Street Food for dinner

picture: India, I for Irony
Songs: Ella Fitzgerald, First Lady of Song CDs

Someone gave the homeless dogs clothes. They got them stitched out of sacks of flour or rice, something hard to make out. The dogs sat by the stinky nala, rather proud of themselves for once. They walk around a bit, sit down, look at each other sideways.

The dogs and the village across the street, and the seemingly infinite methods of tying scarves around rickshaw-wallas, are all part of the flowering of Delhi winter. The street sellers have carts of roasted peanuts and sweet puffed rice, and best of all, popcorn roasted fresh and hot on the fire at the end of the handtruck.

Three nights this week I’ve had street food for dinner. The first night, I was feeling disappointed in myself. I can’t speak Hindi, and I was getting anxious about getting anything done at work. So I came home, put down my stuff, and walked back across the road past the plywood and nutritional supplement stores. The initial darkness quickly gave way to a whole lane of excitement. Piles of puffy jackets for Rs 250, shiny shoes, orange and pink sparkly sweaters, watches in water buckets to demonstrate their water-proofness. Shirts five for Rs. 100, socks, and some pots and buckets and kitchen things. All lit by a single bulb fitted to the top of a butane canister. Looking at these silent burning orbs, I felt like I should know how they worked, and that it had something to do with the camping lanterns we thought were so exotic. Most exciting for me was the food. More popcorn, and roasted sweet potato that would be served with salt and chaat masala, and finally at the end a stand set up selling the largest parantha I have ever seen. They gave me two in a bag, and I rushed home happy.

The next day I found myself stuck. I knew where I was, but it wasn’t an area were people were rich enough to take rickshaws; consequently I had no way to go but to keep walking. Soon enough I came upon a lighted strip with promising traffic. In front of a shop that advertised improbable Chinese Food a man was putting the finishing touches on an aloo tikki. This one was covered with not just chutneys and dahi, as the ones we get at work, but fresh ginger and pomegranate seeds. It was steaming hot and smelled divine.

He was handing it to a young woman and an older woman, and I figured there are worse ways to wait for a rickshaw than eating Indian poutine with some ladies. We spoke in Hindi about how they never listen when you tell them about ingredients, and how nice ginger was in the winter. Many many people in India speak some English, and the ones I work with speak it as a mother tongue. There has been public education in English in India for longer than in Britain. Still, I find I use English like rope bridges through the jungle. It is direct, and available, and gives its residents a way around the morass of hundreds of languages in a country of billions. But sometimes, when you’ve got nowhere to be and the food smells good, you can step off the bridge and hang out in the intimate, dark mysteries of the trees.