Indore Is for Foodies
We travel from the city with the worst air quality in the world to the cleanest city in India. Indore has banned plastic bags, and—like Delhi does in some places—employs compostable cups, bowls, and other dishware when providing street food.
After our sojourn with Meenakshi, we allow ourselves a night of unworried hanging out before our trip to Indore on Sunday. We’ve already laid out our travel clothes, and we never really unpacked once we got here, so all we have to do is figure out how to store our gifts before our flight tomorrow.
We leave plenty of time to get to the airport, which is just as well. We’re staying in Old Delhi, which is a tiny, cramped maze of streets that reminds me of Stone Town in Zanzibar [Ed. note: Did I really not blog about Zanzibar!?] or some remote villages in the Pyrenees. When you look at a map, all of the restive sizes that you’re used to become skewed. What you think is a one-way street is actually a two-person-wide path gulley between buildings. A scooter or a motorbike could get down it, maybe.
It’s only after our third Uber cancels on us that we begin to get nervous, and start walking in the direction of the major intersections.
We had assumed we could get picked up where we were dropped off—we aren’t so entitled as to expect an Uber pickup in the narrow gulley that abuts our hotel—but apparently we assumed wrong. We also couldn’t converse with any of the drivers that called us as our Hindi isn’t that good, and neither was their English.
We finally manage to cram ourselves in the back of a car that is barely bigger than a rickshaw, with no trunk and our large backpacks occupying all of the space across our knees.
On our way out of town we witness hijras begging for change at an intersection. Then the road opens up a little and cows line either side.
We finally make it to the airport and thank our driver. We’ve eaten away at a good chunk of the extra time we had left ourselves, so when we spot multiple large lines outside the airport, we go in a separate entrance towards the side that has no lines.
This entrance doesn’t appear to connect to the main terminal; it’s lined with kiosks for baggage wrapping services, currency exchanges, ticketing booths, and the like. Matthias stands in line at the booth with our airline’s name on it and I go a few booths down to where some guards are.
‘We’re trying to check in,’ I tell the guard, who doesn’t speak much English.
‘Yes, outside,’ he tells me, much to my dismay.
I’m never proud and hopefully always desperate when I employ this, but I turn on some white coloniser privilege and pretend not to understand. I can see that there are security checks behind him and an entrance to the main terminal.
I show him our tickets. ‘We have tickets to Indore and we’re trying to board,’ I tell him, looking back over my shoulder desperately towards Matthias, second in line now at the booth.
‘But there are two tickets,’ he points out to me, needlessly.
‘Yes, there are two of us,’ I tell him pointlessly.
‘Why do you have two tickets?’ he asks me.
At this point I motion for Matthias to join me.
‘One is for me,’ I tell him, pointing out my name on my ticket and opening my passport.
‘OK,’ he says, ‘Show me the other.’ I had him Matthias’s ticket, tucked inside his passport. The guard opens the passport and reads the ticket.
‘But,’ he says incredulously, ‘It’s Black!’ And opens Matthias’s passport photo, the ends of his Afro cropped just out of the frame.
‘Yes!’ I cry exasperatedly, and turn to nod at Matthias, who has just appeared behind me.
‘O!’ the guard explains bewilderedly, before letting us through his definitely unofficial security checkpoint.
Before we came to India, I asked some of my coworkers who were familiar with the area where we should go and what we should do. ‘Is there nightlife?’ I asked, attempting to scout locations for Matthias and me to go out dancing.
I was met with laughter. ‘No…Indore is not a place with nightlife.’ Some argued (apparently correctly?) that it had the biggest rock scene in all of India. But still, not dancing.
‘But it’s a city of 2 million people!’ I protested, ‘Boston is only 640 thousand and there’s plenty of dancing here!’
‘Meaghan,’ Harshit explained to me patiently, ‘It’s India. You have to change your perception of what is big and what is small. India is a country of 2 billion people.’
He, of course, was right. Even though Indore is a city twice the size of Boston (albeit half the size of the Greater Boston area, apparently), there was not much nightlife. Not much, of course, except the night market…
I had talked up my desire to try panipuri to anyone who would listen, including our Indian counterparts. Madhur (of Meenakshi cousin fame) and Kasturi had prepared some panipuri, or water balls, for us at work recently and explained how these tiny fried dough balls were meant to be pierced with your thumb, filled with some chaat, and ladled to the top with various flavours of liquid before being eaten in one explosive bite that is hard to contain in your mouth.
Monday night, our hosts gleefully meet up with us to take us to the night market. Ravi, another Wayfairian who happens to be from Indore, implored me to try the night market if I enjoyed food at all. He argued that Indore has a more vibrant food scene than Delhi; apparently everyone in Indore is a foodie. If our hosts here are any example, I’d say that’s true.
We take in the sights of the night market as we approach it. It’s one long road that stretches away into a bright distance, lit by the fluorescent lights of food stalls on either side. Unlike in Hanoi, however, there are no clothing shops—just food. We will eat our way through.
The panipuri stall is one of the first on our trip. Our hosts are a bit nervous—apparently no one from Wayfair has ever tried panipuri here before. They haven’t tried it because of the liquid/water with which it’s filled—because of the fear of travellers diarrhoea, really. Diarrhoea be damned.
Panipuri. Let me tell you about panipuri. So these little fried puff balls are served one-by-one as you hold out your bowl for another. They come fast, and we’re lied to that we have to try five—we have to try ten. I can’t remember all of the flavours that we tried. There was onion, garlic, ginger, cumin. Cilantro, mint, lemon, hot. I liked the hot less than I thought I would; my surprise favourite was onion. There were sweet ones at the end that I despised. At one point I’m standing mid-chew with one, another in my hand, and a third on deck in my bowl. It’s something like what you see in this video: Indorians Enjoying 9 Flavours Pani Puri.
I get through all ten, but I have room left afterwards only for small bites of the other dishes we try on the walk. No matter; I have emerged victorious from my panipuri challenge.
There’s so much food—fresh coconut milk and other beverages, endless fried things—including a better tasting (points to Indore) version of the spiral potato we tried in Hanoi—some sweet chaat that was absolutely delicious—and all of it vegetarian.
At the end of the line of stalls, once we’ve turned back and are heading home, we encounter a paan stall. Matthias and I had encountered paan in Delhi with Meenakshi and Vaibhav, so we opted out but opted in to documenting everyone else’s experiences.
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