Month: March 2019

My Encounter With Cooking

One of the biggest problems I had adjusting in US, was cooking. Now generally I was a good cook back in India. But that was on a gas stove. Here in my apartment we had an electric stove. Not that I didn’t know this technology existed but full cooking on this electric stove? This was something I had never done, neither I thought it was a good idea. Of course, there was a reason for it. What do you do when you lose the power for a day; like on the day of load shedding? I explained the problem to Kartheek & asked him about the ‘load shedding day’. “Do people eat in restaurant that day?” I asked.  Kartheek simply looked at me. I was going to learn this type of look from him & others on similar questions were a way to express all their emotions together. Dismay, anger, frustration and god knows which all emotions one can have to show pity on others.

First, he didn’t remember what load shedding was then why one needs to have it to eat in restaurant! But after I explained it to him that in India, we still have a chronic power shortage, so we shut the power off in different areas on different days… at least theoretically. I am talking about a situation 18 years ago. It is much better now. My town in India had load shedding any (and all) day of the week. After my explanation, he went on to a completely different track. He started discussing world matters and how political situation in India needs to change and how they can rectify these problems etc…. I was wondering why wouldn’t Kartheek go back and take over political parties? And more over why isn’t he answering my simple question? Anyways, all I learned though this was, that you hardly lose electricity in US and so I didn’t  have to plan anything special for eating out. (By the way, Kartheek wasn’t correct. During my stay in the apartment the power went out 3 times in 3 years and not only did I have to eat out, I couldn’t even take a shower).

So, on the 1st day my roommate, Devendra, and I decided to make some tea. Devendra, another Indian guy who had joined me here and was staying with me while both of us were awaiting our families to join us from India. Tea, we thought was the simplest thing that any human being, at least an Indian human being, can make. Back home it wasn’t even considered cooking. In India any 2-year-old can make tea….well sort of. Here we were experienced electrical engineers and I boasted myself “a cook” so it was much less of an issue. So we thought.

We got the water boiling and had concoction made and added milk. As the milk started rising normally, I reduced the power but unfortunately the milk didn’t realize it and kept rising……and …… for next one hour we both smelled like burned corpses… needless to say we had to go eat outside. Till date I hate electric stoves.

After a couple days of practice, I became friends with the stove. At least it seemed that way. Making tea was actually a sort of game that I enjoyed playing. So, on one weekend we decided to make authentic Indian snack with tea. What else other than “Pakora” could I think of! Well for my American readers, I want to explain Pakora. It’s a fried food. It tastes exactly like onion rings except it’s a little more spicy. Normally eaten with green chili, so, the Pakora-Chilly combo tastes like Onion Rings on fire and as you eat it, it sets your mouth, esophagus, digestive track on fire for next 12 hours unless you are used to it. Most Indians are used to some amount of chilly be it red or green. Some of the Indians don’t even consider the chilly as “a chilly” unless it’s more than 500,000 on Scoville range. Well! I am not that Indian.

So, we got the oil in pan and heated it to it’s boiling point and we started frying. The 1st batch of pakoras came out nice, evenly brown, crispy and very tasty. Both Devendra and I couldn’t contain our joy and finished the 1st batch. The problem happened after this.  We spent a little too much time in praising our own creation while the stove kept on heating the oil. We started with the next batch……And then…. it happened. Instead of normal frying; the pakoras caught on fire… well almost.  The smoke started oozing out of the pan and we couldn’t even see each other for a few seconds. Quickly it filled the whole room and … oh my god!!! We started hearing sound of 100 railway engines blowing the horns in our kitchen. We had never heard the fire alarms before (as both of us didn’t have fire alarms in our houses back home and in those days it wasn’t so common) and by the time we were able to grasp what’s happening,  there was a knock on the door and the building manager Mr. David asked us to get outside.

Although we had panicked, we turned everything off and ran outside… the whole building had become railway engines blowing horns & vomiting smoke. There were several residents gathered outside. We casually joined them and waited… like everyone except we didn’t know what we were waiting for. After a short while a long red truck appeared. Now Devendra & I were horrified. We thought we were in deep trouble. Everyone else seemed to be calm while we were trembling inside our pants that no one knew… and even if they had come to know about it, they would have thought we were cold. The firemen quickly alighted themselves and went inside the building. After 15 mins a fireman came out & said everything was okay. He talked to the building manager and we knew they had identified the source of the trouble when the manager, Mr. David, called us. I thought, well now it’s over. We are going back home next day. I was thinking how would I explain it to my wife that they deported me because I was making pakoras in US. As it is, she always disapproved my Extreme love for food & cooking.

