chapter 6

ChicagoThe first call VK made from the new SIM was to his son who said he was fifteen minutes away. We were to wait outside; he’d arrive shortly. With great joy, we wheeled our trolleys out, only to be welcomed with a huge blast of freezing cold air. Brrrrrrr. It was windy Chicago all right. VK quickly donned his coat. I had a lot of warm clothes, all safe in our suitcases. We stood there, shivering, our teeth chattering, our numb hands hardly able to grip our bags.A car drew up, and, recognising Amar, we rushed to it. We must have been going blue with cold for he leaped out, took one look at us and asked us to get into the car; he’d take care of the luggage. ‘Quick, I’ve turned up the heater,’ he said. VK jumped in and jumped out immediately for he had leaped into the driver’s seat. This was the U.S. and, on their roads, left was right and right was left. It took us a few days to get this right.As we sat in the car, thawing slowly, Amar put the luggage into the dickey—trunk in American English—and we were off into the streets of Chicago. De-frozen, we were now able to gape at Chicago’s famed skyline. The rectangular boxes were all over the place; it was truly the land of the skyscraper. It was a strange feeling, to be hemmed in by high rises all around, and I felt a trifle claustrophobic.On our way to the hotel, Amar began educating us about driving in the U.S. He explained how, at minor junctions, drivers followed a zip system to decide whose turn it was to enter a fork. One car from one road moved ahead. The car behind drew up to where the first had been parked but did not follow the car in front. A car from the other fork now had its turn; followed by one from the first road. It seemed to work very well. No honking, no snarling, no pushing ahead of your turn. In fact, we heard the sound of a car honk only twice during our entire U.S. trip, and both times when I tried out the horn on a friend’s car.What a far cry from Indian roads where honking is a compulsion, and happens even if there is only one car on the road. If you have a car, you must toot your horn and let the whole world know, is the philosophy that drives a driver in India. In unsupervised junctions or forks on the road, it is a free for all and the most daring driver wins. But, one has to admit, it is a sort of functioning chaos.The discipline of drivers in the U.S. was impressive. We noticed very few policemen around. At junctions with traffic signals, the signs were respected and everyone waited their turn. Cars were only too happy to stop for pedestrians who could press a button on a post and claim the right to walk across. No one threatened to mow them down. In fact, drivers in cars reacted as if they’d like to lay down the red carpet for pedestrians if that were possible.Post this tutoring about roads in the U.S., we reached Candlewood Suites, a cosy, warm place where Amar had booked a suite. While we freshened up, Amar, not too familiar with Chicago, located an Indian restaurant and we soon headed there for dinner. Eager for my first visit to a restaurant in the U.S., I had one impatient foot inside the door when Amar pulled me back. ‘No, wait,’ he warned. It was time for my first lesson on restaurant etiquette in the U.S.‘Whether it is Indian, American, Thai or Greek, you don’t walk in and pick your seat—near the window, far away from the wash room,’ he tutored me. ‘You have to wait at the entrance and catch the eye of someone who works in the restaurant, who then comes over.’‘Oh, okay.’ This was quite unlike India where you can just barge into a restaurant. If it’s full, you take a quick look around, and make straight for the table where people are having their dessert and plant yourself next to them, sending silent but strong signals, until they choke over the fruit salad, pay the bill and vamoose.We waited, and soon a jaunty young chap greeted us with an enthusiastic, ‘Hi! How are you doing? May I help you?’‘Hi. Table for three, please,’ my son said.I was thrilled by the profuse welcome. My charm was already working. ‘Hi,’ I began, smiling broadly. ‘I’m doing fine, thank you very much. And…’But the chap had turned his complete attention to a couple standing behind us. ‘Hi. How are you doing?’ He addressed them.I learnt soon enough that this was standard American courtesy. Wherever you go, whether it is a shop, a restaurant, a billing counter or a bus station, you are greeted with a bright ‘Hi’ or a delighted ‘Hello’ accompanied by a brilliant smile that immediately fades and reappears like a flash to welcome the person behind you.Another chap soon arrived and led us like meek lambs to the table. Amar said you could express a preference for another table and they would oblige, but hardly anyone did that. We gave our order—parathas, roti and a mughlai curry for Amar and me, and chicken biryani for VK. We ate rather silently; I wasn’t sure if we could talk while eating. What if someone strode to our table to say with a grin, ‘Hi! How are you doing? Would you please leave the restaurant? We don’t allow conversation here.’As we tucked in, VK exclaimed, ‘Ssh, ah, ha.’‘Ah ha, he likes the food,’ I thought and smiled at Amar.But soon it became clear that they weren’t appreciative noises, but his palate’s protests at the spicy food. When Amar saw him push the plate away with tears in his eyes, he said, ‘I’ll ask them to box it.’Box it? I looked at him quizzically. ‘You mean they’ll spank the biryani, “Naughty, naughty”, and throw it away? Haha!’‘Box means to parcel the food,’ Amar laughed. ‘They’ll give us a cardboard box. We have to put the food in.’ That made very good sense, I thought. We can scrape every morsel into the box. I always had this sneaking feeling that not all the food you asked to be parcelled went into the takeaway containers. Amar added that if you don’t wish to eat at the table, you can place your order at the counter, and say you wish for something ‘To go.’ And you wait, get the box, and, well, go.Amar paid the bill with his credit card which was swiped and returned, along with a receipt. ‘What about the tip?’ I asked. I had heard so much about the tipping culture in the U.S.‘This is the “tipping point”,’ Amar smiled. ‘Look, here’s the space on the receipt for the tip and you write the amount; 10 to 15 per cent of the bill amount is the normal tip. Pay 20 or 25 per cent and the waiter will add you in his prayers.’ He booked himself a mention in our waiter’s prayers with his 25 per cent tip. ‘They don’t take the card again. Since they have already swiped the card, they can simply include the tip amount.’‘Can’t they add more than you have specified?’ I asked.He said, ‘Well, I suppose they can but everything is based on trust and there is no hanky panky.’No PIN or OTP required either. It’s all very simple in the U.S. And therefore, not too safe and foolproof, but then the trust factor is pretty big. This amazing, trust-based system is available in India too these days, but I cannot imagine it working too well in my country, for some reason. Three or four dinners at swanky restaurants and, for all you know, a millionaire would be left counting their pennies.‘Waiters in the U.S. work for minimum wages and there’s a kind of tacit understanding that they should earn the rest from tips,’ Amar explained as we left the restaurant. ‘They do earn a sizeable part of their money through tips. If they received living wages, that would be fine, but they don’t; so, they look forward to a better life through tips.’I looked forward to a good night’s sleep. Returning to Candlewood Suites, we were settling down in our room, when Amar commented, looking a little anxious, ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to sleep well tonight.’‘Sez who?’ I retorted. Should it have been ‘whom’? No, ‘who’. Anyway, whom cares? I was already in deep slumber. All that sleeping, walking and eating during the flight had paid off.‘Let’s walk around and scout for a restaurant for breakfast rather than rely on Google search,’ Amar suggested the next morning.‘Yay,’ I responded, all game for adventure. But it ended tamely, for we spotted an attractive one just down the road. This time I remembered to stand at the door and respond with just a smile at the extravagant greeting. We were led to a table near the window for a delightful view of the serene scene outside while, inside, the restaurant bustled with vibrant life—tables with people displaying various degrees of satisfaction depending on which stage of their breakfast they had reached, while smiling waiters hopped about.‘Pancakes,’ I chose from the menu without a second thought. I had always wanted to eat authentic pancakes, though, when I was a child, I had been conned into believing that the pancake was actually our very own dosa. Here was my chance to discover how closely related the two were.My choice was perfect—what delicious pancakes. They were everything I’d hoped they’d be, though I must confess I’d no idea what to hope for. Whether they originated in the Stone Age—a rough imitation of a primal pancake had been found in the stomach of Otzi the Iceman, but I wouldn’t wish to taste that—or were invented by the Romans, the American version was just wow. And didn’t justify the ‘flat as a pancake’ analogy, since I’ve seen flatter dosas.I remembered an interesting titbit I had read regarding that popular phrase. In the early twenty-first century, three geologists, seeking some diversion during their dull excursion across the American Midwest, decided to find out the relative flatness of pancakes and Kansas through topographic profiling. They came out with the astonishing and gleeful discovery that Kansas was flatter. This flat state theory didn’t amuse Kansas geographers, who, determined to defend the honour of their state but unable to disprove its flatness, found solace in comforting comparisons. They pointed out that while Kansas might be flatter than a pancake, other states like Florida and Illinois were even flatter.Tucking into the flat pancake at a restaurant in the flatter state of Illinois, what pleased me most was the superlative taste.The cheerful waiter placed a bottle of maple syrup close to my plate. I was a little wary of maple syrup. Prithvi, the cousin in Chennai, had paid a small fortune to get a bottle of imported maple syrup to celebrate his daughter’s return from Paris after her studies. ‘It tasted awful,’ he had confessed, and now it sat like an ornament at the centre of his dining table, gazing superciliously down at the native pickle and homely sauce bottles.But Amar encouraged me to have a go—it’s the ideal combination with pancakes, he enthused. I took a cautious lick and gave up. I assumed it was an acquired taste, and I wouldn’t have time to acquire the taste during the half hour it took to have breakfast.For the first time, I witnessed first-hand the American obsession with size. When I saw the huge pancakes, my eyes turned as large as the non-existent saucer on the table, the coffee being served in mugs. Amar had ordered scrambled eggs and VK an omelette. The scrambled eggs came in a mountainous heap and the omelette almost overflowed from the huge plate. Obviously, the hard work of a lot of hens had gone into their preparation.And then there were the mugs. Enormous jugs, almost, of coffee brought and placed on the table—drink coffee king size! I took a surreptitious glance around and found that no one else seemed to be intimidated by the giant coffee mugs—they were guzzling their coffee as if it were water. The moment I finished mine, the waiter refilled it. Aghast, I protested. For one, I had just finished drinking that monstrous quantity with great difficulty, for another I thought we’d have to pay for it, and I was beginning to be horrified at how expensive everything was in the U.S., when converting dollar into rupees, of course. Though Amar had warned us against that—it doesn’t make sense, he said, and it would be