The Vindaloo Bugaboo

What in the name of Krishna is that smell?
Oh, that’s right. The people from India living next door are cooking curry. Considering that the entire population of my apartment is Indian, this means everyone but me is cooking curry.
What is my problem with curry, you ask? Well, the spices they use have the most offensive odor I've ever had the fortune of smelling. People of all nationalities love curry, but based up my own independent empirical study of Building 13 of the Concord Hills apartment complex, Indian people love it best.
However, being in the middle of several Bengali and Punjabi families, it wafts through the air ducts and into my nostrils, smelling like thick body odor and tickling my nausea. It's like a greenhouse in here. A greenhouse that only grows chicken tikka jalfrezi.
What does curry smell like to me, you boldly venture to ask? Well, close your eyes and picture this not-so-hyperbolic scenario…

Imagine the dirtiest, scruffiest person you know. The most unkempt, disheveled, disgusting, stinkiest mess of a person you have ever associated yourself with: a street person who hasn't known a shower in months, or that hippie dude down the hall from your college dorm, or me during puberty.
Now imagine that person’s sock.
This is no ordinary sock. This is that individual’s favorite sock. He never takes it off; he perpetually wears it. He sleeps in it, he labors in it, he works out in it. He hikes and plays racquetball in it. Later, he spills his dinner on it – a dinner of garlic sauerkraut and fish tacos. He goes to the toilet room in it. In the absence of tissue, he makes desperate use of said sock.
Now imagine if one day that person did take the sock off. Deciding that it has finally worn out, he then wads it up and throws it in a corner of a closet underneath a pile of musty, wet towels.
Years pass.
Mold grows.
Now imagine you find that sock under that pile of reeking mildewed stanky rank.
Then for some unfathomable reason you hold that sock up your face and inhale deeply through your nose…
This, my friend, is what curry smells like.
Like sweat, rotting carcasses and dog vomit.

Now Indian people are not necessarily dirty. They do not necessarily have poor hygiene. That's not the statement I'm trying to make. People from that region who come to America bathe often. I know because I hear them next door running their screeching showerhead in the wee hours of the morning while I’m trying to sleep.
Their feet are not dirty either. They don’t wear socks. I know this because I trip over their sandals everyday when they take them off and leave them haphazardly in the hallway.
It is not their socks I smell. It is their cooking. Their ridiculously foul-smelling cooking.
Being from Indiana, where there are only a bunch of white folks, three black people and a smattering of Mexicans, I am not cultured. I feel terribly guilty when I can’t understand the cashier's accent at China Buffet. I am intimidated by diversity, partly because of ignorance, and partly out of fear of the unfamiliar. This, I assume, is true of many who do not grow up without the surroundings of varying ethnicities. In this respect, I’m a product of my environment and I have a lot to learn.
Detroit is wildly diverse and all the better for it. Part of the reason why I wanted to move from Indianapolis is the exposure to different ways of life, ways of thinking, different cultures.
Law school is going to be a great education, but perhaps this culture shock is going to be an education in and of itself.
I think of how out of place I sometimes feel, and then realize that this is how all those who leave their home country to come here feel. And I can sympathize a bit with them a little bit. In reality, I’m the lucky one. I can drive thirty minutes to the suburbs and it feels like Indiana. But this is the only place they can maybe hope to feel comfortable – their little pocket of the community. And I’m the one invading their territory.
So will all this perspective make me stop zealously campaigning against curry?
Of course not. It smells like rotten garbage.
But it does make me stop and appreciate the fact that I have had it pretty good compared to some. And to be tolerant and understanding of those who are away from home in a strange new land.
I just won’t be asking them for any recipes.

Originally written on September 11, 2002.