I knew that I had to head roughly west to get to the train line, and that if I could get to the tracks I would just have to walk north or south a few blocks to get to a station. I started following the roads west. After a few blocks, the road split, so I asked a woman which way I should go. She wasn’t sure how to explain to me how to get to a station, and eventually pointed me down one road and told me to ask someone which way to go at the end of that road. I went down a couple of blocks, and realized that she had sent me east. I was back where I had been earlier in the day. Hmm. Ok, well I will keep heading down until I find a major road. I don’t think this is the right way, but she is the one who lives here. I turned south, along the way I had come that morning. I went west again at the next road. At the end of the block the road split again, so I asked someone the best way to go. She sent me back the way I had come. Huh. Irritating. Am I completely turned around? I walked back, and at the next intersection, and asked someone again which way I should go. She pointed back in the direction I had originally come before my last turn bqck tracking once again. Huh. Ok, am I just really turned around? Then I noticed that the sun was setting. So I knew for sure which way west was. And I had been heading the right direction, both times I had been told to turn around. Apparently I am stopping idiots and asking them for directions. Damn it. Forget this maze of a city, forget these crazy people who don’t know where the train is, I am walking all the way back to the damn mosque and just going back the way I came earlier. No more asking directions, no more confusion and backtracking. So I walked back, and made it to the train station. It was weird though, how all three of the women I asked pointed me in exactly the wrong direction. They had seemed to understand my question, but it was like they couldn’t figure out what I was talking about.

On that note, I went to a restaurant the other day and couldn’t order what I wanted. I walked into the restaurant, paused, smiled, and was pointed to a table. A waiter gave me a menu. When it was clear that I had decided what to order, one of the waiters came over and asked what I wanted. He couldn’t understand what I said: totally understandable. I am in a Chinese restaurant in India. My waiter doesn’t speak English. Fair enough. So I opened up the menu and pointed to what I wanted. He said something back that I couldn’t understand. I smiled and shook my head and shrugged, not being able to understand him either, and then pointed again to the thing on the menu that I wanted. He said something again. We went back and forth for a minute, and another waiter came over. The same thing happened. I am pretty sure they were not saying “That isn’t available” because that would have looked like “no” or something. I feel that I would have been able to understand that. I feel that very strongly. By the time the third waiter had come over, I had just started pointing at one of the vegetable fried rice things. Finally one of them was like, fried rice? Yeah, fried rice. (I really really didn’t feel like having a big plate of fried rice.) They brought me a big bowl of fried rice. I ate it with as much grace as I could muster. It wasn’t even vegetable fried rice, which was what I had last pointed to on the menu. Sure enough, when I got my bill, it was for a different price than the thing I had been pointing to. I know they got the concept of rice-with-an-entree, because that was what they were bringing everyone else. But the waiters couldn’t get it together for me. And, seriously, what was the problem? I think they may have been morons. This couldn’t have been cultural. They handed me a menu, which is, by definition, a list of Options. Choices. I made a Choice. A Decision. A Selection, from the list of Options That You Gave Me When I Came In. We don’t speak the same language, sure, but what eloquence do you need to communicate a simple menu choice? By handing me the menu, you were saying, albeit implicitly, that you were offering me a choice of these dishes. I didn’t walk in with my own menu and start demanding grilled peacock and nectar of the gods. We entered into a basic social contract. By opening up your restaurant to the public, you offer to make food, I offer to eat and pay for it. Nothing complicated. Nothing tricky. Nothing subtle. This is a relationship that millions of people enter into with millions of establishments on a daily basis. This must be the fourth or fifth oldest business in the world. I wanted Vegetable Manchurian! I would have settled for Vegetable Anything! You didn’t understand pointing! Who doesn’t understand pointing? I insist that I was being neither stupid nor intolerant! Why couldn’t you understand what I wanted? Why why why? Why couldn’t you put together the simple logic of the situation? What, in short, was the issue?

I feel better now. I had been holding a lot inside there. I think I get why McSweeney’s does that “Letters to People Unlikely to Respond” thing now. It is totally therapeutic.

I got some kickass flipflops on the way home from the Chinese food restaurant. So there is a happy ending.

My foray into the Chinese food restaurant was precipitated by the search for yet another restaurant that doesn’t exist from the guidebook. The mockery of fate. I swear I am going to find the guy who wrote that book.