Summer fun

I just had my first mango of the summer. I look forward to more tomorrow. 

How to keep yourself from being masturbated at by strange men

You may think it is enough to build walls, put up a roof, and live in the house, to keep yourself from being jacked off at by random men. But this is not enough. Should you be lucky enough to have a garden, put a gate around it, make it high, but this will not keep someone from sitting on the road and playing with his penis at you.

You may think that this is not related to you at all; it’s just a man caught at a stray moment on a road that has a decent amount of tree cover on a hot afternoon. This is not true. You know this because he is sitting right outside your gate directing his gaze at the young woman working inside the house, at her desk, doing accounts, The light is on, and you can see her typing. This is obviously highly arousing (perhaps you will want to make this her fault- she was provoking him by poking at her calculator).

But for the last few moments his gaze has been on you, and because you are weighed down by the bottles of detergent and club soda that you carried home from the store on foot, you aren’t really paying attention to his hand rapidly moving up and down. When you notice him pointing his penis towards you unfortunately the instinct is to shriek and run inside. An instinct you have to fight to reach into your bag to hunt for your phone. Should he threaten you, you could run into the house and lock yourself in, but should he overpower you and come into the house with you, there is little you can do.

And then before you know it he does, and he takes off around the corner, leaving you with the unpleasant image of being threatened by some strange dick, and the fear that this situation could escalate to something even more physically threatening.  The police are no help. You did not have the presence of mind to take down a full license plate number, and without this they do not want to interrupt their Sunday afternoon nap. You have the last two digits, but that is not enough.

The men who look after the neighbouring house for some fancy politician type do not care much, they have a camera trained on the road, perhaps they can get me a license plate off the footage, but they seem bereft of all expression when I request the footage.

This has happened before, another man who works on the road tells me. That time this guy hung around for 45 minutes, and frightened a group of young girls returning from school. But no one complained. We do not know if it was the same guy. He was wearing a helmet, so I have at once seen too much, and not enough of him to be able to recognise him.

The police return my call after 30 minutes. If it happens again please let us know. Again we will interrupt our snooze to hear you complain. He didn’t do anything to you right? So why do you care? Let it go madam, we have other things to do.

It seems like there is very little you can really do to keep yourself from being masturbated at without your consent.  Perhaps by next Sunday afternoon, which is really the only time the road is this deserted in daylight hours, I shall buy a gun (look I married an American, it was bound to show eventually). A girl can dream.  

Food notes after 2 months in North Carolina

I would have said the South, but the South is big. And Alabama is very different. See- I am assimilating- I am taking on the disdain of a native North Carolinian for her less advanced neighbours.

Here are some assorted notes on the food from here (not comprehensive in the least). Some of it is delicious. Some of it is inscrutable. Most of it is very bad for you. All of it will make you miss a good hit of sour like in a good kadhi, or sambar. It is very much like Punjab here- a purely butter based civilisation. The predominance of vinegar in meat preparations does not count, it leaves an anaemic tang in the mouth that is far from satisfactory.

i) I have been introduced to pork ribs. We ate them dry rubbed St Louis style (which apparently means something specific because every city has a style and they all compete with each other about how much sugar to put in their food- St Louis mercifully puts very little) and they were fantastic. I am now a convert, even though I approach most barbeque with suspicion. I do not think people should get points just because things have been cooked over charcoal. I am from India. This lack of modern equipment does not impress me much.

ii) I have eaten fried chicken. Chickens here have breasts bigger than many humans do- and you have to worry about this, but it is all the same after a good frying. And fried chicken is very good.

iii) When Southerners say sausage what they mean is spiced pork made into a patty of any shape, called a sausage just to cause confusion as there is never any casing to be seen. They eat these frequently, often on a biscuit- also called so to cause confusion with a native English speaker (ha! see what I did there?). Here a biscuit is not a crisp thing to pick up and dip into tea but a fluffy mound of cornmeal, butter and cheese that disappears easily in the mouth, only to appear almost instantly on your electrocardiogram.

iv) Pecan pie. Now as a woman in a bar in the middle-of-nowhere Georgia told me- it is not pe-can like pee-can which is a thing that sits under your bed, but pay-Kahn like the Dominique Strauss. How ever you say it pecan pie is wonderful. Red velvet cake, key lime pie, pound cake, brownies and blondies, something with funfetti because the stuff is everywhere, will also often show up on the same dessert table, but the pecan pie is best.

Now a small note about pound cakes. This is not a sponge cake. It is a plain cake, with flour, butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla. I have not understood why this cake is so beloved.  My husband and his parents think it to be the height of culinary achievement, and they are not alone in this. Nothing in which you put equal parts sugar, butter and flour can fail if you ask me. Most American baking has so much butter and sugar that it must be very hard to make it taste bad. To me pound cake seems the most boring thing. It is not sublime in texture, it is not a showcase for excellent vanilla like an ice cream can be, it is not a particular test of skill, but it often inspires a devotion that is difficult to comprehend for those of us coming to this food in our adulthood. It will send grown men into raptures, and is more mystery than food.

Kaju katli is very hard to make.

Things I have watched in the last 2 weeks

The One I Love
I have liked Mark Duplass since I watched Your Sister's Sister some years ago. He's some some great little bits on The Mindy Project. Lovely as he is this movie was a bit annoying. I think they could have taken the main plot device a bit further. This is a quiet film about a dysfunctional marriage between two completely normal, and slightly annoying people- which made me both like it, and be bugged by it.