a total killjoy—how could we not? One dollar is NOT one rupee, after all. By the end of the trip, I had become an expert at mental mathematics.Apparently, you don’t have to pay for the refilled coffee, but I’d gladly have refilled the waiter’s coffeepot with some from my first mugful. Smacking his lips after a satisfying breakfast, VK announced that the huge size of everything put him off food. Ha!Filled to the gullet with pancakes and eggs, and overflowing with coffee, it was only fitting that our next destination be something monumental—The Art Institute of Chicago, the second largest art museum in the U.S. Even as the two enormous statues of bronze lions, sculpted by Edward Kemeys, that flanked the entrance greeted us, looking rather stand-offish, a feeling of awe threatened to overwhelm us at the sheer size of the place.The admission cost a tiny fortune, but the experience was well worth it. You could spend days there and still not see everything. That was the whole idea—woo people in, get them hooked and ensure multiple visits in future. We had to make our choice, and since the museum boasted of one of the best collections of paintings in the U.S., we went to the European Art Section that displayed the Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. They made a huge impression all right. We moaned with joy over the Monet collection, ran our eyes over Renoir’s ‘Two Sisters’, gawked at Van Gogh’s self-portrait, a pre-ear mutilation effort. Cézanne seized our attention with ‘The Bathers’ though ‘Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair’ looked grimly disapproving.By this time, my hunger pangs began. I have a strange problem—the moment I check my watch and find it’s close to meal time, I get hungry and must eat, great art or no art. VK gets lost in museums, and true to form, he was already living on love of artefacts and recycled air.When I mentioned lunch, he looked as if I had made some vulgar suggestion. I appealed to my son, who was a neutral party—he could tilt towards VK’s standpoint and go hungry for hours or could hear the rumbling of my stomach and take my side. Thankfully Amar had digested his scrambled eggs only too well and chose to come with me to forage for food. We followed the helpful arrows that led us to the museum canteen to find that lunch was from 12 to 2, and it was close to 2.Most outlets there had already stopped serving and, looking desperately about us, we found an Indian place that had roti and Goan fish curry—creatively described, for there was only curry and no fish. After some earnest search in the curry with the wooden spoon provided, I fished out a disintegrated bit that had seen better days. We grabbed the two pieces of roti—the last on offer—and made our way to a table. With a great sense of timing, VK joined us. We sat down and shared the food among the three of us, not that it would have mattered to VK what he got, for he was in a hurry to head back to the art gallery. He wouldn’t even have noticed if we had offered him the literature about the museum we had picked up at the entrance; he’d have chewed on it, wiped his lips, commented, ‘Nice, tasty, tasty, nice,’ and disappeared into the museum.VK later said, rather apologetically, that this kind of disregard for food was mostly because he felt we could get food whenever we wanted; art was a rare commodity. So, sublime feelings for art and artefacts took precedence over pandering to baser instincts. Ah, but that’s in India, I countered. Not in the U.S. which is so rule bound that if you are late, you don’t get anything. In fact, as we later learnt, you have to get to the food counter 15 minutes before it closes, for at the exact time, the waitresses pull down the shutters, turn their butts to us and are halfway to the station to catch their train before you can say, ‘Bread and butt….’Corridors led to corridors and we cried halt only when Amar said we had another place to go. We did a last-minute scamper through Ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and Egypt, nodded at gods and goddesses, hobnobbed briefly with hallowed Greek philosophers, stared at exquisite pieces of pottery and artefacts, stepped back hastily from the mummies, smiled at the Buddha who beckoned from the ‘Arts of Asia’ collection and came out of the museum, with VK managing a crick in his neck as he kept turning back to give it long, lingering looks.‘To a skyscraper next,’ said Amar, booking a cab on his phone. ‘That one.’ In the cab he pointed to a tall building in the distance that dwarfed other skyscrapers in the skyline. I got it. ‘Ooh, Sears Tower?’‘No, Willis,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Same place. Name changed when it changed hands.’ Of course, don’t we know about re-naming places? It’s a worldwide ploy to feed egos and keep people confused, but unwittingly helps their memories remain healthy and ticking.At the time of our visit, the Willis Tower was the mother of all skyscrapers in the U.S., with One World Trade Center, which was higher, playing father. Standing tall and proud, its chief aim in life is to give short people a complex. And house more than a hundred businesses, of course. We joined a long queue of differently-hued people, lending it some more colour, and waited for ages. Finally, after clearing tight security checks at different points, we entered a big glass lift, sorry, elevator, and flew to the observation deck, called the Skydeck, at the top, in 60 seconds flat, clipping a second or two from Batman’s speed.From the observation deck, we observed, marvelling at the fantastic view of the high-rise buildings that defined Chicago and felt a special thrill looking down on them. From the ledge, or the glass-boxed balcony, we could look right down and watch tiny toy cars make their way around the ribbon strips, also known as roads. The drizzle made the view a little hazier and more mysterious, adding to the fascination. It was like playing Lego in dim light.