In honor of my pals left behind in Delhi, I give you a sample of the questions I posed to T & P on a daily basis. We like to call it Dumb Questions from the NRI. It usually goes something like this:
T: blah..blah..important nuanced analysis of Indian socio-politics..blah—
Me: Um, PS. I paid rs. 45 for a chai today, was I ripped off?
T: What does that have to do with what we were talking about? You can’t just throw PS in there and change the subject. That’s not how it’s used.
P: Sure it is, that’s how I use it. It’s a women’s college thing, you wouldn’t understand. This one time at Bryn Mawr….
Me: No, really. Do you think people can tell I’m not from here? I haggled and everything. I got him down from Rs. 90 for the chai. Did I get the Indian price?
T: No no, of course not. You got the best possible price. Besides, what good would it do for me to tell you that you had been ripped off?
Me: So when I paid Rs. 8 for a banana? And the Rs. 100 I paid for the umbrella? Wait… I made a list of all the things I bought.
P & T: Stupid NRI.
I have no one here in Cal to pose stupid NRI questions too, which wouldn’t be so hard as long as I felt I was passing as a real Bengali. But yesterday, buying some DVDs of questionable origin and authenticity on the street, I was accosted by my urchin vendor to tell him where I was actually from. When I asked him why he thought I was foreign, he said in his heavily Bihari-accented, grammatically incorrect Bengali that the Bengali that he spoke perfectly came out of my mouth all funny. India is the land of my deflated ego. Just when I thought I was slick and impressing everyone with my mad Bengali skills, poof. The Bihari pre-pubescent pirated-DVD vendor informs me otherwise. So I did the only thing left to do: pulled my list out of my pocket and asked him, “I paid Rs. 150 for this shirt, did I get ripped off?”
