India Garden: Tandoor and Tikka

Written & Narrated By: Cheech Manohar

A homesick man orders Indian food, and gets a little something extra on the house.

Collection Two: “A Traveler’s Guide”: Stories about Space, Time & Other Worlds

Episode #: Nine

Release Date: Tuesday, August 20th

Est. Runtime: » 31 Min

Standout Lines:

"Vish imagined a giant, studious hand coming down from the sky and highlighting the building like an annoying footnote that would be on tomorrow’s test."

"A hole in his ceiling winked out the last dregs of that evening’s rain, which was currently climbing its way through his sock. He stood there and let himself be invaded from above and below, full body shivering in the relief of being attacked by something he understood."

"Vish could not tell if it was meant to be a question. It seemed all sentences fought their way through the dense jungle of her accent, barely escaping with any punctuation whatsoever."

From the Author:

I was going on a work trip to London, and feeling very important. It was the first time someone else was paying to fly me overseas. I walked through TSA and took my laptop out of my bag thinking, “Oh yeah, I brought this laptop because I’m working. I’m about to go work. In London.” I went through customs and immigration. When they asked me “Business or pleasure?” I think they almost didn’t let me through because of how enthusiastically I yelled “BUSINESS.”

But being an Indian in London turned out to be an emotionally complex experience, and perhaps one that I had not prepared myself for.

All diaspora kids grow up hearing about the atrocities of the British Raj in India (probably from too young an age, but Indian parents famously don’t mince words). In my underbaked brain, it had always registered as something that happened a long time ago. But as I began to walk around the city, I was struck by how urgent and personal it all felt. My mind spiraled calculating the immense wealth it must have taken to build these buildings, to maintain them, to maintain the lifestyles of the people living within them. I wondered how much of that wealth had been taken from India and found myself, despite logic, wanting it back.

I didn’t plan to write a story about colonization but alas, here we are. It’s sneaky like that. India Garden: Tandoor and Tikka is about someone who pulls at that thread, and realizes just how much this amorphous monster affects his life. But more importantly, it’s a story about what it feels like to reclaim it all for yourself.

— Cheech