Here’s How the Story Ends

We had turkey.

I hate to reveal how a story ends before it’s even begun, but keeping you in suspense would be cruel. Cruel like the season 2 finale of “Grey’s Anatomy.” That kind of cruelty has no place on Thanksgiving. So I’m telling you now: We had turkey.

I like Thanksgiving. I look forward to it the way I look forward to birthdays, and anyone who knows me knows that’s a pathological level of looking forward. I started bugging my American friends in Chennai -- all two of them -- at least three weeks ago. “What are we gonna do for Thanksgiving? What are we gonna do?”

I don’t have Thanksgiving traditions. My family immigrated to the U.S. when I was 5, and Thanksgiving didn’t immediately translate. We were eaters of borscht and baklava. Squash soup and pumpkin pie seemed … mushy. I embraced them in time, though not as quickly as I embraced Barbie, Boy George and all things jelly: jelly shoes, jelly bracelets, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

We were guests, never hosts, and I witnessed a dozen Thanksgiving traditions. There was the family that watched football. The family that played touch football. The family with the Thanksgiving-off: a potluck meal at which every dish was critiqued and scored, a winner crowned.

The common denominator was turkey.

Turkeys aren’t indigenous to India, and they’re far more expensive than chickens. You don’t see turkey on menus or in stores. Which is why no one had an easy answer for my question: “What are we gonna do?”

Scott knew of a turkey. Kidnapping schemes were discussed. The plot fizzled when we spoke of feathers and butchers.

We got our first major lead on Monday, when we went to a Harlem Globetrotters game. On their third and last night in Chennai, the Globetrotters played to an almost empty stadium. Basketball, like turkey, doesn’t suit the Indian palate. My crowd of eight cheered as loudly as possible for a game whose outcome is rigged. The vendors hawked samosas and masala popcorn; we wished for beer.


At halftime, Scott, his wife, Padma, and I “snuck” into the VIP section. Nobody tried to stop us as we crawled through barriers and hopped over railings. Maybe it’s because Tamil Nadu’s turbaned governor left with his posse shortly after the halftime photo op. Maybe it’s because Scott and I are white, and in India that means VIP.

We arrived on the podium several minutes before the third quarter and made a beeline for David Hopper. Mr. Hopper is the U.S. consul general in Chennai. We introduced ourselves and made small talk. Then we got to the meat of the matter (pun totally intended).

“We were wondering where we could get a turkey for Thanksgiving,” Scott said.

The next day, the diplomat e-mailed me a name: “Tamil Nadu Veterinary & Animal Sciences University, Poultry Research Station.” I didn’t like the sound of it, but we were short on options. Padma volunteered to make the call.

“They asked if I wanted it alive or dressed,” she told me Wednesday morning.

“Dressed?”

“As in deprived of feathers.”

Dressed sounded like a good idea. And the price was right: 120 rupees a kilo. Translated into American, that’s about $18 for a 15-pound bird.

We had another problem: I don’t have an oven. Scott and Padma don’t have an oven. No one we know has an oven. That’s because Indians aren’t bakers. They fry, sauté, steam, fry, simmer and fry. Also, they fry. Their breads are flatbreads, and their desserts are sugary, no-bake confections. That left one cooking option for our gobbler: deep fry.

Wednesday night brought a new lead in the form of a text message: “My friend can deliver u a turkey 2morro if u want.”

Several minutes later, another text message: “It is already cooked. Honey roasted in fact!”

Touchdown. The third message from my flatmate Nathan said “Harry,” followed by a phone number. I called Harry right away.

Harry is an Anglo-Indian who works at the American International School. Harry has a contact at a food-processing plant outside Chennai.

“They are raising all the fowls,” he told me. “They cook the whole thing and give it. It comes nicely packed.”

I imagined a turkey-shaped insulated delivery bag. It would probably need reheating, I thought. No matter. We have a toaster oven.

“I’ll take one,” I told him.

