Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

HOW DO YOU EAT?

217 Kathmandu,฀Nepal,฀2000 I sit, squeezed between Adam and Sapana, on a narrow couch. On my lap I balance a snack plate containing half a hard-boiled egg, three rice balls stuffed with cooked vegetables, a few slices of pickled cucumber, and two pale pink rice wafers. The hard-boiled egg slithers around on the plate and drops into my lap. “It’s okay,” I tell Sapana, whose dark eyes register what she takes to be my distress. “These black pants won’t show a thing.” At least I hope they’re not showing almost two weeks of rough and tumble eating, much of it seated on cushions on the floor around Adam and Sapana’s low oblong table. I cope poorly with food on the floor, especially when I’m eating with my hands, as I occasionally do here, following the custom of my daughterin -law’s country. I also cope poorly with Rahula, Adam and Sapana’s year-old son, who, when he’s not at his mother’s breast, circles us like a sheepdog, leaving a trail of mushy bananas, chocolate, grape jam, and rice. This evening it’s important that my costume pass muster because I am on display. Sapana’s parents have invited relatives to meet their son-in-law’s mother. At last, they can introduce a member of the family of the American father of their first grandchild. Thus far about twenty-five people—the older women in brilliantly colored saris—have passed through the narrow living room where the three of us are perched, surrounded by eight members of Sapana’s parents’ household. I twist awkwardly in my chair to smile at Sapana’s diminutive aunt, who sits to Adam’s left, her chair, like our sofa, flush against the wall.Turning sharply to my right, I flash a smile at Sapana’s mother, who is seated to Sapana’s right, also flush against the wall. The rest of the family is lined up opposite us. A passage, no more than three feet wide, leads from this “Western” living room to the “Eastern” one, a square, carpeted space furnished with bright woven cushions and a color TV. The English term for this household, Sapana once explained to me, is “joint family.” Even as I envisioned a large cut of meat, a roast with the bone still in it, I understood that she meant “joint” as in shared, fastened together. They are all joined in a tight unit: Sapana’s parents, her father’s brother and sister-in-law, her father’s unmarried sister, Sapana’s brother and sister-in-law, and her two adult HOW฀DO฀YOU฀EAT?฀ EATING ALONE 218 sisters. Bound together yet elastic now, in their embrace of Adam, in the warmth I feel in their eyes, and in the outpouring of welcoming words whose meanings I can easily imagine. I reach for my orange soda, wishing it were a double scotch. “My mother wants to know how you like Kathmandu,” Sapana is saying. “I’m happy to be here,” I respond, “happy to be in your home.” Clearly this is not the occasion for sounding off about the pollution, the abominable traffic, the uncollected garbage, the power outages, the sad-eyed beggars in the streets, or the emptiness I experience without the New York Times. “Sapana’s father is asking who lives in your house with you,” Adam says, interrupting my silent conversation with myself. “Tell him I live alone,” I say. Sapana’s father inspects my face. A slender man in sparkling white Nehru pants and a white Nehru jacket, he is fine featured like my movie-star-beautiful daughter-in-law. I feel the weight of the question he is about to ask. “My father wants to know how you eat,” Sapana says. “We can’t imagine eating alone. No one eats dinner in my parents’ house until everyone who lives here is home. If my sister-in-law is delayed at hospital, they wait. Eating means eating together,” she says, elaborating her father’s thought. Eating alone is easy, I want to say. I eat what I like, when I like. No one sees how much red meat I devour or how much Chardonnay I drink. I can indulge an impulse for sushi without having to lay on a fancy meal or make brilliant conversation . The New York Times brings six presidents and five prime ministers to the breakfast table along with...