It was an awkward moment. She asked directly: Where do you think I'm from? Not only did I have no idea, I was also ignorant on the stakes in being wrong. I guessed Lebanon not because of any recognizable features or noticeable accent (as if I could tell) but because our location, Edgware Road, is filled with Lebanese establishments and it seemed the safest direction. The woman in question, who was about 55 years old, Arabic, wearing a full headress and long dress on a very muggy London night, and was waiting for her family to arrive to join her, had just gotten into an argument with the waiter at Mahal, an Indian restaurant where I ate dinner tonight. I was so thoroughly enjoying my Thalis platter - basically a one-person sampler platter of seven different small meat dishes (including chicken Massala), warm naan bread, basmati rice, and a cold dill & zucchini yoghurt - but I couldn't help notice the tiff two feet from my nose. Maybe it was the combination of eating dinner at 10pm, having just downed two frosty Kingfisher beers, and not having slept much for two days considering I just flew to London from Chicago this morning and couldn't get settled on the plane for some reason, that compelled me to look to my left and ask: Are you okay?
Maybe I looked sympathetic but she certainly was comfortable in our conversation, ranging from how spicy we like our Indian food (me a lot, her not at all - she gets indigestion) to where we were from. I was the only white guy in the room and certainly the only American. It's funny she thought I was British at first because I hear those two accents as so different. She clearly doesn't. She's never been to Chicago, but her daughter has. And the answer to the question? Half Turkish (father), half Kuwaiti (mother). Okay, then - that was my second guess. Gotta say, even though she sort of shook her head signalling that my answer was pretty stupid, I was happy with the stab because (1) Lebanese over on Edgware really was the safe bet (what isn't about risk/reward these days?) and (2) geographically if you think about it it's actually sort of a middle point between the two.
Her daughters showed up as did my check and it was time to move on, just after the guys to my right (all Kuwaitis) and I chatted about what was good at Mahal. They say there are lots of Indians in Kuwait and that the spices are somewhat similar, which I didn't know. For all I know, everyone in the restaurant was Kuwaiti.
London was in beautiful form today, with sunny clear skies and a bit of mugginess, and as I parachuted back into town after a month in Chicago only to head out again in five days to Asia and then Chicago and then ultimately back here for a long while later next month, I had the sense that I was naturally sliding back into an easy pace, whether it was jumping the Heathrow Express over to Paddington, walking into our lovely townhouse now fully refurbished from a mess of water damage a couple months ago, and shooting down to the office by way of the Tube and a Pret chicken club sandwich; it all felt...comfortable.
When I left the office at a late hour, the air, which had cooled and sweetened from midday, hit my face and it became an immediate given that I'd walk home tonight. I became quietly excited about doing so, knowing that I could have gone many different ways, seeing different neighborhoods, each sort of similar to the next but now cleary different to me in ways that I probably wouldn't have noticed a year ago. I took a well-trodden route back and all was as it should have been tonight with Mayfair polished but vacated, Oxford Street unrelenting in its garish vibe, and Edgware Road throbbing with countless men, women, and children - eating, commuting, socializing, smoking, arguing, watching.
As I left Mahal and stood on Edgware Road waiting for the No. 98 bus to take me farther north, with the faintest of rains dusting me and the aroma of sweet tobacco wafting from the hookah bar just behind the stop, what popped into my mind was, simply, I'm home.
