Airlines Hotel Restaurant, The Rameshwaram Cafe and Burma Burma, Bangalore

Although I’ve lived back in Europe for a few years now, it doesn’t feel fully like home. The culture is familiar but doesn’t reflect who I am. I wonder if it ever did? It’s weird because, now that I’ve lived in a few places, nowhere gets it quite right. There is always something a bit off.

Let’s sharpen the contours of this disconnect with some trivial examples.

I am not alone in thinking that taking your shoes off when entering someone else’s house should be compulsory. In fact, not doing so should really be a capital offense. But for some reason, leaving the outside world at the door isn’t always a thing here. Even though it really should be. It doesn’t feel like I’m at home when it is normal for a guest to walk their size 12s into the living room. Instead I am cringing and my internal monologue is spiralling. “What the actual f*** is going on? Should I remind them that walking dirty shoes into a house is punishable by death and how can I do so politely without appearing like an up-tight arse. Is it too late to ask now? Now? Damn, I it’s definitely too late”. Instead I swallow hard and pretend to be ok with it, all the while contemplating if I have enough disposable disinfectant wipes for the floors once they have left.

I also think that it should be compulsory to offer food with post work drinks. Or any function which extends over a meal time for that matter. This is not a given in the UK. Perhaps it is a cost thing or an effort thing. But really it feels like a cultural thing. After all, I went to a university where the phrase “eating is cheating” was commonplace at the pub. I have lost count of the number of immediate post-work functions where it seems perfectly acceptable to serve unlimited alcohol, but sacrilegious to serve even a crumb of food. My culturally disconnected self leaves these things booze sodden and hungry.

So sometimes the culture you are surrounded by doesn’t feel like home, even if in actuality it is.

And sometimes the culture you’re surrounded by feels more like home, even if it actually isn’t.

I should start this part by saying that setting foot in India, whether or not you have Indian heritage, is by no means for the faint-hearted. It is colour and crowds and heat and dust and roads and honking and cows and temples and traffic. It is often too much.

My experience of India had, until very recently, been limited primarily to the more northern regions. Jaipur and Delhi and Rishikesh and Agra and the like. All beautiful and beguiling in their own way, but all a little too something. Too hot, too crowded, too desperate, too tourist.

But then I visited Karnataka and a little bit of Kerela and everything changed.

Bangalore is a buzzing metropolis with more than its fair share of traffic, but it also feels different to the north. More tropical, a little more modern, a little less harried. It still has the honking trucks and crowded palaces and colour and chaos, but more modern. You can feel the energy of an expanding middle class on the rise, hungry for the same things people want in Europe and America.

I was shocked to think “wow, I could live here”, despite knowing full well that  my ignorance of the local culture was being cruelly exposed with every interaction. I had forgotten slightly how great rising Asian cities are, as they weld traditional charm with a frenzied scuttle to build and expand and attract the modern professional elites.

Intertwined with the glorious traditional colours, sights and smells there are boujis restaurants and fun boutique shops and bars. And sports clubs and glorious yoga studios and coffee shops with straight-out-of-a-travel-magazine appeal.

One such boujis restaurant is the (vegetarian) Burma Burma, which blends a comfortable modern vibe, a bit like an up-tempo Dishoom on dress-pink day, with some very unconventional and delicious cooking. I say unconventional only because I really have no idea what Burmese food is, especially when it is entirely vegetarian, so I was unable to deploy the authenticity-o-meter to judge if it was anywhere near the mark. But what I was able to experience was a fantastic meal of Burmese-inspired delights, all cooked with a deft hand and presented with modern panache. There were some fried (but in no way oily) mushrooms in a moorish hempy-coating, a seasoned tofu in a bun which somehow cured my meaty cravings and an astounding avocado and tea leaf salad that I would still be eating now if I could.

In search of less boujis but equally delicious offerings, I also visited Airlines Hotel and The Rameshwaram Café, the former a delightful outdoor spot under a shady banyan tree to enjoy a traditional dosa and a sweet tea, and the latter a bustling tickets-and-counter operation that served hundreds of quick traditional dishes like dosas, rasam, idli and the like to a local crowd.

The service at Airlines Hotel was - there is no nice way to put this - rude, but somehow sitting under the old banyan tree, shielded from the heat of the way and using my ghee-soaked fingers to paw through a mirror-like dosa was one of the highlights of the trip.

Rameshwaram Café was more of an in and out affair, but was still pretty mesmerising. As I ate my spiced idli and sipped at a lassi standing at the metal tables arm to arm with other punters having their own Saturday lunchtime treats, I could imagine myself as one of the patrons just stopping in for a bite on the way home after a morning run.

I can’t pretend for a moment that India felt like home because it didn’t and it isn’t. But certain things do feel more like home, even when you are in a foreign land eating delicious foreign things. 

I would certainly take some of these things with me if I could, but I guess the point is that you can’t pick and choose. Maybe one day I will call somewhere like this home, or maybe not. But it’s certainly a possibility, especially as I am pretty sure that they always serve food with drinks and, most importantly, everyone takes their shoes off at the front door.