Dinner at Shalimar

Fremont is where the Bay Area's Indians keep their groceries, and Shalimar sits in the thick of it, one strip mall among several where the Indian stores are, as I like to say, a pitching wedge apart. You could restock a kitchen from Fremont without ever needing English, and I have seen people try to prove it. The evening had that flat, undramatic Bay light to it, sun going down somewhere behind the stucco, the neon OPEN sign doing more advertising than the building around it ever would, or ever intended to.

We go to Shalimar the way you go to a place that has stopped needing a reason, or an alibi. The trigger, honestly, is groceries — the pantry runs low, and low pantry means Fremont, and Fremont means dinner first, because apparently a man cannot be trusted to buy lentils on an empty stomach. My wife is the one who really loves this place- oh the Aaloo Paalak Methi; I have just learned to love it on her behalf, which after enough years amounts to the same thing, and requires considerably less effort than learning anything on my own behalf.

The real theater of the evening is the tandoori — the great clay oven that does not care what temperature it is outside, because inside it is always August, and always will be. I watched Sardarji working it pull naan out hot, blistered, slapping air, and asked if I could take his picture. He said yes, which is the kind answer, and which is how you end up with a photograph of a total stranger doing something extraordinary and ordinary at once, while you stand there doing neither.

There is a version of respect that just means noticing someone's work and saying so, and asking to keep a picture of it is about the plainest form that takes. Cheaper than a compliment, too, but rewarding for a long time.

Then the table, in the unglamorous way tables actually look mid-meal — not styled, just going: naan still puffed from the oven, the metal bowls doing what metal bowls do, someone's fork having already been put to use before anyone thought to record the moment for posterity, posterity having clearly finished eighth in the evening's priorities.

After dinner, the actual errand — the reason we'd told ourselves we came, back when we still believed it. The New India Bazar a few minutes down the road, aisles of lentils and lemon pickle and cookies imported from somewhere very far from here, everything lit that particular fluorescent white that grocery stores reserve for after dark, the kind that makes everyone look like they've just remembered something.

We came for rice and came home with dinner too. That's Fremont's whole trick — it feeds you on the way to feeding you.