Next year, we'll ask "how are you?"

Perhaps it was because my stomach capitulated in its long-running (no pun intended) battle against India, finally, in our last week, but what I found I was craving as a farewell meal was not the heavy Mughlai fare available in the "fine" restaurants, but an omelet sandwich.

Bombayites do the omelet sandwich particularly well. Not for them the mushy, bland, grainy egg sandwich I lived on for ten days in Andalusia because I didn't know how to say "is that vegetarian?" in Spanish. The perfect Indian omelet sandwich is a thin, spicy, slightly greasy crepe of an egg served folded up on buttery lightly grilled bread.

The perfect Indian omelet can be found (for slightly less than a buck) at the "Chickita" cafe, near the Prince of Wales art museum, which has been renamed something long and Indian and non-colonial, but which everyone still calls the Prince of Wales museum. Chickita is carved out of a piece of sidewalk, is absolutely filthy, and the proprietor has a habit of lighting a fistful of incense sticks, the smoke of which gets pulled in by the fans back into the restaurant until your meal simply tastes like pure patchouli in various textures, but in addition to the omelet sandwich, they also serve an excellent chikoo milkshake -- it crunches -- so it's worth taking the incense risk.

Now, the thing is, eggs are considered non-veg in Indian cuisine. Mumbaikars aren't vegan -- dairy is very much still on the menu -- but, I guess, take some sort of pro-liferist position vis-a-vis the potential of an egg, even unfertilized. Thus, K and I have to go to special non-veg cafes to get our egg fix, which means we only go when I'm definitely craving egg, because I know there'll be nothing else on the menu I can eat (Chickita is named as such because it specializes in chicken). As good as Chickita is, we simply don't go that often.

This time around, because we were eating dinner at the ungodly hour of 6 PM, the place was empty except for one middle-aged gentleman in a long white kurta at the next table. As I was contentedly sipping/chewing on my milkshake, he turned to K.

"What is your country?"

K and I both hesitated, out of habit. K, because the question is so very, very frequently a prelude to "you must see my shop/buy my carpet/carry a gemstone back to my cousin in Trenton." Me, because, dammit, it still annoys me that it's socially acceptable to assume that someone who doesn't look Indian is a tourist. It's still very normal for me to be charged the tenfold-higher "tourist" rate at every sightseeing venue, even though I carry a government-issued card that says I'm a resident, and even though I pay an exorbitant VAT like every other Indian resident (and don't benefit from it), and even though someone who looks Indian but was born and raised in the U.S. and doesn't speak Hindi and doesn't pay VAT and has been in country for all of about an hour will pay the "local" rate every time. How is this anything other than blatant, explicit, vicious racism?

"Er, the U.S.," K finally said.

"But we live here," I added.

The man smiled broadly. "Have you seen the Taj Mahal?"

Ooh. Bad question. We both looked down and shook our heads.
The man frowned.

"Perhaps you have just come back from Rajasthan?"

"Not this time," K said, smiling tightly.

"See, I work here," I offered, by way of explanation. "We haven't had much time for travel."

"We saw Ajanta," K said.

The man looked baffled. Why would tourists come such a long way to see some third-rate caves?

"How many days you have been here?"

"Over a year," I said. "As I said, we live here."

"What hotel you are staying at?" The man asked K, since I was clearly deranged. White people don't live in India.

"No hotel," K said wearily. "We live here."

"You are with a tour group?"

"No," I said patiently. "We live in an apartment. I work here. We've been here well over a year. We're not tourists. We live here."

"You are going to Goa?" he asked K.

"We've been," I said, "now and then. Over the course of more than a year. While we've been living and working in Mumbai."

"Well," the man smiled at K, getting up to leave, "welcome to India."