As we approached Mr. David & the huge fireman; I was almost ready to hear…go home you idiot. Well,  instead I heard the fireman saying “Sorry guys”. My eyes were popping out, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, so I looked at Devendra and he was also looking like he had seen a ghost. The fireman again apologized and explained that how the fire alarm was mounted close to kitchen stove and how in winter we couldn’t open the windows so how the smoke could have triggered it…. and then he said “Well hope it didn’t spoil your food!” What!!! I was worried about booking my plane ticket home and this guys was worried about my snacks getting spoiled. I felt like hugging him and Mr. David & the whole fire department including the fire truck. Since that time, I have had some sporadic malfunctions with cooking but it never escalated to this level. A wise boss in India had once told me, it’s okay to be dumb, stupid or even plain idiot as long as you don’t make same mistake twice. The rest of that winter I came close to dying of hypothermia while cooking but we never had to call fire truck.

Not sure what you would think of me after this but I am sure my boss would be happy. God bless his soul in heaven.

My Encounter With Car Buying

My experience of trying to buy a car with Queens English in US.

The America I came across was completely unrecognizable compared to what I had imagined. The humans all looked the same except they were far fairer than what I had expected, though there was another problem. They didn’t speak English! Well, let me explain. The English that Indians learn to speak is Queen’s English and the one Americans speak is…American English. Although the “colour” of sky is blue everywhere; here in US the sky has blue “color.” Well! It caused a lot of embarrassment…not for me but people who tried to introduce me to the American culture that you will eventually find out in my other encounters.

My boss, Kartheek, took me to a restaurant the day I joined…the waitress came and asked something. (FYI- Kartheek was here for over 25 years & married to an American girl. At least he remembered India was Bharat. Kartheek was my litmus test for testing my American language skills or my adoption of American culture… in a way.) First, I thought she was stammering, but then I saw Kartheek was also stammering. That was a clue for me that something was being said and also understood & responded to. I was never more ashamed of myself than this. My mom was an English teacher, and I had topped the school in English, but I couldn’t even understand the stammering business let alone speak.

The lady went away and came back stammering again. I had a very sober or what you call clueless smile on my face. She stammered again. Ah! I was very intensely listening as if my life depended on it. I thought she was asking about my pop. Well why is she asking about my dad? Again, clueless smile appeared on my face. Here the seasoned Indian came to help and said she was asking if I needed a drink. Pop is a drink?! This was beyond my comprehension. Well a few months later I went to Charlotte, NC and very confidently ordered pop and the waitress said, “sorry?” Turned out, here they called it soda not pop. Indeed, the America in my book was different.

People here also think of India in the same way. One day I was talking to the janitor of our building, and he asked me a simple question. I almost died hearing his question.

He was asking if I went to school on a horse or on an elephant. Damn National Geographic. This was just a preview though, I was to get more of this later.

Obviously, March in North Dakota those days (before global warming I mean) used to be quite cold. I was told that if I preferred not to die of hypothermia then I better buy a car. Of course, I hadn’t yet given up, so I started shopping for a “used car.” In India we called it a “second hand car.” But I had discarded that phrase long back when even Kartheek, the seasoned Indian boss, didn’t understand what I was saying.

So, I went to look for a used car. This time I took a colleague of mine with me who was my neighbor in apartment complex and also from neighboring county, Pakistan. My problem is like a quantum particle physicist. I easily find what I look for. The very first car I saw, I liked. But then it was Azam, the Pakistani friend of mine, who advised me not to buy it. He was talking about how the hood was damaged and the trunk had a hole in it and asking the owner if it had block heater, etc. What the heck was that? We did have a car in India but none of them had the parts Azam was asking about. So, I thought I could just go along for the time being.

I lost my first car, but on we went to the next one. This was an odd-looking Toyota.  They called it a hatch back. It had only two doors and you had to fold the front seat to get in or out. Again, my love affair started. This time I wasn’t going to listen to Azam, but thankfully he too liked it, except for the fact that it had a big hole in the bumper. But I didn’t care, so we bought it and brought it home. Actually, Azam drove us back. This was my first big purchase in my dreamland.

