titanic brunch
I was at work for thirteen hours today, which was brutal. It was made more brutal by the fact that I didn't go to bed last night until 1:30am, with the expectation that I would get to sleep for six hours. Instead, I was shaken out of my blissfully strange malaria-pill dreams by a violent thunderstorm around four a.m. The lightning and thunder were intense, the wind threatened to knock my windows in, and rain came into my shower through the bathroom window. Luckily, it does not matter if one's shower is soaked; in fact, the rain water was probably cleaner than the water that I actually bathe in. I have missed thunderstorms during my time in California, so it was nice to have one, but hopefully my sleep will not be interrupted again tonight.
At the office today, I ate a whole package of Ritz-cracker-knockoffs (i.e. they taste like Ritz crackers, but are made by someone else and only cost six rupees, or around eleven cents). They were extremely tasty, and the package revealed their stunning secret: they are made with 'edible vegetable oil.' I am shocked and devastated to learn that my entire life, I have been eating products made with potentially-inedible vegetable oil. As a daughter of the Corn Belt, I feel cheated and lied to.
Since nothing happened at the office today worth repeating (the power even stayed on all day!), I will regale you with more tales of my weekend. Namely, I shall describe brunch at the Taj Krishna.
The Taj Krishna is a luxury hotel approximately twenty minutes from my apartment, which is located in Hitec City. The Taj Krishna is across the street from the hotel in which I stayed at the beginning of my trip; as you can tell from the name of my former hotel, the Taj Residency, the two hotels are related. I do not know why the same company owns two equally-upscale hotels across the street from one another, but I have stopped questioning things that do not make sense here.
The brunch at the Taj Krishna is called the 'Titanic Brunch', which seems to be a rather unfortunate reference, although I suppose that everyone on the actual Titanic drowned before they had the chance to contract food poisoning from the ship buffet. There is a pool outside the restaurant, and so the drowning option exists for us as well. Every Sunday at around noon, any expat who is awake piles into the cars (driven by liveried drivers wearing white shirts, white pants, and a small 'CosyCabs' logo on the left breast) and takes the short trip over to the Taj Krishna. Once there, we always sit at the same long table, and we all order the same things that we typically get. My default order is a barbecued chicken pizza, and I also eat a croissant with smoked salmon while enduring the interminable wait for the pizza. However, many other people choose to eat waffles, and the chefs also turn out some remarkable French fries. I find it ironic that I usually cannot have ice at the Titanic Brunch, but c'est la vie.
Brunch at the Taj Krishna makes me contemplate my expatriate status more strongly than just about anything else. By Sunday at noon, most of us have spent Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Saturday night with each other; that leaves very little to discuss over brunch. We talk about the same things that all Westerners seem to talk about (the heat, the weather, our work, the five restaurants we always go to and how they compare to each other, which stores we should go to this weekend, etc.).
That is all perfectly fine; I enjoy spending time with my coworkers, and some of them are becoming genuine friends. However, the expatriate feeling is inescapable at the Taj Krishna. The Titanic Brunch caters to a large crowd of Westerners, and so it feels like what I have always imagined a British club to be. Looking around, one sees a) intricate artwork, b) stunning food creations, c) more white people than any other place in Hyderabad, and d) uniformed natives catering to one's heart's desire. I do not think that some unfortunate British wives went mad because of the heat; they went mad from attempting to layer their old lives on a completely alien world.
At the Taj Krishna on Sunday, I noticed that a man sitting at a table near ours kept looking at us, and he appeared to be sketching as he stared. He was hunched over his journal, long straggly grey hair falling onto the table, and he would occasionally look up furtively (but intensely) as his hand moved across the paper. I made eye contact with him several times--that awkward, startled eye contact of one who has been caught staring, but cannot feel too ashamed because the person who did the catching was staring as well. I had been skimming the surface of the conversation around me, and was focusing most of my attention on my inner thoughts and on a bird perched beside the pool outside. I was also engaged in the same sort of detached observation that I typically practice when in a group that I am not wholly a part of; observation that protects the inside as much as it watches the outside. And so, while it felt unsettling and surreal to furtively watch someone who was furtively watching us, I did not want to draw anyone else's attention to him. Since I was essentially doing the same thing, only without paper, it seemed unfair to turn him into an object of amusement, or scorn, or revulsion. I wanted to see what he was drawing, but it was impossible without inviting the attention of everyone else, and so we left the Taj Krishna and the moment disappeared.
Brunch at the Taj Krishna is not a comfortable tradition like dim sum; it is a reminder of how alienated I am from this country, and how different I am when I am with coworkers, rather than family and friends. On the surface, brunch is just a pleasant Sunday activity, replete with tasty Westernized food and the occasional after-brunch pedicure at the salon downstairs. However, beneath the waves lurks all of the fear, dislocation, culture shock, and indescribable wonder of living in Hyderabad.
