Buying Dinner

You'll have to indulge me again with a preface, as I need to explain a bit about food here. My family (similar to many Nepalis) eat two main meals a day. One in the morning anywhere from 9 to eleven and then again in the evening, usually pretty late. The standard meal is rice (Bhat) or flat bread (Roti), lentil soup (Dal), curry (Tarkari), and some sort of pickled vegetable for spice (Achar). Since I'm guest and male, I get to eat first, and my servings are always far more than I would normally eat in the U.S. This is especially troublesome in the morning as I normally don't like to eat much until noonish. The standard conversation goes something like this:

Mom: Here you go. Eat slowly. It doesn't taste good, does it? I didn't taste it, I'm fasting today (I kid you not, she "fasts" about three days in a week, which doesn't mean she can't eat, she just can't eat certain foods, like salt or sugar or garlic or rice. It changes.)

Me: Oh ho! This is a lot of food! It's delicious. You have given me so much. In the morning my stomach is small and I cannot eat much.

Mom: (noticing that I'm maybe halfway done with the Dal, places another spoonful on my plate) Here, you have to eat more. (And then, after I allow only one more spoonful:) The food tastes bad.

Me: No. No. The food is delicious (and it almost always is). I just can't eat that much in the morning.

Mom: Fine. Fine. Eat Slowly. Its not very good though. Here, let me give you more Dal.

And so on.

So last night I got home around seven and discovered that the kitchen and another room in the house had just gotten painted (they are in the process of building their house). Mom explains that they (she and the servant girl) have been moving stuff all day and their really tired. A rare moment of thoughtfulness comes to me, and I offer that we could all go to a restaurant for dinner. Mom smiles warmly at the idea. "Everyone?" she asks (this should have made me pause). "Sure." I reply.

We wait for a half hour for my brother to get back from a friend's house, as he is the eldest son and these sort of decisions are increasingly put on him. Meanwhile, my host sister, who is married and lives in a different home, shows up with her child. Moments later her husband arrives. Word must have gotten out that I was buying. Then the three guys who painted the house earlier in the day showed up again out of nowhere. I was just about to say something about definitions of everyone, but thankfully they had come for some other reason.

When Sanjay arrived, it was decided that instead of us all going to a restaurant, Sanjay and I would walk to one and bring the food back. So we headed out to a restaurant where a friend of his works, and promptly ordered about seven main courses. It took the kitchen about an hour to get this all done (and was likely half of their business that night). On the way back we stopped and bought a liter of pepsi to cap things off.

The meal was like thanksgiving dinner, all sorts of different dishes spread out. There were a couple of moments where they wanted me to eat first, but I think the temptation matched with my insistence that tonight was "western night" melted the traditional order of things and after five minutes of hurried food collection the room was silent. I have to admit that I really wanted to start forcing seconds onto people's plates and deriding the food, but I didn't think the joke would go over well.

At the end though, everyone did say thank-you several times, which was nice. We drank the Pepsi for desert, and I was surprised to see that all the food had been eaten. I realized later that evening that my family had quite possibly never gone to a restaurant as a group before, or potentially had done anything like it. At least when I lived there, that wasn't even a thought. Its that type of privilege that we sometimes forget about in the U.S.

Oh, and the total bill to feed eight people: less than $9.