A Dinner With Partha

Our first weekend in Chennai we were invited to have dinner at Partha’s house. He is the project head of all the Logos projects at Amnet. He and his wife and their daughter as well as his brother and his wife and her sister were also there and all living in this one little tiny house. One bathroom…and the tiniest kitchen I have ever seen. Tile floors and bright purple walls. In their home spent a lot of time looking at large photo books of their wedding day. It was beautiful! The weddings here are stunning and an all day affair! It was so elaborate and amazing. I hope that we can participate in one before we leave because they would be quite an experience.

Communicating was not too bad. There were a lot of awkward silences, but that is to be expected I suppose when we were so tired!!!! The accent is hard to get used to too, but I am getting there. It will just take time.

Anyway, we sat criss cross style on colorful straw mats on the tile floor in the living. Partha and his family presented to us a large banana leaf each that is about 2 feet by one foot that they put our food on. You eat with your right hand only, and tear the breads for dipping in sauces (Chutneys). We ate Idly (sticky rice cakes) Dahls (like thick soup), Dosa (flat idly sort of like a pancake), and of course lots of Chicken Biryani. They put down about 4 different kinds of chutneys that you dip the breads, or the idly in to eat. We had a mint one, a sweet mango one, a coconut one, and another one that I cannot remember. I remember there were two different sauces with chicken in them, squid, prawns, fish (Miles’ fish still had its eye), and several more things. Also, we ate with our hands (right hand only) which is very difficult for Miles being left handed. Well the women around Partha would present him with the various containers of food, and would put large portions of it on the banana leaf and tell us what things were. It was all very tasty—the biryani was little on the spicy side. They probably served us about 7 meals, and never once sat down or joined us. It is customary to have them watch us eat and make sure we were perfectly comfortable. That was the hardest part was having them watch us eat and every time we finished something they plopped more down on the leaf. We both had to start denying food, which we think they found offensive. Oh dear!

Partha and his family would eat after we had left. That was terribly difficult to have them watch us and not participate with us. There was dessert as well...some sort of toffee ice cream. It was a wonderful meal and great way to meet some more people, Miles will be working closely with Partha so it was good to meet him outside of the office as well as his beautiful family. It was also a great way to learn about traditional everyday life of a middle class Indian.