A Tandoori Thanksgiving

Last week I got several emails from the States asking, "What was I doing to celebrate Thanksgiving?"

I had no intention of skipping the holiday, despite being 8,000 miles from home, but with our apartment still lacking a gas connection for cooking, I was indeed thankful to be invited over to an early Thanksgiving dinner the Sunday prior by a fellow Washington D.C.-Area native. My friend Ananthy from Maryland (posing here with our roasted bird) gathered roughly a dozen ex-pats from around the world at her Delhi guest home - a small house for people in her organization, the PATH Campaign for Microbicides, which works on AIDS and STD prevention and other reproductive health issues here. In case you were unaware, India, along with South Africa, has one of the largest AIDS-infected populations in the world.

Besides your microfinance-venture capitalist narrator, our eclectic group of guests included a freelance photographer, a business journalist, a jazz singer, several IT consultants, a French restaurateur, and our host, the Hopkins graduate and reproductive health specialist. These people hailed from locales as diverse as L.A., Bangalore and Paris, so in a symbolic gesture to those for whom the Thanksgiving holiday was new, we took turns briefly explaining what we were most thankful for. I was of course just thankful to be in India and yet still enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner.

The food was delicious. Two French guests provided significant quantities of imported wine and cheese to get things started. While the meal included some creative improvisations, tandoori chicken instead of turkey and cranberry jelly instead of sauce, heaps of homemade mashed potatoes and Stove-Top stuffing cooked up by the photographer from L.A. ensured that the dinner tasted like Thanksgiving should.

We found out subsequently that the U.S. embassy here (a 20 minute cab ride from my apartment) was actually selling turkeys during the week. Unfortunately news here doesn't travel quite as fast as the auto rickshaws. Its starting to get cold in Delhi as winter is setting in, so I'm heading south to the beach this weekend. Next stop, the old Portuguese colony of Goa.