Being Hosted

We opened sheets of newspaper and lay them overlapping to cover Mr. Achir's carpet. He apologized profusely as we did so, not about eating at a table made of newspaper but about us having to endure his housekeeper's cooking for this impromptu meal. "My wife is not here to cook for the children tonight and the housekeeper's cooking? Well, I don't know."

I had watched the housekeeper earlier dig balls of dough from a steel bowl and roll chippatis, an Indian flatbread. She had looked competent enough to me, simultaneously drizzling ghee (clarified butter) around the dough as it bubbled and rose in the cast iron skillet, monitoring the pressure of the ghosh (mutton curry), and setting up a pot of rice.

Mr. Achir bustled back and forth from the kitchen with bottles of water and big bowls of fluffy white rice. Then he followed with a bowl of ghosh, thick with brown gravy, and a heaping bowl of sauteed and spiced and shredded cabbage. Finally he set a smaller bowl down on the newspapers and, full of pride, announced, "My wife made that one. Green chile curry. It is a little spicy so maybe it is not fit for the children. Come let's eat!" I could make out some small green chiles and peanuts swimming in a dangerous looking red sauce, topped with more of the melted ghee.

We filled the dishes for the children while Achir chastised us for being so stingy with the size of our servings. He piled buttery chippati after chippati on our plates. His own children began to eat, left hands tucked neatly in their laps, right hands fully engaged in the art of mixing rice with sauces and gravies.

Tian dantily ate from her spoon, but Tehva stopped short. "Chinja is eating with his hands." The only thing missing from her observation was an, "Oooooooo! He's in trouble!" but her tone definitely suggested that she was expecting a spanking to follow shortly for seven-year-old Chinja.

As Tehva watched Chinja's deft one-handed eating, she dropped her spoon. Truth be told, the dishes looked even more delicious as Chinja mixed and pinched, and then neatly shoveled his food into his mouth. "Can I do that, too?" And before I could even respond Tehva was mixing and shoveling, too.

Silas silently eyed Tehva, Chinja, and Chinja's sister, Ruksana, and then put aside his fork. "Mom, I'm going to use my hands," he stage whispered, as if preparing to dive off of a cliff or wrestle a crocodile. If it is possible for a seven-year-old boy to look awkward eating with his fingers, Silas fulfilled that possibility. He gradually doubled himself over, all the while shoveling rice into his mouth, until his chest rest solidly on his criss-crossed legs. Then he folded tighter, his face just a few inches off his plate. Finally he decided to lay on his stomach and close that precarious inch between his plate and his mouth. Bad manners? Probably.

We wiped up the last of the gravy with the chippatis only to have Achir throw more chippatis at us. "No, no," I protested. "You're making me fat!" As fast as I could eat those buttery flatbreads I was finding more food on my plate. Then I remembered. Stop eating--leave things uneaten. As painful as it was to American sensibilities, I took a bit of mutton and a bit of cabbage, played with it, and let it be. No more chippatis came flying in my direction.

As we walked out the door later in the evening, the kids were astonished. "Wow! That was the best day ever and we didn't even know them at the start!" It was true. All three kids had been there since early afternoon and had been entertained, fed, entertained, fed, entertained and fed again. "The only thing better than lunch was dinner! That was amazing! And we had such a good time! We did they do that for us? In the United States that would never happen!"

I tried to explain cultural differences to Tian and Silas. I tried to explain the concept of karma and how some believe that good deeds come back to revisit those who lay a path of kindness. I talked and talked but in the end they set their own conclusions.

They decided that Mr. Achir and his family are good people and no longer strangers to us. And boy can they lay out a mean dinner spread.

Human nature leads us to make generalizations--sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. and I let them generalize away on this one. This is what they now believe--people from India are so nice--that equals out to more than 1/5 of the world's population being full of kindness!

What a nice mindset to have achieved in the course of just two meals and an afternoon of play.