SURESH AND THE BUTTER CHICKEN

I was on the streets of New Dehli with my mate Suresh. I met him at a coffee store, on the street. He walked up to me and instantly started telling me all about himself. He’d learned English as a young shoe shine boy and listened to all the different languages travellers used until he’d pieced it all together. Some words had Australian accents, others American, a lot of Dutch inflections in his English speaking voice.

Suresh begged me for the chance to let him be my guide for my stay. “Sure” I said. He asked how long I was staying and I said that depended on what I felt like doing or what he could show me. Suresh liked me and I could tell.

“What’s your name?”

“Luke”

“Look! I love your name. Look! With your eyes!”

“Nah, not quite”

“Luck?”

“Nah, Luke” I said with a smile

“It is Look! You are Look!” Suresh was excited.

Suresh showed me a lot of things around New Dehli. He took me to restaurants, to fabric markets, to see shrines, and he told me all about his family and his troubles. Some children walked past the café staring into the sky.

“See that” said Suresh

“What, those kids?”

“Yeah. Brown sugar”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a drug around here – the kids get hooked to it and live on the streets. They have nowhere else to go”

Oh that’s terrible, I thought.

I bought Suresh some breakfast and a chai. He liked chai and wondered why I wanted coffee.

“I dunno, it tastes good I suppose”

“All the Dutch people I meet want coffee, but they mean marijuana” said Suresh “would you like to go to a coffee shop?

Ahah! I’d figured it out. The coffee stores in Amsterdam sell the devil’s lettuce legally.

“Nah, I’m fine – I would like some butter chicken though”

“OH! OH!” said Suresh “I know just the place!”

Throughout our time together Suresh kept asking for money to buy things. He told me he goes to Narcotics Anonymous and he was preparing a speech. I’d bought him a new shirt, a real fancy Western style one – he liked that. Picked it out himself.

“At NA tonight” he proclaimed with confidence “I’m going to tell everyone about how Look changed my LOOK!” He strutted around in his new shirt.

He asked me for more money to by a scooter so he could see his children. His family had abandoned him for being an addict and he’d brought them shame. He wanted to buy a scooter so he could prove to them he was working to become a better man for them.

I gave him half what it would cost at the start of our adventures. A cab driver and he were talking on one trip about what a good hourly rate rate was for work and I doubled it and paid that to Suresh for being my guide. I was $30,000.00 dollars in debt already from this and some other overseas adventures. Banks will hand out credit cards to anyone in Australia – even if you don’t have a job to pay it back with.

But, Suresh did take me to get that butter chicken, eventually. In Australia I call butter chicken the cheeseburger of Indian cuisine because everyone (me) likes it, just like everyone (me) likes a cheeseburger.

I realised Suresh gets a cut from bringing people to restaurants. He called it ‘commission’. I bought him a curry too, with all the trimmings. But I knew part of his commission was a free meal for himself too from the restaurateur. Double happiness!

The butter chicken came out on a metal plate with a stick of butter right in the middle of it, still melting. I wondered if the chicken was cooked through but ate it anyway. This was the best place in New Dehli for Indian food after all. And I’ve got to say, it was brilliant.

Unfortunately, I found out later, as I was staring out a train window, that that chicken probably wasn’t cooked through. The butter had still looked like a rectangle in the middle of the plate and that should have alerted me, but I was hungry and gobbled it all up anyway.

Trust me. That chicken was not cooked all the way through.