The Obvious Child
Jenny Slate is fantastic. She shows up every so often on Parks and Recreation, and this film made me want to hug her. I imagine that for many of us the twenty-something broke girl figuring out life in New York thing can get a bit old but this movie was very sweet. As a bonus it also has that guy who showed up in the last few seasons of the Office. And there's an abortion which gets treated completely normally. Which is really nice. 

Outsourced
This movie had one scene where the American hero is doing an Indian voice to the Indian heroine, and she's being Texan back at him, which is, unfortunately, what conversations with my American husband sometimes devolve into. It is unavoidable. He cannot get over the headshaking, and I cannot get over the ridiculous English. This movie had some really funny bits, without anything terribly special to recommend it.

Shuddh Desi Romance
This was so much fun. Parineeti Chopra is one to watch, and all four characters here were perfect. This was the second movie in as many weeks that talked about abortion without making it seem like some terribly tragedy, and I liked that a lot. Also this movie got so many little details right about living alone as a girl in a barsaati. The washing of clothes in plastic buckets, and the importance of cupboard space. I look forward to watching this again.

Daawat-e-Ishq
Not enough food. Terrible songs. Wonderful t shirts, and moustaches. 

The Fall
I hope there is a third season. I binge-watched this over a weekend when sick, and was terribly sad when it finished. Jamie Dornan is so much better than this 50 Shades nonsense will make him appear to be. Gillian Anderson is luminous, and so so good in this series about a detective and a serial killer.

Blackfish
This year SeaWorld declared bankruptcy and I have been wanting to see this documentary, about their mistreatment of killer whales, for a while. It was terribly written. The script seemed to be more interested in letting former SeaWorld employees apologise for their negligence. They explained over and over how they had not known that this might be a difficult environment for these massive whales. J and I watched it in parts, and were depressed after every segment.
So this one SeaWorld employee was killed by a whale and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which sounds very much like a union to me, got involved in the investigation, eventually leading to trainers being banned from working, as well as a bill in California against the use of orcas in parks. I saw the situation, and the documentary as being about a victory for union action, which gets a lot of crap in the US. I am tired of hearing about how unions destroy things instead of protect people. It was good to see a documentary that essentially said if these people hadn't gone to court no one, including apparently handlers who worked with these animals all day every day, would have known how terrible working conditions for people, and living conditions for the orcas were. It was terribly written, but I am glad to have watched it. 

Mean Girls
I liked this. Hadn't seen this before. How lovely Lindsay Lohan was. How lovely Lizzy Caplan is, and how eagerly I await the next season of Masters of Sex. I'm not sure I'm on the Tina Fey bandwagon but I was so happy to see Amy Poehler. Please follow the link for only the best version of We Didn't Start the Fire.
http://video.vulture.com/video/Parks-Recreation-We-Didn-t-Star

Thai Villa

J and I like Thai food. Or rather J likes Thai food, I dream about it on a near daily basis and love it beyond all reason. One particular lemon fish that I ate as a 13 year old in Banglampoo before the mall burnt down and had to be rebuilt will forever be my most perfect fish.

I am in the process of moving to North Carolina and we have not discovered our go-to Thai restaurant yet. We have this kind of pan-Asian fusion restaurant around the corner, Tasu, and the food is a lot better than that shady description makes it sound. It is not identifiably Chinese, or Thai or Vietnamese, but their wonton soup is a thing of wonder, and everything they send out is delicious. I love it, but it is not where I would go if I wanted Thai food.

So we decided to try something new, and ventured into Thai Villa, in Cary. Only 3 tables were occupied, which is not the best sign, but it's kind of hidden away in one corner of a strip mall, so we shrugged that off. Big mistake. On entry the place looked promising. There wasn't a single tv, which has been my major grouse about most American restaurants- why must people always be watching sports? Even when out to dinner? And why do you need a 5 screens per room to watch them on? Anyhow. The lack of screens and the friendly service were a good start. But it was all boiled socks from there.

J ordered the Chicken Tom Yum Soup and Rainforest Curry with chicken. I ordered Glass Noodle Vegetable Rolls and Kapow Chicken (chicken with basil, red chilli paste and green peppers). The soup looked and tasted as if it came from a Knorr soup cube that hadn't even been brought to the boil. The chicken smelt bad. I would find that all the chicken they served that evening was really really smelly. The vegetable roll was a small limp thing with little to recommend it. Both the chicken main courses had the flavour of nothing so much as the boiled socks of a teenage boy.

The chicken was rank, but even worse was the criminal way in which they dealt with the curries. We decided not to stay, and that's never happened before. Neither of us has left a table at a restaurant after just a few bites convinced that the meal is beyond saving.

I've been to Thailand several times, and I don't expect the food to taste like on the streets of Bangkok. It is really painful though to encounter something so rank that calling it Thai would be insulting to the cuisine, and calling it food would be an unfortunate mistake.

I keep falling asleep in different parts of the house over this horrible document that needs editing. The dog is tired of being startled awake whenever J comes upon us. J is tired of having to wake me up so that I can get this done and we can have our life of leisure and poverty back. I am tired of falling asleep in the cold and waking up covered in dog hair while being told off by an irate American.