Superior Indian Cookery
Let us explore together this question: why are people at a certain stage of life — when they begin to feel like weary rowers who have gone too far, forgotten where they were going and why it was supposed to be worth the trip, when they begin to drift and mope and regret having departed the shore — drawn to ethnic restaurants?
Consider us. How are we to explain the warm spot in our heart for Superior Indian Cookery, the subterranean agglomeration of grottoes that we call — affectionately, very affectionately — the Black Hole? Something comes over us whenever we stoop to pass through the low door and make our way down the narrow, winding stairs, lined with others waiting for a table. What is that something? An otherness. We always feel a little odd, a little displaced, when we visit: we are somewhere we do not quite belong, doing things we do not ordinarily do. We do not ordinarily drink from a bottle concealed in a brown paper bag, for example, but here, waiting on the stairs, we do. Everyone does. We must bring our own drinks, since there is no liquor license. Pouring drinks from a bottle in a bag, even if the bottle holds a decent wine, makes drinking seem like an illicit activity, exactly like the illicit activity it was when we were young. “Ahha!” we said to ourselves. “Perhaps we’re on to something here. Being here returns us to a time when so much of what we wanted from life (alcohol and sex, to name two) was forbidden and, being forbidden, more alluring, possibly, than it has ever been since. But is that all? Surely it can’t be just that?” What, then?
The décor? Probably not, even though some of the fabric hangings on the whitewashed walls seem to depict erotic scenes, perhaps even orgies. We are not sure because the hole is so black that we find it hard to separate fact from imagination.
The other diners? Possibly. We wonder, we marvel, when we observe the clientele. We see such diversity: scions of old colonial families, pale and myopic from too many years of breeding too close to the good old stock; a good sampling of the offspring of the ruling classes of emerging nations, sent here to study at BU or BC or any other school beyond the indigenous terrorists’ range; and, most exotic of all, citizens of MIT and Harvard, in their intriguing garb, speaking a curious patois that sounds much like English.
The service? We don’t think so. We watch the waiters go about their work. Is it only paranoia that makes us think the staff is talking about us? We confess that we have this feeling in all ethnic restaurants. When our waiter calls out something in Hindi or Urdu or Cantonese — or Italian, for that matter — we can’t help wondering whether he’s saying, “I’ve got some people here who are most certainly insane; come and take a gander at them,” or, “If a moment arrives when you can make an observation without being observed yourself, you must not fail to notice the ludicrous socks on the man who has ordered the kima masala.” It has occurred to us that, for the staff at Superior Indian Cookery, the place must seem to be filled with exotics all the time — people of bewildering customs, speaking a baffling lingo, pursuing inscrutable goals. When we leave, where do they imagine we go? Certainly they must suppose, since their imaginations must be as good as ours, that we go somewhere much more interesting than we actually do. If they imagine lives for us that are more intriguing than ours are in fact, doesn’t some of that rub off on us? Don’t we, seeing a curious look in the eyes of our waiter, bask in it? Aren’t we glad to be thought exotic? The grandfatherly host, smiling, always smiling, probably thinks that whenever we do not come to his restaurant of an evening, it is because we are indulging in bizarre sexual practices. Perhaps we are. And what about that nice-looking trio on the stairs, the ones drinking the tequila — what will they be getting up to after they’ve finished the last sweet spoonful of their mitha bhat and disappeared into the dark, into the mysterious nighttime Boston that only the natives know? We can’t speak for you, of course, but as for us, we know that we feel a darn sight more intriguing just knowing that the paterfamilias here might be thinking about us along such lines.
[to be continued]
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