Raisa Janke
Enjoying dinner or is it friends in India
Photo: Raisa Janke
“It won’t be that far I promise! We passed it on our way in.” So we began to walk. The other two quickly bought his story, but my memory told me it was a little further than they remembered.
Dinner was to be on our own that night in Mumbai and normally we would have gone locally. However, Megan had been reading up on the area and found the name of an Italian restaurant which was the best in ALL of India. I was slightly caught by that statement but I was ready for a change in taste, so I agreed to go along. We had a small group; Troy, Kayleigh, Megan and me.
When we consulted the map for the direction we needed to head and its approximate distance, we found that our residence was in the same quadrant on the gridded map. Our landmark was the Marriott hotel we had seen that morning coming in from the train station. We all remembered this mainstream hotel because of how large and extravagant it had appeared. With the map and our trusty memories we headed south.
As we were walking we kept reassuring each other that we were in fact headed in the right direction.
“Oh I remember this shop so this must be the correct street.” “We didn’t turn very often so we must keep going this way.”
For the most part I agreed with all these comments but I knew the Marriott was still nowhere near. My memory told me that it was about half way between Mr. Chinai’s home and the train station, an hour’s drive by taxi. But nobody wanted to hear a “Debbi Downer.”
A half hour into our trek we convinced Troy to make sure we were going in the right direction. The way the streets actually go and the way they appear on the map are totally different things. When he stopped and asked, we ran into the next obstacle--language barrier. Thankfully the shop owners could understand Marriott and from what we understood we were going in the right direction.
Another 10 minutes down the road Megan and Kayleigh started doubting Troy and his “keen sense of direction.” Megan stopped and asked a security guard who then pulled some of his friends to help translate the information. One man spoke very broken English, but we pulled out “stoplight,” “right,” “Street,” and then “left.” We walked down to the stoplight turned right down a road which we all remembered. When that road ended we took a left. No Marriott. So we kept walking.
Finally, we saw torches burning in the distance down one of the streets. We immediately remembered the Marriott having torches. We had found our landmark! However, our restaurant was somewhere on the opposite side of the very long and very busy street.
Once again we walked. Megan squealed, “Don Giovani’s!” There it was—one hour since we had set out on our journey. We had all worked up quite the appetite at this point, so we rushed inside. Nowhere had we read how classy this place would be and that we might feel out of place wearing shorts and a T-shirt and disheveled hair from our trek.
When we walked in it became very apparent that we were not dressed for the occasion. The lighting was dimmed with candles on all the tables. The servers were dressed in tuxes, and Italian music filled the air.
We were seated next to the only other people in the restaurant, a table of women who were all dressed up for what appeared to be someone’s birthday. As more people arrived the more uncomfortable Kayleigh, Megan and I began to feel. Troy of course had a button down shirt on and looked somewhat presentable. However, he knew just how to put us and the waiter at ease. “We’ll start with the house wine please,” were his first words. We then proceeded to order appetizers and our main meals shortly after. Waiting for our food was the most uncomfortable. I felt as though everyone was looking and judging us “Americans.” Troy however was unfazed and kept our glasses full for the remainder of the meal. Between the wine and the wonderful Italian food we soon forgot about everyone else and began to enjoy our night. We laughed at the irony of eating (very good) Italian food in India and the insane amount of walking it took to get there.