Of essential necessities in life.

ROTI, KAPDA AUR MAKAAN (we'll go in the reverse order, for the sake of simplicity.)

MAKAAN.

Searching for a home in the US, we (the plural referring to me and my room-mates) thought was done the high-tech way - online searches, viewing homeplans and submitting applications online and presto, we'd be done! It was a rude shock to find out otherwise. Spent the whole of the Labor Day holiday labouring around the streets near the campus searching for a habitable place to live in. The constraints initially were only the monetary ones. But then were told survival is worth all of one's money, and given safety issues, half the streets we had in mind were shift-deleted in one go. Saved us some physical work, but also brought down our options. Scanned street after street searching for "To Rent" boards and calling them up (Turned out we couldn't just barge into a home and ask the landlord for details - calling them up for an appointment meant we ended up collecting about 15-20 phone numbers from different streets). Ended up repeating the same message to each one of them, to their voice mailboxes in fact - asking if an affordable, habitable home was still on offer. Got sick of hearing a machine respond to us, and tried our luck over the next few days. After losing a few dollars in application fees (that really hurts, especially the first few days when you convert everything to INR and crib how the same things were cheaper back home), and after phone calls beyond count, landed up with homes in an apartment about 5 min away from the UC North Campus, the Engineering Research Center, to be precise. Ended up with a slightly expensive deal and had to sadly bring down the no. of occupants from 3 to 2, but that was the best we could have asked for given the shortage of time. In hindsight, a large one-bedroom apartment - with wooden flooring, a balcony overlooking an about-to-be-shut-down swimming pool, a decent kitchen equipped with a fridge and an electric stove/oven (no roaches at the time of occupancy), and a bathroom with the lock far more advanced that the main-door lock - wasn't such a bad deal after all.

KAPDA

It was fortunate we'd brought in cartloads (washer-loads is more appropriate through) of clothings from India, but weren't entirely prepared for 15 day laundry cycles. Needed a few more stuff to make a house a home, so went shopping to Wal-Mart, about an hour from here by the bus. Bought lots of stuff, from mops and brushes and liquid cleaners to sleeping bags and a microwave oven. Hoped all along Rupee were priced much better against the Dollar. The conversion made sure everything hurt 47.something times more. With enough stuff to fill a vehicle's rear end, we ended up taking a cab back home. Needless to say, it didn't come cheap either.

ROTI

They go by the name of Tortillas (pronounced Torti'as, for reasons I do not understand) here, a rough equivalent of the wheat base we make chapatis out of back home. Bought a few of those, and 2 huge sacks of rice. Vegetables here come in cans, and have shelf lives that go into years. Bought a couple of those. For old times' sake, bought fresh cabbages and potatoes. Lemons here were of the size of oranges back home, so decided to have a second thought on those. The bananas, hybridized, I am told, all look very very identical, in terms of size and shape. Or maybe the mind sees what it chooses to see. To fit into the Amreeki way of eating, bought quite a few buns and bread loafs. Milk here is sold in cans, in gallons I suppose (couldn't find the volume anywhere on the can, but the "2% Fat" label was quite prominently displayed, I must say.) Bought vegetable oil (that, by the way, is the closest substitute to good old groundnut or sunflower oil) and looked like we had everything in our armoury for Khana khazana. A dose of one's own medicine.. a tad too literally.

The first meal we made turned out to be much better than feared. Made rice and sambar, and turned out we wouldn't miss the food back home as badly as we'd feared. Figured out in the process that a simple pressure cooker is bad enough to set the smoke-detector howling. and that shoving duct-tape or simply removing the batteries could mellow the blasted thing down. (Disclaimer : It's illegal to do so, and on record, we didn't do it). Off record, make your guesses :-).

Had a South-Indian get-together among student-residents of our apartments, and turned out the sambar we made tasted better even on other taste-buds. Ramki's now the sambhar-specialist around this place, and since we take cooking turns, good food 3-4 days a week makes up for the mass of edibles we shove down our throats the days I cook. So much for the bare necessities here.