Overture

A select few worldly experiences confirm the expectations we divined from them, and very seldom if ever are they identically satisfying. I came to experience Indian food, for this reason, with everything to lose. My hopes and expectations were pinned on romantic notions of India that have not yet been dismissed, as I have never been there. We hope, most of us anyway, without knowing we hope, or whether there is anything to hope for; the cuisine of India had long held for me the promise of unfamiliar delights, foreign but familiar in the perfected divination of universal pleasure.

My fascination with Indian likely began at a time when without any concept of the composition of the world I attempted to categorize what I would see on television or in books. Images of camels and sheiks, picture books of Japanese block prints, the story of Oedipus narrated by an eccentric aunt all fell into the same faculty of discernment of otherness, and were as alike as they were different. The diversity I identified within the mix led to a keen wonder and curiosity in me for the lives in the other worlds. At a time when the idea that I lived in a country and not simply in a house was addressed to me delicately, I had a firm fascination with what was beyond, though, barring the books I was gifted with, I didn't know where to begin looking for it.

Toward the end of highschool and the beginning of my first year of my first year of college I began to gather my impressions of India into a single, desired experience. I remember confiding in my father, after finishing a presentation in Religious Studies class on Shiva and the Nataraja, that I wanted to leave for India and not return. Great loves begin with mistaken assumptions. I do not know if there is any truth in what I believed about India at the time. It is surely more vast and more colourful and mysterious than I ever believed, as well as more familiar, straightforward and mannerly than I thought possible. My father confirmed for me in that moment what I already knew; I could not afford such a venture, certainly without any purpose in mind but to arrive there. What ensued in place of energy I could have invested in attempting to travel was a side-track into the Baghavad Gita, the Puranas, and at one hopelessly optimistic juncture -- hopeless because at the time I could barely cook the food I'd eaten my entire life -- Madhur Jaffrey's A Taste of India.

Where this accute fascination didn't last a general interest prevailed. I learned, with the help of a college roommate, simple curries and other dishes, innovating and exploring at a slow pace. My first experience at an Indian restaurant was hurried and expensive, and I remember splitting a single dishes with a friend while looking aside in longing at the buffet. So it was with a great deal of apprehension, though I was certainly excited too, that I undertook my first true taste of Indian cuisine.

My girlfriend and I were living in Shenzhen, China, a boom town if ever there was one; it had evolved in 28 years from a fishing village on the Hong Kong-mainland border into a city of 13 million after receiving license to practice Capitalism as Special Economic Zone, the first such designation. The city was built entirely on migrant labour, and like Hong Kong, the Indian population comprised a significant minority. I found The Spice Circle after pouring over restaurant reviews, having found that imitations of western food were imitations at best, and we set off one Friday when the fabled buffet would be in full swing.

**TBC**