The food? Possibly. Most of what we eat here is stew of one sort or another, and that’s fine with us. Stew is the international dish of comfort and consolation. When a French maman sees that the family is un peu triste, we’re sure she makes bœuf bourguignon or cassoulet. Our own mom made chicken stew (with, unfortunately for the quality of our childhood memories, lima beans). It’s the spices that make stew different around the world, and here we find that there is always a flavor we can’t quite identify.
It must be something else, then, but what? We scan the room to see what people are drinking. Most are having wine or beer; however, there is that intriguing threesome (a man and two women, attractive, fortyish, giggly) passing a bottle of Cuervo Gold. Tequila with Indian food? A surprising idea. We ask if we might try it and, since the answer is “Please do,” do. A couple of swallows later, we make a couple of discoveries: first, that the combination is surprisingly good; and, second, that that is exactly why we have come here — we have come in hope of finding something surprisingly good. We always come here, we realize, expecting to be surprised, hoping that the surprise will be good. Isn’t that really why we want to go back to youth, after all? We are not talking about nostalgia now. Forget the cozy fires, your mother’s kisses, your father’s pipe tobacco — what you really long for is what you found in your first olive, your first drink, first kiss, first whatever: surprise. When you went home for the holidays looking for some remembered flavor of youth, you expected to find it in the old house, in the remembered things, places, and people, and you were disappointed, weren’t you? Of course you were. Only the echoes of the past were there, diminished and disappointing. You were looking for the wrong thing! You were looking in the wrong place! What you miss most from the past, from your youth, is novelty. You have lost the capacity to be surprised, and you wish you could regain it. Well, we have found it! We have found it here, in the Black Hole. Here, we now understand, something scrumptious from our past awaits us, waits for us to descend the narrow stairs, bottle in hand, and claim it. It’s a taste of the naïveté that made life more interesting when we were young.
We learn here, with each bite of something unfamiliar, that it is possible to recover something of the past — not to repeat the experiences that we remember fondly, we know that wouldn’t work — but to recover the capacity to experience anew, to be surprised, to be pleased when we weren’t expecting to be pleased, to take great pleasures from small things, like a stew or a piece of bread, to find in the smallest experience, the touch of a hand we’ve touched a thousand times before, something fresh. We are rejuvenated. That’s it. That’s it. And if we have restored to us the ability to be surprised and pleased, then the future is promising, and we are hopeful. We see how much wider the world is than the circumscribed little dog run we’ve been inhabiting! We see how much there is still for us to learn, see, do! Strange people to meet, strange things to eat! Now that we have recovered the capacity to be surprised, anything may happen. We may fall in love. Oh, sure, we’ve been in love before, but this time it will be different. How many moribund marriages could be revived simply by adding a pinch of an exotic spice to a familiar dish? (Maybe that’s what those wall hangings are about.)
Perhaps we now know the secret. We’ve been rowing the damned rowboat of life for a long time. Our hands are sore, and we’re tired body and soul. We stop rowing. We drift. We say, “I can’t go on.” A voice from somewhere says, “But you must go on.” We say, “Why? What lies ahead but death? Why row toward death? Why not just drift and let it come to us?” But here, in the Black Hole, that little voice, speaking with an outlandish accent, says, “Taste this. See? There are surprises ahead.” “Well, then!” we say, and we take up the oars and row with the vigor of youth.
And that, nôtre lecteur, nôtre semblable, nôtre frère, is why so many people, when they reach what our dedication to frankness forces us to call middle age, are attracted to ethnic restaurants.
— BWB
Superior Indian Cookery
1991 Brahmin Avenue, 555-0202.
American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Diners Club. No checks.
Handicapped: steep stairway, tiny toilet.
Lunch 11–3, Monday–Friday.
Dinner 5–11 daily.
Reservations not accepted.
BYOB.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 502, Mark Dorset considers Novelty: As a Source of Pleasure; Allusion; and Identification of Author with Reader from this episode.
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