Thursday morning, a flurry of activity. A driver was sent to fetch the turkey from the school. He carried 2,200 rupees, or about $48, to pay for a 10-pound bird. (Cooked turkeys don’t come cheap.) Scott and I sketched out a menu over Skype. Stuffing sounded like a tricky affair. A call was placed to Chennai’s recently opened KFC. Stuffing? Negative. Invitations were extended to half a dozen non-Americans. Shopping lists were drafted. I made a preemptive trip to the gym.

The turkey was waiting when I walked in my door around 4:30 p.m. It was roasted, alright. Roasted, wrapped in plastic and frozen -- solid. Date of packing: 15 Nov.

“Harry, the bird is frozen solid.”

“Yes?”

“Harry, it’s 5 o’clock on Thanksgiving Day. What am I supposed to do with a block of turkey?”

Harry’s plan involved a bucket of hot water. My Thanksgiving plan didn’t involve a cold, barely thawed bird. He promised a refund. I called off dinner. The 16 chocolate croissants Padma had ordered for dessert arrived. She, Scott and I munched on them as we mulled our options.

In the end, we three piled on Scott’s motorcycle and went to the only place we knew we’d find turkey: the Taj, a five-star hotel popular with business travelers. Its all-you-can-eat Thanksgiving feast was expensive, but it was the only game in town. We loaded our plates with turkey and trimmings. The house band, a Colombian foursome, belted “Baby One More Time” and other karaoke staples between Spanish numbers. Football played on a flatscreen TV behind the band. It might have made me nostalgic for Thanksgivings past, except it wasn’t American football. Mid-meal, it was replaced by pro wrestling.

“This is kinda depressing,” Padma noted.

I felt awfully grateful nonetheless.

I’m Not Who You Think I Am

I wasn’t in the mood for coffee when I paid a visit to Fresh & Honest Café. I know what you’re thinking: You, not in the mood for coffee?

I wasn’t in the mood because I’d already downed four coffee drinks that day. There was the travel mug of instant Nescafé before an early appointment. Then there was the cappuccino I ordered with breakfast. Cup #3 was an Indian-style filter coffee savored after a lunch of pooris and potato curry. Four was a Frappuccino-esque concoction procured at Citi Centre.

I was on my way home from Citi Centre when I spotted the Fresh & Honest signs. I figured I’d take a peak. I have a handful of hangouts in Chennai; I’m always on the lookout for more. Give me Western-style coffee and free Wi-Fi, and you’ve got a customer for life. Well, for as long as I’m here, anyway.

The signs pointed me down a dirt road, through a large gate and into an office building. No café in sight.

Perhaps it’s on a different level, I thought. I took the stairs to the second floor and paused before a set of glass doors. Behind the doors: cubicles, conference rooms and no café.

“Here, madam.” The man came up behind me, ushered me through the glass doors and disappeared.

Indian office workers hustled past me. I spotted two white men in business casual entering a meeting. “I’m looking for the café,” I said to the first person I flagged down.

“Next level,” the woman told me.

The man who’d waved me through the doors reappeared just then. She spoke to him in Tamil. I recognized “coffee.” He wobbled his head in understanding and motioned for me to follow him.

The man led me to a rooftop room with walls of braided palm fronds. The decor: quintessential teachers lounge. There were two rectangular conference tables ringed with plastic chairs, a water cooler, a pair of swivel chairs and couches that looked like van seats. There was no one else there.

“What is Fresh and?” I started. The rest of the name escaped me. I was confused and almost certain I shouldn’t have been there.

“Honest,” he replied. “Fresh and honest.”

Then the man disappeared again, and I heard the hiss and gargle of a coffee vending machine.

He brought the coffee in a bone china cup. The matching saucer held a teaspoon and two cubes of sugar.

“What is this place?” I ventured again.

“No place,” he said. “Only coffee.”

“Milk coffee,” he clarified.

Then he disappeared a final time. I sipped my fifth coffee of the day and wondered about Fresh & Honest*. I wondered who they thought I was. I wondered how many times I could pose as this person they thought I was. How many free coffees before they discovered I had no business there? I have friends who pose as guests to use the pools at five-star hotels. No, I concluded, I lack the chutzpah for petty deceptions. I drained the cup and skedaddled.


