Chicken Tikka in England

I was agonizing over the mediocre Mexican mango I ate yesterday while watching the online Indian mango wars gain momentum. It's summer time and the only thing that comes before eating a mango is fighting about which mango is the best. I don't even love mango as much as my family does for instance. My dad sources mangoes, people perform favors in mango. Crates and boxes travel far and wide before they reach our house to then be safely tucked away under the bed covered in newspapers. They must be appropriately ripened under the bed, making the whole room smell of mangoes. Then he goes under and retrieves the choicest ones for post-dinner debauchery. A few always given to our domestic helps. After all, the joy of eating is communal. It is thoroughly communal and don't let anyone else convince you otherwise. There is more joy in watching someone eat your offering than there is in eating that same delicious mango. So mangoes are fed and eaten - haapus and kesar, the rest is all not fit for consumption only. The gujju mango snobbery entails that dasari, langda, tota must all be cooked with. The season of murabba and chhundo, aam papad and an ever flowing stock of aam panna in the fridge. If I romanticize anything about these summer rituals that I grew up with, I'd be pandering to the implicit Columbusian phoren Amreekan audiences. Other fellow mango-eaters in any part of India will surely have their own rituals. But I sat here agonizing, stuck in the times of a disease that at times doesn't feel real. As usual, home feels extra far. Home feels as far as the breadth of the pacific but then you buy a Mexican mango and eat it as a silent assertion of everything objectively better that lies on the other side of the pacific. I am equally grateful for the avocados on this side of it. I live local these days, trying to be less affected by any thievery of chickpea recipes. Stealing is the amreekan way of life and nothing can be done about it. But playing to the amreekan gallery or making a case for anything Indian is beneath, above and beyond me. Learning one recipe, one flavor, one dress won't establish anything, what I think of as tasteful is somewhere between the ingredients.
But the mango agony stems from elsewhere. A few months ago I encountered the second generation Indian creature in my own home. The version of the second gen creature that shoots its mouth off, amreekan confidence and cheetos power the mouthing off. She, of Punjabi immigrant parents, strove to convince our common white friend that (her exact words), "you have to go to the UK to eat the best Punjabi food". They moved on to rave about chicken tikka, a dish that does not exist. The zombie love child of some colonial encounter. I bit my words at the time, trying to take high moral ground. My face is still learning to react to such bounded idiocy. Surely it is idiocy but then last night I was thinking, if that does it for her, good for her. Who am I to prove her wrong and show her the spectrum of good Indian food? There's nothing like that, my mother makes excellent food and the aunty next door makes different excellent food too. I don't really have a point except that I am trying to rise above the desire to hate on and correct anyone who has anything to say about India. It's just a sort of reorientation where your legitimacy or even any satisfaction doesn't come from helping phoreners discover the true authentic Indian stuff. That in itself would be terribly problematic. But I like this Sarnath Banerjee article, his stance comforts me. He writes about and for his own (whoever that might be). I too am hoping to overcome the desire to shed light or set the record straight. A certain bounded, limited cosmopolitics is good, its comforting. There is no need to strive for universal cultural translation. The mexican mangoes still do suck but they are excellent for mango salsa. Onward to making mango salsa.