After we came home, I could no longer contain my curiosity. As a student asks his master, as polite as I could be, I asked Azam. What’s the hood and the trunk? And what heater he was talking about!

Now it was Azam’s turn to have a clueless smiley face. He must have wondered in an awe. And then went on to explain, what the hood and truck were. Oh! I said, we called it “Bonnet” and “Dicky”. So, the Queen’s English word Bonnet became Hood here and Dicky became Trunk. I was to learn later that the stepony has also become spare-tire and a puncture had become flat tire. I had just realized I had to un-learn and re-learn every thing about the car, starting with the vocabulary. I had embarked on my encounters with cars in general and next was to come very soon when I took it to a mechanic and then driving. (FYI – I later found out that an Indian boy Sameer had also became Sam in US). Slowly America was having an encounter with me.

Slowly America was having an encounter with me.

My First Encounter With America

This is a story of a young boy who grew up reading about America and dreaming about visiting it one day.

As any curious young kid in India in those days, I would read anything that I could lay my hands on. I always used to feast on an array of books for free because my dad was on the University book selection committee & was a chairperson at the local public library. Going to the library in those days was like having any smart phone with Wi-Fi except you didn’t have to pay through your nose. Mom yelling at me, to keep the books aside & study, was the same though. I think moms are timeless universal beings irrespective of any parameters. Kids are their precious treasures yet they seldom mind letting that little treasure mind its own business.

One day my dad received a big parcel by mail (we used to call it post then and we used to have postmen) and I was told to open it. As a carnivore jumps on its prey, I clawed away the wrapper and found 5 copies of a book with a cover showing a picture of a bearded man in a lawyer type of coat. The book was heavy with about 400-500 pages and, to date, I still remember the soft silky touch and smell of the new book. Although the picture of the person was unrecognizable; the glossy colorful cover and the title of the book was very inviting. The title read “An Outline of American History”. Of course, it was translated into my mother tongue. Later I was to realize that the picture was of Abraham Lincoln the 16th President of the United States of America.

Those were the days of space age and quantum mechanics. From the TV serial of Fire Ball to the day-to-day discoveries of quantum particles to the imaginative science fictions based on alien visits and encounters were some of the musts of the everyday news items. America was my hero, landing the 1st man on the moon. Several years later when I saw a conspiracy theory video on Fox, “How the Moon Landing was Fake!”, I couldn’t contain my dismay, but that’s a separate story and it almost costed me a couple stitches to my fist. Hardwood floors don’t appreciate when you punch them.

Anyways, this book started out with the May Flower and went all the way to show classy pictures of metal cutting laser beams and Boeing 747. For a nerdy kid like me this book was the feast of a multi course dinner on an empty stomach. I can’t remember how many times I had seen the pictures of the great personalities in that book and read the captions underneath. There was a picture of Charles Lindberg with his plane, then there was General Eisenhower, and also a picture of Mt. Rushmore. It never occurred to me then that I would be visiting it several times in the future. There were pictures of Eskimos and pictures of whale hunting. After I arrived here, I didn’t see Eskimos; though I did almost live like one for 12 years in North Dakota. For a person coming from Mumbai, Fargo was nothing less than an igloo in winter.

When I read this book for the first time, I was just browsing through it and registering pictures and captions of interest in my mind, so I could come back later and read it in detail. That was one of the tricks I had learned from my grandfather. Not how to read a book but how to buy fresh of the fresh grocery at the farmers’ market. He used to take me around and just stroll through it all over without buying anything but just checking the prices. Then the second round was stopping at places where he thought there would be a chance of negotiation. Then after wasting an eternity, he would buy one item and move on to his next prey. I never adopted that style for shopping but did use a similar approach for a thick book with pictures. And it paid off. Within a few scans over the hour I earned my first Ph. D. in American history…of course only among my friends who just knew ‘A’ for America.

This book, however, helped me immensely. Those pictures triggered my curiosity to read and explore more. A small kid in the rural in-skirts of India was talking about the American legends, inventions and started sleeping with dreams of a land that he would one day visit. That was my first encounter with America. c

Welcome to W4F

It’s nice to be able to write. Well…. it would be nicer to have someone read it. We at OREXIAN FOUNDATION let our imagination wander and share what we can. So welcome expressing yourself in the areas of Fictions…. Science Fictions or otherwise or just share your life experiences with us.

Here are some of mine… hope you like it.