* Fresh & Honest Café Ltd., I later discovered, is a Chennai-based provider of coffee vending machines. Thanks again, Google.

So Long, Sanjay

Yesterday was Sanjay’s last day in Chennai. You haven’t heard of Sanjay because I haven’t written about him before. I haven’t written about him before because I met him just 18 days ago. I’m writing about him now to illustrate the dark side of expat life.

I met Sanjay at a party. We sat and talked about burritos. Also about infectious diseases. Sanjay is an Arizona boy (of Indian descent), so he knows about Mexican food. He and two friends founded a Chennai-based organization that provides free HIV/AIDS education, so he knows about infectious diseases. He’s just out of college, a save-the-world type. Which is great for the world but bad for me. It means Sanjay had to return to the States to go to medical school, raise funds for his organization and whatnot. Bastard.

I knew when I met him that he’d leave us soon. We became friends anyway. Over three brunches, two dinners and one “Esencia del Mundo Hispania: An Evening of Spanish Music and Dance” (think Indian adolescents impersonating Santana and Shakira), I learned a lot about Sanjay. He loves steak, bacon and his girlfriend of three years. He dances, drums and does impersonations that rival Sacha Baron Cohen’s. He’s climbed Kilimanjaro, but his four-day trek in the Himalayas was harder.

And now he’s gone.

Yesterday’s send-off -- a three-hour, all-you-can-eat affair -- was the second I’d attended in less than two weeks. We hugged and pouted and promised to meet again -- maybe here, maybe in Hong Kong, maybe in the good old US of A. Then he rode off into the, um, smog.

That’s Sanjay in the back.

Wild rides, strange foods and fast friendships -- all part of the expat experience. So is saying good-bye. A lot.

Sanjay is returning to Chennai in April. I may have taken off by then. Not to save the world, necessarily, but to see it.

Fed Up With the Feds

I heard the big news when I turned on my laptop yesterday morning.

Britney gave K-Fed the boot. Finally.

Then the other big news: Democrats gave Republicans the boot. Finally.

I spent half the day listening to NPR, worrying over Montana and Virginia, “You go, girl”-ing Pelosi and feeling very American. My British roommate and his countryman were unmoved when I skipped to the living room to share the news. I didn’t bother telling them about Britney.

In the afternoon I turned off my computer and went to the most American place I could think of: the mall.

Citi Centre, Chennai’s newest and hippest mall, is within walking distance of my new apartment. I discovered it on Sunday, and it caused my heart to leap.

Now, hear this: I hate malls. In Los Angeles I avoided them except to go to movies. Malls remind me of high school and Jersey and having nothing better to do. So it surprised me that first sight of Citi Centre filled me with glee. I almost threw my hands in the air, rollercoaster-style, as I rode the escalators, the first I’d seen in India’s fourth-largest city.

Two months into my India stay, I crave modernity. I don’t mean central air or toilets that flush, though such technologies are swell. I mean order.

Chennai, or most of it, is chaos. Restaurants without maitre d’s or menus. Stores without price tags or change for a 100-rupee note (a little more than $2). Streets clogged with honk-happy drivers, stray dogs, and vendors of flowers, fruits, coffee and paan.

Walking outside requires full attention and razor-sharp reflexes. Stoplights are scarce, and there’s no such thing as right of way. I’ve yet to see a single blink of a turn signal. There’s more to crossing the street than looking both ways. It’s look right, then left, then right, then left, then right, then run. Motorcyclists think nothing of riding the wrong way down a street. They think nothing of riding the wrong way while talking on their cell phones. I jump to avoid collisions so often as to consider it cardio. I suck in my gut to dodge handlebar jabs.

It’s not that I’m tired of all this. But it is tiring.

