Airport Food Mart

Yesterday, a bunch of us decided to check out the new South Indian restaurant that opened on Versailles road. It wasn't much of a restaurant, more of a quaint little enclave within a gas station! We went in with some apprehensions and found it quite likeable actually. The person who ran the restaurant actually spoke Tamil (in a small city like ours, that's a very pleasant coincidence, believe me).

Anyway, what hit me at once was the amount of noise that the little place generated even before we made our considerable contribution towards it, and the thing is all the noise and smoke in that little place created just the right milieu for a bunch of India-starved Indians like us :) Initially, we raised a racket - chairs being dragged to accomodate the eleven of us, people bumping into each other, each scrambling to find chairs as if they would vanish that very instant. After the initial settling down everyone was happy that they had contributed their fair share towards the overall decibel value. We laughed at jokes louder than we would, talked in our respective native languages, even the people who served the food laughed with us and joked with a liberty they probably wouldn't take with Americans. k and some of the guys acted really mature and added drops of the red and green chutneys into each other's water glasses, then proceeded to drink it accompanied by sounds of "eeeeh" and "yuck", then settled back to some juvenile bickering satisfied with the spectacle that they had created :) While I tried to act genteel and lady-like, I realized I was actually enjoying all the confusion and chaos in that little place.

Perhaps, something about that little place created an illusion of a little India for us. Something about the fact that the place was Indian made us drop our inhibitions, shed our acquired traits, traits that helped us blend in, not stand out like an outsider in a strange land. We may deny it but we are a loud people, we like to talk and talk loudly at that and I think the nondescript Airport food mart let us be ourselves, just for a little while...

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