Hope you all are enjoying the new year. Hope you enjoy
reading this! 
Sankar

Do you have cheese?
1/12/07

This story is about hunger. And it has a happy ending.
In fact, the happy ending is cooking right now, as I
write, in the handy toaster oven that my sisters have
given me as a birthday gift. But it is also about many
other things, some explicit, some implicit, and some
you may see that I don’t even know about.

For about two weeks in November I had a blissful
existence, when everyday I could come home for lunch
and eat a tasty meal with the rice, sambar and curry
that my mom had cooked. While there are many problems
with the parents of a bachelor staying with him,
hunger is not one of them. Since they left, however, I
am back to my old ways. I had been noticing that on
many occasions my head feels light, the brain is not
functioning well, and I have trouble with balance.
Upon closer analysis it struck me that I might not be
eating enough. Further testing has borne out this
hypothesis. I have to confess that in some of those
darker moments the thought of marrying someone so that
I could have good meals has indeed crossed my mind.
But that will not be a nice thing to do. Besides, I
still have a pulse.

It is almost 4 pm now, and I am just about to have my
lunch. So, I have a little explaining to do. And with
your indulgence, I will tell you the story of how it
got so far.

Last night my dinner consisted of one glass of apple
juice, a handful of snack mix (sesame sticks, peanuts,
almonds and pecans) and a glass of milk. While the
stomach didn’t quite fill up, it didn’t feel empty
either. So I decided I’d just go to bed and get up
early, have a good breakfast, and finish the work I
was doing before going to campus.

Either I had gone to bed too late (about 1 am) or was
really tired, but I ended up sleeping very well until
the alarm sounded at 7.30. I was so confident that I’d
be able to get up that I went back to sleep without
hitting the snooze button. But to my shock and horror
the clock showed 9.37 as I opened my eyes. After
making sure that I was not dreaming and consulting
with a second clock I realized that I had to be in my
office within 23 minutes. 

Since it took me ten minutes to walk to my office, and
about 3 minutes to actually get out of bed, there was
only ten minutes left which I used up to get ready and
check e-mail on the way out. 

Now, from past experience, I knew that if I didn’t get
something to eat right now I would have trouble
teaching the 12 o’clock class. So on the way to my
office I stopped by the sidewalk vendor on campus to
get something. Glory be to the Lord he had exactly
what I was looking for – a granola bar, orange juice
and a banana. And all of that for only $2.45.

I thanked him and walked to my office feeling good
about myself for patronizing him, and about Howard for
being not so uppity (or concerned with maintaining the
campus atmosphere, depending on who you ask) that they
couldn’t allow the sidewalk vendors to still work on
campus. I have always admired this guy who would be
standing on the same corner in front of Greene
stadium, whether it was rain or shine, warm or
freezing cold, with all the same things, and charging
a very reasonable price. 

When I first began work at Howard I had a very narrow
idea of what teaching was all about. Especially
mathematics. I thought all I had to do was work out
some problems on the blackboard. But over the years I
have grown to appreciate all the things that were part
of teaching. Looking at the eager faces of freshmen on
the first day of class made me even more determined to
put everything I could into making it a good
experience for them. 

Anyway, the point is that I put a lot of energy into
my 11 o’clock class and the 12 o’clock class and by
the time I was finished by 1.10 I was quite tired, and
hungry. Even though the euphoria accompanied by the
end of the work-week and the impending weekend
energized my brain, the toll taken by a busy week
started to make its presence felt as well. I decided
to leave right away and have a good lunch. 

But there were a few things to finish up and I was
still in my office around 1.30 when a student came by
to get an over-ride to enroll in a class and then my
colleague Richard Bayne stopped by. I enjoy talking to
him and we chatted about work and vented our
frustrations about Mr. Bush and how things were going,
especially since he had just come back from the big
math meeting in New Orleans. In spite of his
entreaties I kept talking and by the time we finished
it was almost two. I told him I was planning to buy
lunch somewhere because there was no time to cook. He
agreed with me that it would be the proper thing to
do.

But this is when my brain started to sink into its
perverse and diabolical ways. May be it was fatigue
and the lack of glucose or may be, after all, I do
have a perverse and diabolical brain. Why not make a
nice burrito, I thought. There was the rice that had
been cooked two days ago, and the open can of refried
beans that had been sitting there for about the same
length of time. All I needed was a slice of mozzarella
cheese. I learnt to make burritos when I was in grad
school, from my ex-girlfriend who is from Mexico. [Of
course, this was just the least of all the good things
I learnt from her]. Since then, they constitute my
lunch about every other day. The mix of rice, beans,
cheese, veggies and hot sauce all rolled inside a
nice, soft, tortilla is the best meal a vegetarian
could have, I think.

