The Cutting Board Napoleon and Other Tales from the Scary Guest House

My Indian abode (pictured at left) has been variously identified as a guest house, a hostel, or, employing the definite article, the “Scary Guest House” (this epithet courtesy of another volunteer). Scary because dirty, and, I suspect, because of the absence, from a Western perspective, of some basic comforts and conveniences. The guest house, owned by Seva Mandir, is located on the campus of a teacher’s college and training center operated by Vidya Bhawan, another prominent local NGO; it is an eight minute walk from Seva Mandir. The campus comprises five main structures: two academic buildings, a boys' dorm, a girls' dorm, and a hostel for visiting training participants (currently sixty-seven teachers from seventeen states in India have gathered for three-and-a-half weeks of instruction in classical Indian culture and art—they’ve taken a bit of interest in me). The Scary Guest House abuts the rear of the girl’s dorm and was once a part of it. In fact, we share a padlocked interior door; I can hear the chattering of college girls just about any time of day.

I have but one roommate for the present, Arun, a south Indian from the state of Karnataka who works with Seva Mandir’s Natural Resource Development Unit. He’s young (twenty-five) and recently completed a Master’s degree in Development Management. He’s a tiny man, perpetually smiling, and he has a pleasant, wheezing, hiccupping laugh, although I never inspire it, even with my liberal bungling. We each have our own room with a single bed, but there are two other bedrooms with two beds apiece, and no doubt they will be occupied, at least partially, at some point.

My room is moderately sized and modest in every sense. There are two pieces of furniture: the bed (at right) and a large and flimsy metal cabinet of four shelves where I store my clothing (I also stack my books and other sundry personal belongings on top). The room is painted a washed out yellow, almost ochre, but judging from the spots where the paint has chipped away, it was once green. Four large windows have also been painted over, to cave-like effect. Two things adorn the otherwise bare space: a page torn from an Indian entertainment rag featuring a couple of suggestively posed actors, which has been hastily taped over a rear window, and hanging beside the door, a lithographed image of three freedom fighters from the Indian Uprising of 1857.

As perhaps befits a scary guest house, cobwebs are epidemic: the guest house is large, the ceilings high, and they inhabit every corner, crease, nook, and cranny. No matter how thorough the eradication effort, the cobwebs return, as though they are sustained by the very walls. I hesitate to kill the webmakers for several reasons. First, their sheer number would render any piecemeal extermination futile; secondly, I think that they’re good luck and perform a vital service: pest control. The Scary Guest House harbors ants great and small, a symphony of crickets, and when Arun inexplicably leaves the door open some nights, a swarm of mosquitoes too—plus the odd beetles, cockroaches, and flies. The occasional trespassing of a lizard is suffered for the same reason the spiders are spared their existence.

From time to time we host larger visitors too. Much of the front wall of the guest house, including the front door, is screened mesh (the swath of blue in the first photograph), and one of the innumerable stray dogs that loll about everywhere in this country has pushed in the mesh at the bottom of the door and can be found sleeping peacefully on the stone floor of our entryway some mornings.

The Scary Guest House contains not a single chair, let alone a table. When we eat, we sit on the floor of Arun’s bedroom. Arun has more space than me, including a real closet, a small anteroom of sorts (it has a door that leads outside) that houses a low dresser mounted with the guest house’s only mirror, and access to the only interior bathroom. I use this bathroom. The other bathroom is beyond the screen door and adjoins the patio (you can see its brown door at the far left in the first photo). Its door doesn’t latch properly, and the less said about its condition the better. I saw a (different) stray dog depart its confines one morning, and Lord knows what else has taken up residence there.

The interior bathroom isn’t exactly a paragon of cleanliness either. The sink is caked with the residue of thousands of hand-washings and the backwash of thousands of teethbrushings. The toilet is Indian-style, meaning it is set in the floor with raised footpads. It no longer flushes, so waste is banished by a pitcher of water refilled as many times as necessary. It’s likely not the most sanitary method of removal, but it seems effective. Although the toilet isn’t up to snuff, in a literal sense, by Western standards, in the reckoning of India, the smell is modest: a blind man can locate a public restroom here just as well, if not better than the fully sighted.