The mall, by comparison, is a place of order and calm. I can wander -- and let my mind wander -- without fear of dismemberment. I can finger skirts and sunglasses without salesmen circling. I can hear my thoughts. They’re a mite more lyrical than the “Madam! Madam! Rickshaw?” I constantly hear outside. The mall as mountaintop. Who woulda thunk?

Citi Centre is the sort of mall that would go by “galleria” in the U.S. It’s compact, bling-y and architecturally ambiguous: faux neoclassical exterior, glass-covered atrium and floor tiles masquerading as fan cobblestone. There’s a creperie, several coffee shops and a “Fun City” playpen for kids. Anchored by a department store called Lifestyle and festooned with banners of hollow-cheeked women and stubbly men, Citi Centre screams America. (If you ignore the kiosk selling black burkas and headscarves.)

Yesterday I toured the food court and considered my options. There were a variety of Indian cuisines: Chettinad, Lucknowi, Bengali and Punjabi, among others. Wangs Kitchen promised a taste of China, Mex Chic’Inn boasted burritos, and Little Italy offered a variety of pizzas, pastas and -- oddly -- nachos.

I settled on Pizza Hut.

Like I said, I was feeling American. I washed down my personal pan pizza with a can of Diet Pepsi, sold at a satisfyingly capitalistic 40 percent markup. Then I strolled to Lifestyle, humming the ‘80s power ballads in constant rotation. Once upon a time I was falling in love, but now I'm only falling apart. There's nothing I can do - total eclipse of the heart.

I was in a dressing room, experimenting with a fuchsia shawl, when my phone rang. It was Scott, an American who lives in Chennai with his Indian-American wife, Padma.

“Guess what I found,” he said.

“A suitcase?”

I wasn’t feeling terribly imaginative, and I’d recently chucked my carry-on, a casualty of Operation Smuggle Eight Bottles of Wine from Bangalore to Chennai.

“Better than that,” Scott said.

“A wine store that actually sells wine?”

“Even better.”

I gave up. The fuchsia shawl worked as a skirt, too.

“Pancake mix,” he exhaled. “You’re on the hook for brunch.”

O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?

‘Toxic Even When Dead’

The Internet is a handy tool. Mostly I use it to figure out if I’m going to die.

Among my recent Google searches:

cauliflower worms
mold futon mattress
laptop electric shock
dengue fever
malarone long term side effects
chikungunya india epidemic
eggs undercooked risk

The caterpillars I found floating in the cauliflower soup I cooked this week probably won’t kill me. They were small, about the size of fingernail clippings, and anyway I lost my appetite after fishing out three. “Cabbage worms,” says Wikipedia, are the most common insect pests of cauliflower. They like rutabagas, too. (I like saying “rutabagas.”)

My moldy futon mattress, however, could very well lead to my demise. I dragged it out of my room after a peek at the Berkeley Parents Network Web site. Mold is “very dangerous,” according to a parent named Sara. Some species are “toxic even when dead.” Dang.

I find Google Image Search particularly useful. A search for “papaya seeds” turned up 465 images. I slept easier that night, knowing the black beads I’d scraped out of my first whole papaya were indeed seeds and not the eggs of some prolific pest.


I’m not a worrywart by nature. In the U.S., I was fearless. I’d go as far as to eat a Yoplait past its expiry date. India has turned me neurotic. I worry over inflamed bug bites. I wash tomatoes in dishwashing liquid. I carry Purell everywhere and quiz waiters about the contents of fruit juice. Avoiding “Delhi belly” means acting like a prima donna: “I’ll take a mango juice with filtered water. Filtered. No ice. In a paper cup. If you don’t have filtered water, then NO water. And no ice!”

Life here can feel like a “Fear Factor” episode, what with ants in my cereal, rat droppings on my kitchen counter, nibblers in my bed, frogs in guesthouse showers, leech attacks and gecko poo. One evening in Coorg, a swarm of moths overran an Internet café where I was writing home. They bounced off monitors, writhed on keyboards and skittered across the floor. We turned off the lights to make them leave.

Moth scales and other body parts are known allergens and can pose a serious health hazard. So says a Journal of Economic Entomology article I found on the Net.