But you see, a burrito is not a burrito if even one of
those ingredients is missing. I had some frozen
spinach but I had just eaten the last of the moldy
mozzarella a couple of days ago. And goddammit, I had
to have the mozzarella all melting nicely on top of
those beans and rice. Now! But how, and where to get
it, that was the question.

The nearest supermarket, a Giant, is about 15 minutes
from my house. As I reached Georgia Ave, another crazy
thought popped up. Why not buy it in one of those
small corner stores near my house? Surely one of them
must have cheese in their refrigerator. I have noticed
at least one small store that said “groceries” on its
banner in this block of Georgia Ave.

So I embarked on my quest for cheese. First stop was
the Howard delicatessen, right in front of campus.
Before I go in there, I have to tell you a bit about
this part of Georgia Ave. Even though this whole area
is fast gentrifying, this block of Georgia Ave still
has the same old mix of inner city street life –
Barber shops, liquor stores, fast food restaurants,
along with a few campus oriented businesses. Many of
them are not doing well, and perhaps are on the brink
of bankruptcy. Already many of the stores have been
sold and new stores seem to be coming up in their
place.

This is one of the stores that was not doing well. Its
sign was fading, door  rickety and patched up, and the
shelves were bare. The owner, a black man, looked at
me rather suspiciously. “Do you have cheese?” I asked.
“I don’t sell cheese,” he said, rather dismissively.
What he probably didn’t tell me was, “You can’t buy a
sandwich, you stupid idiot, but you want to buy
cheese?” So I guess the proper question to ask was,
not whether he had cheese, which he probably did, but
whether he wanted to sell it.

My next stop was in the same row. This one was more of
a store than a deli, and was run by an Asian woman,
probably Korean. But it was not in any better shape.
The woman had exactly the same reaction and answer as
the man.

By now my quixotic quest for cheese had taken a life
of its own. Not only did I want to have my slice of
mozzarella cheese, but I had to find a store within a
few blocks of my house that sold it. 

Walking further up the block I went into a store that
advertised itself simply as “grocery store,”
dispensing with the need for a name. It was run by an
Asian man, again probably Korean (I think I am fairly
adept at distinguishing between Koreans, Chinese, and
Japanese, so please don’t think I am stereotyping).
The store itself was protected behind thick glass and
a locked glass door. Peering inside I spotted a few
blocks of cheese in the refrigerator. My heart leapt
with hope and anticipation. I knocked on the door. He
had his back to me. I knocked again. Probably he had a
hearing problem. I banged on the door. This time he
walked up to the counter and from behind the revolving
glass window asked me what I wanted. “Cheese,” I said.
He walked to the refrigerator and pulled out the wad
of individually wrapped, processed American cheese. I
have tried this cheese, and never liked it. Besides I
was not sure of its melting characteristics. I pointed
at the other block of cheese. It was Cheddar cheese.
Maybe this will work? How much, I asked. “Two dollar,”
he said, holding up the American cheese, and “Three
dollar,” holding up the cheddar cheese. I had one
dollar and fifty five cents in my pocket, remaining
after the purchase of the aforementioned breakfast
items. Even though my perverse and diabolical mind was
also bent on buying the cheese with this dollar and
fifty-five cents, it was willing to soften its
pathological, George W. Bush-esque stubborn-ness and
spend the ten dollars that I kept as an emergency
reserve. But then, if I did buy the American cheese,
I’d have to waste some of it because I couldn’t
possibly eat all those slices. And if I bought the
block of cheddar cheese, the leftover would probably
get eaten by mold before I could get to it. 

So I walked out of there and went to the next store up
the block. “Everlasting Life” is run by a group of
people who claim to be the descendents of the lost
tribes of Jews from Africa. They are very nice people
and I like their principles. Their store is only a
block from my house. But they sell only healthy, vegan
food and hence don’t have mozzarella. Nevertheless, I
was hoping I’d be able to get something. They had fake
mozzarella cheese called “Tofutti” but it didn’t quite
fit the picture of melting cheese that I had in mind.
But I did grab a few sesame sticks and some jelly
beans from their shelves that provided much needed
glucose and kept me going for a few more minutes.
Besides, I didn’t have to pay for those.

Next I walked down Columbia Road to the corner of
Sherman Ave. The sign of this store was so faded that
I cannot even tell you what its name was. It was run
by an African man, probably Ethiopian. This was a
slightly bigger store where I could actually walk to
the shelves and take things. But they turned out to
have the same processed, individually wrapped slices
of American cheese. This man had a slightly more
sympathetic, regretful response to my enquiry but the
end result was nevertheless the same.