The message is heightened by the Sri Lankan calypso band that plays in the restaurant; their best songs are 'One Way Ticket' and a cover of 'Hotel California'. Surrounded by loud expatriates and deferential waiters, staring at (and being stared at by) a mysterious artist/pervert, idly eating salmon on the surface while facing an existential crisis beneath the waves, the lines 'you can check out but you can never leave' seemed to have been written just for me.
At the office today, I ate a whole package of Ritz-cracker-knockoffs (i.e. they taste like Ritz crackers, but are made by someone else and only cost six rupees, or around eleven cents). They were extremely tasty, and the package revealed their stunning secret: they are made with 'edible vegetable oil.' I am shocked and devastated to learn that my entire life, I have been eating products made with potentially-inedible vegetable oil. As a daughter of the Corn Belt, I feel cheated and lied to.
Since nothing happened at the office today worth repeating (the power even stayed on all day!), I will regale you with more tales of my weekend. Namely, I shall describe brunch at the Taj Krishna.
The Taj Krishna is a luxury hotel approximately twenty minutes from my apartment, which is located in Hitec City. The Taj Krishna is across the street from the hotel in which I stayed at the beginning of my trip; as you can tell from the name of my former hotel, the Taj Residency, the two hotels are related. I do not know why the same company owns two equally-upscale hotels across the street from one another, but I have stopped questioning things that do not make sense here.
The brunch at the Taj Krishna is called the 'Titanic Brunch', which seems to be a rather unfortunate reference, although I suppose that everyone on the actual Titanic drowned before they had the chance to contract food poisoning from the ship buffet. There is a pool outside the restaurant, and so the drowning option exists for us as well. Every Sunday at around noon, any expat who is awake piles into the cars (driven by liveried drivers wearing white shirts, white pants, and a small 'CosyCabs' logo on the left breast) and takes the short trip over to the Taj Krishna. Once there, we always sit at the same long table, and we all order the same things that we typically get. My default order is a barbecued chicken pizza, and I also eat a croissant with smoked salmon while enduring the interminable wait for the pizza. However, many other people choose to eat waffles, and the chefs also turn out some remarkable French fries. I find it ironic that I usually cannot have ice at the Titanic Brunch, but c'est la vie.
Brunch at the Taj Krishna makes me contemplate my expatriate status more strongly than just about anything else. By Sunday at noon, most of us have spent Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Saturday night with each other; that leaves very little to discuss over brunch. We talk about the same things that all Westerners seem to talk about (the heat, the weather, our work, the five restaurants we always go to and how they compare to each other, which stores we should go to this weekend, etc.).
That is all perfectly fine; I enjoy spending time with my coworkers, and some of them are becoming genuine friends. However, the expatriate feeling is inescapable at the Taj Krishna. The Titanic Brunch caters to a large crowd of Westerners, and so it feels like what I have always imagined a British club to be. Looking around, one sees a) intricate artwork, b) stunning food creations, c) more white people than any other place in Hyderabad, and d) uniformed natives catering to one's heart's desire. I do not think that some unfortunate British wives went mad because of the heat; they went mad from attempting to layer their old lives on a completely alien world.
At the Taj Krishna on Sunday, I noticed that a man sitting at a table near ours kept looking at us, and he appeared to be sketching as he stared. He was hunched over his journal, long straggly grey hair falling onto the table, and he would occasionally look up furtively (but intensely) as his hand moved across the paper. I made eye contact with him several times--that awkward, startled eye contact of one who has been caught staring, but cannot feel too ashamed because the person who did the catching was staring as well. I had been skimming the surface of the conversation around me, and was focusing most of my attention on my inner thoughts and on a bird perched beside the pool outside. I was also engaged in the same sort of detached observation that I typically practice when in a group that I am not wholly a part of; observation that protects the inside as much as it watches the outside. And so, while it felt unsettling and surreal to furtively watch someone who was furtively watching us, I did not want to draw anyone else's attention to him. Since I was essentially doing the same thing, only without paper, it seemed unfair to turn him into an object of amusement, or scorn, or revulsion. I wanted to see what he was drawing, but it was impossible without inviting the attention of everyone else, and so we left the Taj Krishna and the moment disappeared.
Brunch at the Taj Krishna is not a comfortable tradition like dim sum; it is a reminder of how alienated I am from this country, and how different I am when I am with coworkers, rather than family and friends. On the surface, brunch is just a pleasant Sunday activity, replete with tasty Westernized food and the occasional after-brunch pedicure at the salon downstairs. However, beneath the waves lurks all of the fear, dislocation, culture shock, and indescribable wonder of living in Hyderabad.
The message is heightened by the Sri Lankan calypso band that plays in the restaurant; their best songs are 'One Way Ticket' and a cover of 'Hotel California'. Surrounded by loud expatriates and deferential waiters, staring at (and being stared at by) a mysterious artist/pervert, idly eating salmon on the surface while facing an existential crisis beneath the waves, the lines 'you can check out but you can never leave' seemed to have been written just for me.
posted by Sara @ 10:13 AM
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