Illustration by Sajith Kumar
Long Beach Elaichi Chai
Mumbai may well be the City of Dreams in India—our own curry version of American folklore—but if there’s any global claimant to that title, Los Angeles is where the search ends. Everybody knows it’s a cosmopolitan city, a melting-pot spiced through with all imaginable ethnic flavours. But that doesn’t lessen the little fizz of culture shock you feel when you see a shop called Rasbhog, selling Indian mithaai—well, it’s not exactly on glamour-kissed Sunset Boulevard, but still. Nor is that a solitary desi outlier. Lined up in its vicinity are many other Indian shops, all doing brisk business. There’s Ambala Dhaba, offering all those...
