Indian Office Life
We’re only here for two days here in Indore, really. We have a 6:50AM flight from Indore Wednesday morning, so we have Monday and Tuesday here to complete our work.
We have even more difficulty than usually getting picked up at our hotel Tuesday, and it turns out to be because there is ‘a cricket team’ staying in our hotel. I snap some pictures in case any of my colleagues back in Boston can recognise anyone. It turns out they can; it’s the Indian national cricket team, with a captain so handsome that he made it into a lunch-and-learn presentation my team had recently had about cricket.
We spend the first half of Monday just getting set up in the office. Our computers couldn’t connect to the WiFi, and IT came back and forth a few times to ask us for varying additional information like our MAC addresses (…that we could have provided ahead of time). By lunch we were all set up, however, and our emails were downloading as we ate our way through some (very bland) curry.
I should take a moment to point out how very bland this very bland curry is. I consider myself fairly familiar with Indian cuisine (and yes, I recognise what a conceited statement that is, but my past lunches and current spice cabinet could back it up in fair order); in fact it could rival Turkish cuisine as my favourite. I know the various preparation methods and spices, and I often cook Indian cuisine at home.
I have no idea what this curry was.
It was some kind of creamy tofu thing? It was served over rice, and its overall colour was a very, very pale green—like something that once had greens in it, but had been watered down with a lot of cream. It tasted creamy, but also like a dish that had had only cream added to it and no other seasonings—salt, pepper, coriander, cumin, and certainly no chilis. I ate it with chapatis and it was fairly filling, but so bland it was like eating a soft pillow of nothingness.
Monday we had ordered into the office, but Tuesday we walked down to a restaurant in the area. After talking up how much I love spicy food, and after getting the pick of the best vegetarian dishes on the menu at the restaurant after some heated debate with our hosts, I learned that the curry I had had the day before was intentionally bland because all of the other Wayfarians who had visited before.
‘I’m so sorry! If only we had known! I’m told. ‘We usually order it so that the Americans…’ and he trails off.
Of course. The Americans. Of course they couldn’t. I know the kind of Americans of which they speak; we all do: they’re the kind of white woman who…well, the kind of white woman who would be in India and not eat spicy food.
Office life in India otherwise is fairly typical for international travel. We have our fair share of both WiFi (as mentioned), login, and charging mishaps. Tessa manages to spark a whole power strip out of power, including my laptop charger that was precariously charging. Steve Jobs is stencilled in high relief on the wall.
Our second (and last) lunch here is really incredible. We eat out of thali plates—a sort of high-sided stainless steel round plate—and I enjoy all of the (both very spicy and not!) vegetarian appetisers and main dishes that the restaurant has to offer. I don’t even bother to take my anti-diarrhoea medication beforehand.
Despite all of our precautions—and the fact that Mathias was not subjected to yesterday’s bland curry—I still spend the afternoon of that work day asking our hosts what kind of cold medicine they can find. Matthias, who today has shirked stopping traffic on account of his Blackness and instead settled into bed to rest up, has let me know that’s he’s put up in bed, and not feeling well. I finally get my hands on some cold medicine thanks to our hosts and head out a little early to go play nurse before our 24-hour journey home tomorrow, hoping all the while that whatever this illness is manages to be a 24-hour bug.