America Town

drink – zapatista coffee with soy milk
music – A.R. Rahman

Washington DC, USA

DC and Delhi, two months and a half months in, seem properly different worlds. I live in a row house five minutes from a Starbucks in one direction, and Chinese food/subs/cold beer in the other. On my first weekend here we took a walk towards Georgia Avenue. We walked into a massive police operation, possibly a hostage-taking. There were police cars and flares blocking the road in one direction, and people with small children sitting on street corners because they couldn’t go home. One block from my house, I saw a police car stop and let a guy out from the back seat. He walked away fast, tucking his tags into his shirt. Perhaps the definition of the border of gentrification is where the undercover cops start their beat.

On long slow mornings like this, I let myself notice things. The garbage trucks on the street, the fire trucks the night before. There are no more skinny boys who collect bags of trash and sort through the bins at the end of the street by the stinky nala. I have many fewer personal interactions in my daily foraging for food and transportation. In Delhi, I had to talk to people to arrange my auto rickshaw, or pick tomatoes, or buy hot parantha for breakfast. The parantha wallas knew that I only wanted two hot paranthas in a newspaper pocket, no pickle or plastic bag. If I didn’t show up for a few days in a row, they asked me where I had gone.

There is less anxiety with a metro pass; the price is the same whether I’m sick, it’s late, or I’m wearing a t-shirt. I don’t steal myself before I leave the house. For lunch I may have beans from Michigan, carrots from Ontario, an apple from Chile, and salsa from a dozen places. Now there are no nights with no good tomatoes left in the Mother Dairy stall. I used to stand for an hour, listening to podcasts, peeling and dicing cloves of garlic smaller than a baby’s fingernail. It would take an extraordinary effort to find out what is being harvested now. In Delhi, the season’s fruits would follow me down the street on a handcart.

With such an expectation of certainty, it’s hard to feel the force of the reports on the global food crisis. It felt more real the week that eight bombers struck Jaipur and an earthquake destroyed Sichuan. I have stood in front of the Hawai Mahal in Jaipur’s old city, and I have sent visitors along the Golden Triangle. I carry an admission slip, eight years on, from the panda zoo outside Chengdu, unhurt according to the BBC. A picture of bangles shattered on the ground felt like someone had shaken my kitchen drawers out onto the sidewalk.