By now I started noticing the large posters of sexy,
voluptuous women in small bikinis adorning the fronts
and interiors of these stores, advertising beer and
other alcoholic beverages. It seemed like every store
in the neighbourhood had the same ingredients – the
pictures of women inviting you with their sultry
looks, the rows of beer and other hard and soft
drinks, the token pieces of American and cheddar
cheese. I even walked into a liquor store by mistake,
and after finding its shelves stocked exclusively with
liquor, walked out to see that it did say up front, in
large letters, “Liquor” in glorious isolation. Gray’s
market, which, for a change, had sultry African and
Caribbean women in bikinis instead of sultry Latino
and Anglo women. Sunray market, whose spacious
interior walls were so adorned with these large
posters that for a moment you might have thought you
stumbled into a Sultan’s harem. The Korean (?) lady
who sat in the store, Miss. Havisham-like in forlorn
but ever hopeful decorum, even picked up the piece of
cheese by her own hand and waved a sad good-bye as I
walked out mumbling “mozzarella.” How could any man
walk out of these stores and not be hypnotized by all
these bikini-clad women into buying beer is beyond me.
In Tamil, there is a saying, “When hunger strikes, all
 else flee.”

My last and final hope was Murry’s. This is a
mini-supermarket near the corner of Park Road and
Georgia Ave. I have shopped there for groceries once.
I was pretty sure they’d have mozzarella there. This
store was the furthest from my house but I decided to
end my odyssey there because I was quite confident of
my chances of hitting the holy grail. As I walked into
the store with its wide aisles and long shelves I felt
a big wave of relief. Finally, I said to myself,
finally it is going to happen. Passing by the
reassuring rows of vegetables and fruit and bread and
other edibles I walked over to the refrigerator aisle.
I passed a cabinet full of milk and juice, and then
several cabinets of frozen wings and steak and pizza
and finally one whole cabinet of ice-cream. But hey,
did I miss something? Where is the cheese? Looking
carefully, I spotted a few boxes of processed,
individually wrapped American cheese and blocks of
cheddar cheese. The same stuff, only bigger.  

My heart fell. This was the end. I had to give up on
my dreams. I started walking to the door. When I
pushed the door it didn’t open. Maybe this was a sign.
My hungry body finally got the better of my crazy
mind. It was past three o’clock. “This is not the
friggin’ Whole Foods, you Crapovich. Get some food.
Any food.” [The actual words are unprintable]. So I
walked through the store again, to find something that
would satisfy my eclectic appetite. Then it came to my
attention that all the 8 inch pizzas were selling for
99 cents. At least I can fulfill my dream of eating
lunch with a dollar and fifty-five cents. So I started
looking at the pizza. There was cheese pizza,
pepperoni pizza and then combination pizza. Hoping
that the combos would contain veggies I looked at them
only to find that they were a combination of pepperoni
and small cubes of some other meat. 

Then for once my mind actually came up with a useful
suggestion. I could heat the frozen spinach and bake
the pizza so that the spinach would get embedded in
the cheese. With this brilliant solution I picked up a
cheese pizza and walked to the counter. When the lady
at the counter rang up the pizza and it actually said
99 cents I couldn’t believe it. I gave the dollar bill
to her and walked out triumphantly and quickly with
the pizza.

So, my dear friend, [if you are still reading], what
is the moral of this story? 
That you can still buy something for a dollar? Or that
anything is possible at the end of the work-week? Or
perhaps you will read this whole story as a metaphor
for the way I search for a girlfriend. But I must warn
you, you do so at your own peril. As Mr. Kundera says,
“Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single
metaphor can give birth to love.”

Wait, I didn’t tell you the happy ending. I have to
say that it is not a completely happy ending. It is
only 75% happy, because, after I sprinkled some
spinach and red chili powder and put the pizza into
the oven [it fit!] I let it bake for too long. So
about a quarter of it was closer to black than golden
brown. But at least the rest of it was edible, and I
have a lot of experience eating burnt stuff. Most
importantly, it satisfied my hunger.

So there you go. The story is finished with a slightly
less cheesy [oops, silly pun!] ending. Now it is
almost 8 o’clock. My body says that it is time to eat
dinner. But don’t worry, after I finish this and then
finish sending it to all of you by e-mail I plan to go
to Busboys and Poets and have a really good,
vegetarian, healthy dinner. And maybe I’d even get to
talk to the cute waitress who served me the last time
I was there.