So Long and Thanks for All The Chicken
I survived Bangalore and all I got was this stupid Coke Zero.
American Germaphobe India Saga (part 14)
This is an ongoing true story (that starts here) of a work trip to India where I, a spoiled, frightened, American germaphobe, desperately cling to my waning sanity by finding humor in the fear.
My business in Bangalore is ALMOST concluded: just one more mystery lunch, a few more hours at the office, a “relaxing” trip to the airport, and a quick foray through the pleasant bureaucracies of Bangalore’s finest international airport, and I can declare Mission Accomplished.
Well, sort of. I’m actually on my way to Shanghai, so mission half accomplished.
I started the day knowing I would have to drag my heavy suitcase and backpack everywhere I go, yet I felt light and jubilant with the anticipation of putting the karmic stresses of this trip behind me.
Wasn’t nothin’ gonna spoil my mood.
Well… almost nothin’.
THE MYSTERY LUNCH
For my last lunch my colleagues took me to one of the campus’s roof-top cafeterias. It’s actually a really nice setup: open air but covered so you get a lot of fresh air without having to worry about too much sun or rain and elevated enough to avoid the majority of flying feral insects.
And the feral dogs.
And the feral tuk-tuks.
The range of available food seems pretty good — for Indian cuisine — but in my imminent departure-induced excitement, I let my guard down and made a silly mistake: I decided to try and impress my Indian colleagues by not going for the “burger” table this time.
In retrospect, I doubt they were impressed. In fact, I suspect that all I did was make more work for someone to have to babysit my naïve self and guide me through unfamiliar options too colorful and pungent to be called edible by this fast-food-trained dude.
As we walked past trays and plates of the various selections, my colleague would grab my arm and direct my attention at this or that, compelling me with commands to “take some of this,” and “you can mix these together,” and “oh you really must have some of that.”
I would hide my reluctance and take a miniscule sampling of this, the teeniest dab of that, and generally make excuses about almost everything else.
After almost filling my tray with heaps of aromatic anxieties, he decided to take me to a booth where they were dishing out chicken and rice.
Chicken and rice!
My reaction to this discovery was Pavlovian. I think both my colleague and the chicken-and-rice-serving guy saw the joyful relief on my face as we approached.
After a suspiciously lengthy exchange in Hindi, the server started hunting through his supply of rice and chicken, picking out particularly big chunks in order to dish me out a healthy portion of mostly chicken with just enough rice to keep it from being too obviously American-portioned just for me.
Rice? Good.
Chicken? Good.
This stuff? Well…
It would have been good except that the chicken “chunks” were not the hunks of chicken meat or even meat-like substitute that decades of intensive McNugget training has led me to expect.
Nope.
These were truly chunks.
Of chicken.
Not chicken as in “that tasty meat you can buy from your local grocer, pan-fry and casually toss into a Caesar salad with a sprinkling of shredded parmesan and fake bacon bits to really make it work well with that bottle of Riesling you’ve been saving for just the right meal.”
No.
If you were to flash-freeze a chicken in liquid nitrogen, then shatter it with a ballpeen hammer, then cook the pieces, then put them in rice with some sauce and a bunch of Indian spices, you would exactly reproduce the mélange d’ fowl almost literally staring up at me from the bowl.
Those chicken chunks had bone, cartilage, gristle, and I dare not think what else. I think there might have been some chicken meat in there too, but I would have needed a gas spectrometer to be sure.
My colleagues, upon noticing that I was leaving that mound of mostly non-meat untouched, immediately began presenting me with options to try any of the other food items being served in an attempt to find something that I would eat. I told them that what I already ate was enough, that I really was fine, and not still hungry, and didn’t need to try other things.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t buy it. After all, my physique doesn’t exactly say “this guy doesn’t eat much.”
CHICKEN GAMES
I had planned my departure to the airport for mid-afternoon. The company arranged a driver and car for me: a beautifully-appointed 1980s-era Toyota Corolla with open-window air conditioning, an organically multi-hued back seat cover, and a fresh coat of dust to hide the rust.
From the office, the airport is supposed to be about an hour’s drive but prevailing traffic conditions convinced me to leave earlier, allowing for two hours. My driver, upon hearing this, muttered something about that still not being enough, but indicated he was up to the challenge with a smile that seemed both forced and way too big.
In retrospect it might have been a snarl.
Getting out of the crowded parts of the city took a while, with lots of stop and go making us lose time. Once we got to some of the countryside roads, my driver, probably sensing my growing fear of a late airport arrival, would really let the Corolla show its mettle, cranking that bad boy up to 80–100 kph on some of these streets. I know that doesn’t sound very fast, but for these streets it was a ludicrous speed. These streets were mostly single lane bi-directional streets (where each side has one section I’ll generously call a lane) packed with trucks and bikes and other things that move far less quickly, so my driver would pass them at every opportunity.
Now I’m no stranger to passing the occasional slow-poke driver, and I will confess to having taken some unnecessary risks upon getting too impatient. But compared to this guy, I’m like a timid little grandma on a Sunday drive trying to stay in God’s good graces on the way to church.
This guy would pass a convoy of trucks at a time. Often around blind curves made doubly-blind by the convoy we were passing. Worse: this insanity was not unique to my driver — others would do it to, and at one point we came all too quickly upon a case of an oncoming slow truck passing a slower truck, forcing us into a game of automotive chicken.
We had to come to an almost screeching halt so that we didn’t have a head-on collision. Previously I had found being driven through the city traffic of Bangalore harrowing and stressful to the point of just needing to close my eyes and take a break from watching it. This time I was truly worried that I was going to make several involuntary contributions to the already impressive collection of mysterious stains on the back seat cover.
TIME TO MAKE UP FOR THAT LUNCH!
When we finally got to the airport, I tipped the driver 1500 rupees, hoping that he would use this unexpected windfall to start a trust fund for his wife and kids for when he inevitably dies in a tragic but not unexpected vehicular accident.
Thanks to my driver’s audacious violations of the laws of physics, my flight was still a couple of hours away from departure, so I figured I’d head inside through security and find a nice place to sit, eat a dinner acceptable to my culinary sensibilities, and get some work done on my laptop. I was confident in this plan succeeding since I naively expected all airports are generally very “multi-national” in their restaurant options. I mean come on — if there’s not at least three Starbucks per terminal, it’s not a real airport, right?
Indeed, there were a number of places inside the terminal that serve Indian (or at least non-Western) food, but what I was looking for was something familiar like a cheeseburger, maybe with a nice glass of wine or a beer as a reward for surviving the week as well as I did.
I could find nothing of the sort. Not even a single Starbucks.
The Bangalore airport isn’t actually all that big, and I walked up and down that terminal, surveying all of the places twice before finally settling in on one that I figured was the least of evils.
Alas, once I got up close and saw the menu, I decided that I would just grab a Coke Zero and that’d be “good enough” to wait out the couple of hours before my flight was scheduled to depart.
Let me tell you: after a week of barely eating, those were a long couple of hours, watching everyone else eat while I sipped at my nutritious zero-calorie slurry of tasty chemicals and tried to feed a few electrons into my also-starving phone from a charging station.
It inspired my inner poet:
Here I stand my phone a-chargin’
All around me smells are bargin’.
Food, Oh Yes! I would adore!
Were I not in Bangalore.
My departure from Bangalore imminent, I relaxed, totally oblivious to the row of dominos of fate that Karma had been neatly lining up, just for me.
Stay tuned, the first domino is falling…
