It was a nice room we had at the hotel, overlooking the swimming pool and the landscaped gardens. The flight from Chennai had taken over an hour and though it was plum in the middle of the lunch-hour, Air Lanka had only peanuts to offer us. So the first thing we did was to go hunting for food. Sure we were blessed with 5-star accommodation, but we still thought we needed quick, middle-class at this point. We walked out of Le Meridien onto the busy road. Traffic signals all worked, cars stopped for pedestrians. And there were restaurants, scores of them actually. But they represented two ends of the spectrum, they were either too seedy or too upmarket.

Hunger overcame our class preferences, and we bumbled into one average looking joint with the menu pasted up on the wall. "Hoppers & String Hoppers," it declared mysteriously in bold. And then, to our relief, there was "Chapaty Set" and "Dosa Set." One of each, we told the sole waiter in Tamil. Once the first few morsels went down, our eyes opened to the ambience, if you can call it that. The chief decoration seemed to be scrunched up newspaper bits strewn on the floor. A few had managed to land in the waste bin placed near Rags' leg. It took us a while to discover that these were the table napkins provided by the management.

And sure enough, when we finished our meal, we were offered two squares of newspaper. The waiter was quite aghast at our absence of table manners when we refused the newspaper and asked for the washbasin instead. The perplexed fellow then led us to a steel sink where the vessels were being washed. All in all, we had a fairly good and hearty meal.

Our culinary adventure done, we legged it back to the hotel, passing the imposing US Embassy and British High Commission buildings. We stopped at a few stores on the way and always found the people soft-spoken and mild-mannered. They all spoke English and Tamil, the former with a strange accent, and the latter with a smattering of unfamiliar words. That left us in the ironic position of not being able to understand them despite knowing the language.

The hotel welcomed us back with complimentary fruit and chocolate in a basket lined with betel leaves. As I sat down at the window eating dessert, Rags got in touch with his local colleagues. It was decided that we would dine that evening with them. There would be lots of questions to ask them.
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