Tandoori Texan Tales
wanted him. However both of us returned to India.
Connaught Place was still the center of action. Shop
windows only displayed stuff made within the country.
Gone were the flashy imported cars replaced by locally
made ones; there were only 3 such models, though you had
plenty of colors to choose from, unlike Model-T. There
were also those ubiquitous auto-rickshaws and scooters
alongside buses packed like a can of sardines spewing
smoke like the Vesuvius. The outskirts of the city extended
up to about 20 miles from Connaught Place (CP as it was
affectionately called). Sidewalks did not have that smartly
clad sauntering anglicized persona of elegance; there were
those bunches of unwashed, un-scrubbed seekers of Nirvana
on their way to Nepal, with odor that would send any police
dog haywire.
120
TANDOORI TEXAN TALES
My one bedroom apartment or flat was about 10 miles from
CP where my office was located. It was in the southern
suburb of Green Park. South Delhi had the neighborhoods
of people with discriminating tastes. Jor Bagh, Defence
Colony and Chanakyapuri were out of the question; you
could only live there if you were married to the daughter of
Indian Ambassador to Brussels (or she would marry you
only if you were one of those living there). Rest of New
Delhi was very bourgeois. You could know all about micro
and macro economic theories of class struggle between
have’s and have-even-more’s at parties where you could be
invited only if you belonged to the Inner Circle. Young men
dressed in Levi’s jeans at the bottom and Indian colored
Kurta at the top, with beard, smoking Havanas and holding
a small peg of Chivas Regal on the rocks, would fling all
the cliches and jargons. When cornered by sheer logic, they
would immediately take shelter in a line, something like,
‘what do you know, I got it all at Harvard or Yale’. Oxford
and Cambridge were passe. London School of Economics
still made the grade, just barely. Splitting the infinitive?
May be, okay. When the music would start playing the
Beatles or the Beegees, they would make a beeline to their
equally well informed female counterparts, to try out the
latest hip steps.
I bought a 20-year-old Ford Zephyr for four thousand
Rupees, from somebody who had been transferred out of
town and was desperate to get rid of it. If I had done some
background checking and known just how desperate he
was, I could have brought down the price by half. It got the
nickname of Old Faithful. Its color was an indescribable
dirty green. She never let me down even though on some
121
RAJ DORÉ
cold winter days she needed some extra persuasion to start
early in the morning. It would take me a good 35 minutes to
get to work. Getting into the flow of things, I had a house
warming party at my apartment while my landlord was
staying with his expectant daughter on the floor below.
Instead of just warming the house, I found I had got it to a
boiling point. We were doing the shrug/frug to the full
blasting sounds from my stereo of ‘Let’s Forget Domani’.
Sure enough Domani never came, instead came my landlord
a minute before midnight. His daughter did not believe in
induced labor. Would we keep the decibel level down or
make arrangements to move elsewhere. In exactly a minute
later he pulled the fuse off our mains. I gave it a serious
thought and decided to move to a more salubrious
neighborhood.
Within walking distance from ‘CP’, I found a one room
rental with a large terrace; in Manhattan it would be called a
Penthouse, in simple Delhi lingo it is called Barsati, a room
where people run for shelter if it starts raining in the middle
of the night while sleeping on the terrace. My landlady was
Mrs. Thukral staying on the ground floor. Between her and
me there was one more floor having a cute friendly family.
Jan was from Cologne and worked as a journalist at West
German Embassy, his wife Afsal was from Hyderabad, with
a Master’s in Social Sciences, taught in a school for the
handicapped children, they had a little son Kai and a little
girl Laila. This buffer between my landlady and my stereo
sound should work out pretty well, I figured. I gave Mrs.
Thukral all the deposits and advance rents she wanted and
moved in.
122
TANDOORI TEXAN TALES
Anil found a satisfactory job even though the salary was
nowhere near what he could have got if he went back to
America. I was getting settled in my job as well booking
some nice juicy contracts from the Indian Railways. We
developed a good size circle of friends of both genders. The
term Yuppee had not yet been coined, but we were just that.
After a party at my new apartment, my cousin Suguna told
me that Ena liked Anil and if he would ask she would
gladly go out with him. I passed this subtle message
faithfully. Before you could spell Gunga Din, I got the news
that they were engaged to be married.
