We tempt fate at our own peril, but traveling with a bottle of hand sanitizer has been the furthest thing from my mind lately. As I grow more comfortable in and fond of Bangalore, I continue to push my limits both in a geographic and culinary sense. My favorite part of Bangalore is the city’s Muslim Quarter which includes the neighborhoods of Shivajinagar and Frasier Town. In Frazier Town as in Shivajinagar, I’ve found my inner caveman and it is here I’ve truly abandoned all practical advice, joyously munching street corner kebabs cooked over coal, devouring romali roti-wrapped katti rolls and sipping sweet chai from filthy shot glasses.
With each visit, I further relinquish Western standards of food hygiene and rely more and more heavily on my immune system to keep me from harm. India has made me question is the premise of cleanliness, especially as it is practiced in the West. To what extent does hygiene protect us, and how much are we deluded by our rituals of food safety?
In many ways modern Bangalore is stuck between two (or more) eras. As the hyperlinked hub of India’s hyper-ambitious new role as a world player evidence of the region’s technological muscle abounds. Multinationals’ offices are strewn far and wide and sleek new cars maneuver through traffic with even sleeker passengers gabbing into high-end smart phones. At the same time, however, it’s not uncommon to see donkey carts and SUV’s stopped at the same traffic signals. Actually, I take that back–for whatever reason, those donkey carts never seem to obey traffic laws and yet they never get tickets. Go figure. In any case, Bangalore’s high end restaurants, such as Caperberry, can compete with the likes of New York and San Francisco in terms of menu, ambience, wines and price. Restaurants on the other end of the spectrum can be truly appalling.
Many of my favorite Bangalore haunts are either on the street or at least partially exposed to the road, with all of its accompanying dust and vehicle fumes. As often as not, these restaurants will have a hand-washing sink with a cold water tap (of course) and no soap. Even if it were possible to rinse my hands clean, I’m putting those germs back on when I turn off the tap. At Imperial, my favorite restaurant on Residency Road, a squeegee is all that is used to clear the table for you after the last guests have finished their meal. In the U.S., some form of antiseptic is sprayed or wiped on the table before a new customer is seated to protect us from germ–or so we would like to think. If I kept track of how often I saw Bangalore waiters pick their nose before handing me a plate of food, I would have gone crazy months ago.