/31/22, there have been 714 traffic fatalities in Bengaluru this year. 228 were pedestrians. Add to this frightful tally are many more who were merely maimed.
After breakfast, I lingered at Bread and Chocolate a bit, then walked a few blocks, with my luggage, to exchange money. Halfway, I went down into a subway station to rest. Then I had my final meal in Chennai at Cafe de Paris. With still hours to go before check in at the airport, I needed a comfortable place to sit.
Dehydrated, I drank three Earl Greys and a mixed fruit juice, then had some American comfort. My cream of mushroom soup wasn’t creamy but gray, without bits of mushroom. Still, it calmed me. Then came my beefsteak with mashed potato.
“Do you want some vegetables with it, sir?”
“Sure, why not.”
Slightly singed, super tender and with a touch of blood, the steak was excellent, and the mash was soothing enough. The vegetables were OK. With its bell pepper, baby corn, broccoli and carrot in a gravy infused with soy sauce and, get this, black bean sauce, it’s not something ever plopped down by Grandma Daisy May Moses.
You can’t fool me, motherfucker! My daddy owned two lousy Chinese restaurants, in Redwood City and Santa Clara. I was one of his wok jockeys. You need kung fu arms and dancing legs to work one of those iron bitches. With your right knee, you crank up or lower blue flames.
So we’re talking about comfort zones, obviously, and nothing defines them better than food. It’s impossible to love just two cuisines equally, much less two or three thousand.
When a white sexpat told me he “loved Asian food,” I knew he was clueless. There’s no such thing as Asian food, only Japanese, Korean, Thai, Cambodian, Malaysian, Filipino, Cantonese, Hakka, Hunan, Fujian and Vietnamese cuisines, etc., and we’re only talking about East Asia. A lover of Japanese food may hate most Vietnamese dishes, and a Vietnamese may prefer only food from southern Vietnam. Anything from the central or northern part of the country, he can’t stomach.
A Philadelphian may reject a cheesesteak made in Baltimore, much less overseas. When I sent to a Philly buddy image of a cheesesteak I had in Cape Town, South Africa, he blurted, “That looks like vomit!”
If forced to, a man will eat anything, however. “A phoenix, starved, will eat chicken shit,” goes a proverb.
Beyond food, each person also has very specific likes and dislikes regarding everything, from weather to the width of a sidewalk. None of us can be like Lawrence of Arabia, who was said to be “extremely indifferent to what he eats or how he lives.” A genuine masochist, he could walk a thousand miles over freezing mountains or across scorching deserts.
Though so soft and fussy, we’re going to be seriously tested. Knowing this, millions are paying attention to YouTube vloggers who offer tips on how to live in a car or forage for food, even in cities. Of course, the prepping movement has been growing for decades. Alarmed by the accelerating collapse of society, they’re trying to erect private comfort zones, if not bunkers.
Homeless for +5 months, Ava Carl has these videos, “Car Life—Trying my luck at the Walmart Parking Lot (a total fiasco!),” “Car Life—Doing Laundry in the kitchen sink at my office,” “Getting bags of ice to use as air conditioning for the night in my car,” “Dating while living in my car,” “I make music in my car!” and “Weekendphobia—Why I dreaded Fridays,” the last with a sobbing emoji.
No older than 30, Carl’s pale face is nearly always shaded by sadness and worries, but her delivery is brave, candid and, often, even cheerful. Under mournful eyes, her thin lips smile. In one video, Ava rewards herself by buying a pair of Prada sandals at Neiman Marcus for $1,219!
This chick, then, is suffering but not quite broke. The irrationality of that purchase was a defiant gesture to show she still had choices. Already, there are many Americans who can’t scrape together $6 in loose change to buy a loaf of Wonder Bread and a packet of Kraft “American pasteurized prepared cheese product.” Soup kitchens welcome new faces daily.
Arriving at Chennai’s airport way too early, I was hoping to kill time by sitting in a bar, but they wouldn’t let me into the terminal. Finding a breezy spot, I slumped against a wall. With my eyes closed, I could sometimes hear steps and voices, until, finally, someone said, “Are you OK, sir?”
Standing over me were two security guards and three cleaning ladies. They were genuinely concerned. Though there are millions of ragged people sprawled on concrete all over India, you just don’t see a foreigner doing this outside a sleek international airport. They didn’t know my name was Sri Blogging Wallah Bum.
“I’m OK,” I smiled. “I’m fine!”
“Do you need some water, sir?”
“No, no, I’m really fine.”
To a cleaning lady, I even gave a thumbs up. They were all so sweet.
Soon after arriving in India, I met the poet and classical vocalist, Anand Thakore. When he said he lived in Mumbai, I immediately expressed a wish to see it.
“Don’t bother!” Thakore shouted with mirth. “It’s the greatest urban disaster on earth. You should only go there if you know a rich local with a large house, so you can stay in one of his rooms.”
Having lived in the UK, Thakore had returned permanently to his birth city, so he must have carved out a comfort zone within that greatest disaster.
In Namibia, my landlord for +5 months was an Indian teaching at that nation’s best university. Pradeep went from one of the most tightly packed countries to the third least, after only Greenland and Mongolia.
Driving though Windhoek with Pradeep one afternoon, I laughingly remarked about its sidewalks, “There’s, like, nothing here! You never see this in Vietnam.”
“Or India.”
Pradeep’s decision to establish roots in Namibia meant he had found his comfort zone.
Finishing this, I’m again sitting by the Bang Lamphu Canal, with its slight, occasional funk and water monitors. Showing up yesterday at Mam’s Guesthouse, I was asked by its receptionist, “Do you want your old room back?”
“Yeah, sure.”
For a week, I’m paying $101, a hard to beat price in downtown Bangkok. Already, I’ve visited never closed Hong Kong Noodle, just half a block away, three times.
Seeing a missed Skype call from my friend, Giang, I called him this morning, to find out he’s not in Saigon but California.
Soon as he saw my face, Giang cracked up, “You look just like your dad!”
He meant my dad on his death bed.
Two minutes away from me on Samsen Road is Bangkok Poutine. Though I’ve walked by there two dozen times, I never saw anyone inside but its Canadian owner.
Unfortunately, his comfort is not shared by anyone in Bangkok. Still, he keeps his restaurant open, like a shrine to the most arcane religion.
Fortunately, I’ve had poutine just once.