Udaipur was within my sales territory and I decided to
make a pleasure cum business visit there. Sohan Singh
came with a car to meet me at the airport. He had extra gray
on the eyebrows and moustache alongside more lines of
wrinkles on the sun baked cheeks. But he had the same
proud eyes and almost paternal smile. I thought he would
ask me if I ever got that parallel parking right. Instead he
said they wanted me to come and lay a corner stone for a
children’s park in Dore Nagar. Udaipur not only had an
airport now but an extra railway station, a radio station and
several industries. You did not have to go elsewhere
looking for livelihood; you got it all here itself with the
smoke and squalor as trimmings. Sohan Singh had with him
his oldest son Devi Singh that worked in Zavar Mining
Company. I gave them all a good hug. I reminded Devi
Singh that he still owed me 5 marbles for beating him in a
game of Gulli-danda. He smiled avoiding eye contact and
said ‘of course’; meaning how could I argue with my
master’s son, leave alone beat him in any game. They asked
me, is it true that in big cities like Delhi they had big radios
123
RAJ DORÉ
that showed cinema you could watch sitting in your own
living room?
New Delhi had 2 TV channels. One was boring and the
other more so. The government in its own sanctimonious
self righteous perception wanted to make TV not a medium
for entertainment of urban elite but for social change
especially of the rural masses. But the TV station was
located in Delhi with a transmission radius of 30 miles
within which the only mass rural or otherwise was that of
the deadbeat politicians. Once a week there
would be re-run
of 15 year old Hindi movie and once a month a re-run of 30
year old Hollywood movie, just to keep the thinking man on
the streets of Delhi interested.
One day I parked by 13 Teen Murti Marg and tried to take a
peep into the gates. The Sentry told me that a Big Brown
Big Brass lived there now. Ordinary Brown Big Brasses
were so many in number that they had to be housed in high
rise apartment complexes 20 miles away and transported by
buses! Annaji had retired long since and was living with his
son in Lucknow. He had chronic intestinal ailment. I asked
him to come to New Delhi and look up some better doctors.
After some pulling of political strings, he was admitted to
the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the foremost
research institution in the country. He went into a coma.
Every now and then he would come out of it and talk. That
man had a memory that would make a super-computer wilt.
Even in that state he could recall facts like he had it all in a
compact disk drive between his temples. His CPU could put
a Pentium processor to utter shame. All the test results
showed no conclusive results on what ailed him. My mom
124
TANDOORI TEXAN TALES
was in town and I took her to visit him. She was just 1 day
older to him and they had both been through a lot together.
She bent and gave him a peck on the forehead. That was
very touching. As you grow older and see your
contemporaries leaving one by one, you feel lonely and
forlorn wondering when will it be your turn. It was all over
one day, as he started vomiting blood and never came back
to consciousness. His body was brought to my apartment
for some religious ceremonies before being taken to the
cremation grounds.
New Delhi was the oasis for my business principals
travelling from Germany to Canton Fair or Hong Kong or
Tokyo. They would stop over for a jet lag respite. Of course
it did not hurt to go to Agra and take a picture in front of the
Taj Mahal, you could put it all on your expense report
anyway. End of November saw a swarm of these business
travelers passing by here. Being the local representative of
their business, I would keep them generally pleased. Even
though it was not in my job description, doing a good work
in this area helped a lot to further my career, like perfecting
one’s golf swing while working for IBM. When my
company car was not available, I would use my Old
Faithful. Oberoi Intercontinental was brand-new and the
only five-star hotel of international standards. They would
all stay there in rooms on the upper floors overlooking
green golf course with spick and span carpeted hallways
whispering elevator music. They would drink Western
wines, eat Western cuisine, hear Western music and talk
how Western culture had bettered the lot of the world. They
would of course have a picture of themselves taken in front
of the Taj Mahal to show their friends back home that they
125
RAJ DORÉ
‘did India’ in 2 days. One of them once took me aside and
whispered, “Do you know? Taj Mahal was not built by
Indians at all. It was built by Italians”. I said, “Yes of
course, everybody knows that. It was built by the fully
owned Italian subsidiary of Nippon Construction Co., of
Osaka, Japan”.
They all had standard questions for which I had standard
responses.
Question: “There are so many starving Indians and so many
starving cows, why don’t one eat the other and be happy?”