Which brings us finally to the kitchen, in many ways the most modernly outfitted of the Scary Guest House's rooms. Since I’ve arrived, Seva Mandir has acquired, on our behalf, a countertop gas range with two burners (no more single burner glorified camp stove for us!) and, most splendid of all, a refrigerator. Arun cooks. I do not, except when he is away in the field, usually one or two nights a week. I offer my assistance with vegetable chopping or other preparatory tasks, and I wash the dishes. Arun is particular about food preparation and cooking matters. Well, to be honest, this is an understatement. The proper method for achieving some culinary aim—let’s say chopping a tomato—exists, and this is Arun’s method. Then there is everything else. Frequently—by which I mean every time—when he asks me to lend a hand in some way with the cooking, my strivings are interrupted with a lecture and a demonstration that culminates in him finishing the task for me. He hasn't any faith in me. He is a kitchen dictator, a cutting board Napoleon.

In Arun's estimation, I peel the potatoes wrong (I want to tell him: “In the U.S. we have an implement called a vegetable peeler, and if I had one right now I would peel this potato three times faster than your sorry butt.”). I cut the potatoes wrong. I chop the onions wrong. I add too much tea and not enough sugar to the chai (Arun’s version of this quintessential Indian beverage is essentially heavily sweetened milk, which is perfectly fine with me). I’m not attentive enough to the chapati (a circular, unleavened bread also called roti). I wash the rice wrong. This last quibble inspired me to tell him, “You know, there’s more than one way to do something, Arun.” It's the most I could muster. On the one night that he asks me to cook, when he has returned late from a day trip to Kotra (nine hours of miserable bus travel), he predictably hijacks the process mid-way. After we sit down to eat, he notes that I haven’t fried the mustard seed properly. “I am thinking you added the onions immediately after the mustard seed,” he says. He’s right about that.

Imagine my delight one night when, in the interest of saving time, he attempts to cook the rice in a pot instead of the pressure cooker, where dhal (a watery lentil-based mixture that is a staple of Indian cuisine) is being prepared instead. He does everything wrong: he boils an indiscriminate amount of water, leaves the pot half-covered, then uncovers it and stirs several times, then pours off some of the water and returns it to the burner. “What are you doing?” I ask him at one point, but don’t belabor it. The result of his efforts, by his own admission, is “paste.” The schadenfreude, however, is delicious.


You may imagine, given the foregoing, that I am anxious to relocate. Quite to the contrary, I am perfectly content to remain in the Scary Guest House at Vidya Bhawan. I am comfortable here, and at heart a creature who appreciates consistency and familiarity. Also, despite his authoritarian leanings, his lax mosquito admission policy, and other minor annoyances magnified by our proximity, I am fond of Arun. Plus, he’s a good cook, and he’s got range in the kitchen—it’s not just curry and dhal and rice. He’s the rare South Indian who can make chapati, and he’s prepared omelets, the occasional upma for breakfast or a snack, and is a savant with vermicelli. I’ve already been offered the opportunity to move into another Seva Mandir “guest house,” which is really a modern two bedroom flat in the middle of the city. It has furniture, flush toilets, and is implausibly clean (it’s small enough that hiring a cleaning woman is economically feasible). In almost every way, it is more appealing than my former apartment in Washington D.C. But I decided against the move, and not for any misguided notion of living a more authentically Indian existence (in any event, I think most Indians keep their living spaces far neater than ours). The Scary Guest House, for all its defects, has become my Indian home. It’s like that first high school girlfriend, who, though you may have dated smarter, prettier girls later on, you remember with an outsized fondness and think, “Maybe I should have stuck with her after all. She was solid, and things were simple, and she never gave me too much grief.” I guess what I’m trying to say without laughing is: A man can get used to the Scary Guest House.