India Town Afternoon

With an uncertain future and an empty wallet, it seems now, more than ever, I ache to be a foreigner again. Few experiences are more enlivening than being a foreigner, navigating the narrow streets of a metropolis amidst its unusual patterns, colors, and smells. At once I feel the need to find the one taste or smell to forever imprint the experience in my memory, while at the same time not understanding much of anything, and accepting that I never really will.

So when my restlessness and nostalgia are particularly strong, I celebrate one great appeal of a cosmopolitan city: its vibrant, ethnic neighborhoods where, if I get off at the right El stop, I can be uncomfortably immersed into a busy crowd. One of my favorite places to do this is in India Town (Devon Avenue to Chicagoans), where I often hear languages I don’t understand, see no one I recognize, and Chicago’s skyscrapers are seemingly thousands of miles away.

Just four or five congested blocks comprise India Town at the northwestern edge of Chicago. The first thing I do after the long journey there is go to the Nikhar Beauty Salon for the best brow thread in Chicago. Nikhar in itself is unremarkable with its grey walls, faded posters, soft Indian pop music, and a neon sign in the window. But when it comes to price and service, it more than delivers.

As soon as I walk in, a friendly woman ushers me to an empty chair, without having made a reservation. I lay back as the woman begins. She runs the thread back and forth, back and forth, quickly and methodically, and speaks to the other women in their native language. I have no idea if she’s gossiping about the arch of my brow or India’s newest pop star. Every now and then she instructs me to hold something, her accent thick and the rhythm of her English unfamiliar. When she’s done my brows look prefect, as if I’d gone to a five-star salon downtown, instead of this little gem that charged me pennies in comparison.

After the brow thread, if I’m with friends, I head to one of the many Indian buffets on Devon, where I eat more food than necessary for a Sunday afternoon. I default to the Indian Garden, its décor straight out of a 1993 wedding banquet, its buffet predictable but reliable with curries, lamb, chicken, rice, vegetables, and my favorite, green beans with coconut. The staff is friendly, my water glass never empty, and the naan plentiful. After a feast of a meal, I have spent less than $15 and will be content for hours, even days, to come.

The third stop of the afternoon is at one of India Town’s grocery stores. In front, children and elderly gather to watch sugar cane ground through a machine to make sweet drinks on a summer day. Inside, mothers and father stock up on goods from the homeland. At these stores, the produce is fresh and reasonably priced. There are mangoes and star fruit and even a cucumber that looks like a snake. I imagine these exotic fruits and vegetables come from a secluded jungle far from the gleaming concrete jungle of Chicago. Here in the India Town markets are the most interesting packages of noodles and rice and cookies and crackers, clearly made somewhere with different ideas of what’s alluring and appealing, what is idolized and what sells. In India Town, I feel far from the sophisticated marketing schemes of yuppie grocery stores in the city, where I’m convinced to spend $10 on a box of organic rice. In India Town, I’m not lured into buying the more expensive product because of how it will make me look. Here, I merely buy because what I see looks good.

It reminds me of the food stalls crowding Seoul’s narrow streets, pointing to what I want and guessing how much it will cost. Or those afternoons at E-Mart, Korea’s national grocery chain, where the products looked familiar, but didn’t always turn out to be what I wanted. Back then, I never forgot that I was a foreigner and never felt more alive in my own haze of misunderstanding and communicative inadequacies.

I leave the grocery store and wander in and out of a few more before my trek back to Wicker Park. Having made a tiny dent in my wallet, I feel full and satisfied. I still have the urge to hop a plane to another continent, but with the taste of exotic food and unfamiliar sounds still lingering, for now it’s enough to keep me happy in Chicago.