Response: “Because cows are very gentle and refuse to eat
men and be happy”.
Question: “What about your caste system? We in
industrialized, democratic, free, 1st world countries have
classless society of equal people”.
Response: “I could say the same thing, but not with such a
straight face. If you really believe that, buy my Old
Faithful, she runs on colorless odorless free bovine
excreta”.
I was taken aside and told, “That fellow is the son-in-law of
the Chairman of the Board, ear marked to inherit the
Industrial Empire one day and you should not have been
such a smart ass with him”. I said, “I rest my case on
classless society”.
126
TANDOORI TEXAN TALES
However I must add this person with whom I had that smart
chat became my very good friend and even now after nearly
30 years we exchange Holiday Greeting cards.
127
PART 3
The stewardess gently awakened me. She said we are going
to be landing in New Delhi International Airport shortly and
I should buckle my seat belts keeping the seat upright. I was
shaken from my reverie back to reality. Here I was coming
to New Delhi from Dallas, Texas after an absence of more
than a couple of decades.
Passing through Customs and Immigration was extremely
smooth. This was the first time I was coming to India on a
U.S. passport. I had to get a visa to enter the country. My
emotions were too mixed up to grapple embarrassment. My
brother had come to meet me at the airport with an air-
conditioned car. He let me use one room in his flat that he
had got air-conditioned. He found on his last visit to
129
RAJ DORÉ
Washington DC that people in America wanted everything
air-conditioned.
I had booked a rental car with Budget. After settling down,
we got to their office and got the rental car. For $5 extra per
day, I could also get a chauffeur. Having watched the Delhi
traffic coming from the airport, I grabbed that deal. The car
was of course air-conditioned. In India traffic is supposed to
go on the left side of the read, one more inheritance of
British individuality. But in reality one drives on either side.
It is also survival of the fittest philosophy, you go left or
right or sometimes up and down as well. Lanes are marked
on the road but that is just a formality.
Anil now worked for the World Bank in Washington DC.
He and Ena had a girl Shibani and a boy Akil. Anil gave me
the whereabouts of another mutual friend Surendra. I gave
Surendra a call and we decided to meet for coffee at Volga.
CP looked so different. It had multi-storied skyscrapers all
over the place. I was told the periphery of New Delhi
extended beyond 30 miles spilling over neighboring states.
The stores in CP carried foreign brand names like Reebok,
Neike, Izod, Pepsi, Coke, Doritos, but all made in India.
There were a few more brands of cars locally made than
before. Parking spaces by the street side were at least 2 or 3
deep. Volga served some good Indian Kingfisher beer. I
stopped converting prices from rupees to dollars, and just
gave a handful
of Rupee notes to the waiter and asked him
to keep the change.
Mrs. Thukral at 60 Babar Road got a surprise of her life to
see me. We started ticking off common memories and
130
TANDOORI TEXAN TALES
people. Kai was in Delhi married to an Indian girl. Laila
was having two kids and living with her English husband in
New York City. The trees on the street had not been felled
but half a mile away there were fly over highways and 30
story commercial buildings. Come 5 O’clock in the
evening, they all spilled out zillions of working men and
women trying to get back home. Mrs. Thukral smiled and
said her apartment is never without well paying tenants.
Who knows, next time I see her she would have pulled
down the 3 story house and put up a 30 story apartment
complex, on top there may be a true Penthouse with a
skyline for a view, not just a Barsati. We all get
Americanized sooner or later. Who was I to preach her?
Progress (?) and jobs have a price to pay. The whole city
was belching smoke and dust like it was one big incinerator
gone out of control. Windows of the car were always rolled
up with A/C in full blast. I was not sure if Delhi had got
changed or my perspective had changed after living in free
wide spaces of Texas so long. I guess both are true. I get
that kind of claustrophobic feeling also when I go to New
York City, Boston or Chicago. I asked Puri my rental
chauffeur to take me South Delhi. While there was one
Ring Road before there were two now. Ring Road is
equivalent of American Beltway circling the city. South
Delhi still had the better neighborhoods. It was still not the
most elite. There were also other very livable residential
districts. There were several more 5 star hotels like Hyatt,
Sheraton and what have you. In comparison, Oberoi
Intercontinental seemed drab and dreary from outside.
131