Fingers and food

When Japanese people visit a Japanese restaurant, it is extremely unlikely they will be ashamed to use their chopsticks and make a big point of asking for cutlery.

But when a Bloody Indian goes to an Indian restaurant, he or she will insist on a knife and fork. If they’re in the company of somebody who uses their hands, they’ll look embarrassed and say something like, “Oh, you’re eating with your hands is it?”

Yes, you pretentious twerp. And I dig my nose in between mouthfuls to get more flavour.

This is strange, because apart from bumwashing, if there’s one thing that Indians have got right, it’s eating with the fingers. Tradition has even politely assigned a hand to each end – left for loo, right for rations.

It is also strange because Bloody Indians just can’t use knives and forks. They hold them up as if they’re paying unexpected shower visits. They look as if they’re trying to kill their food even as they eat it. They send peas flying across the table like bullets. They never, ever put the knife and fork in the position that signals they’ve finished eating.

Cutter confusion
Bloody Indians go to even the smallest Indian restaurants and ask for cutlery. The kind of restaurant where if you say, “I want a knife and fork boss”, the waiter will scratch his head and go to the owner. The owner will get up from his desk near the door and go into some back room where he can be heard scrabbling around for 10 minutes before he emerges with a fork that bends on contact with food and a knife that wouldn’t cut toothpaste.

And there are actually Bloody Indians who eat chapattis, naans and – god in heaven – dosas with a knife and fork. The next time you see somebody doing this, lead them gently out of the restaurant to the lane behind and break all their fingers with the cricket bat you keep down your trousers. This is so that the next time they ask for cutlery, THERE’S A BLOODY GOOD REASON.

Indian food is not designed for cutlery. A biriyani isn’t a biriyani unless it’s sucked off fingers. (And unless it’s mutton. Don’t get me started on “vegetable biriyani”.) If you eat biriyani with a spoon, YOU HAVEN’T TASTED ONE YET.

Finger pleasures
And who cares if it’s a swanky restaurant with white tablecloths? In a swish Chinese restaurant you get chopsticks and nothing else. You have to ask for a fork and endure a scornful grimace from the waiter. So it should be in Indian restaurants: the default eating device should be your hungry little digits. No matter how adept you get with a knife and fork, you’ll never do justice to the best part of the chicken – the piece with the “oysters”. You’ll never know the delights of sucking gravy off bones. You’ll never experience the reassurance of being knuckle-deep in warm rice and daal. (But the good thing is, you’ll never discover how boiling hot rice is like napalm – it sticks to your skin as it burns its way down to bone.)

If you’re a finger-eater, as you should be, I have a request for you. The next time you’re out in a group and you hear whiney hiney in the corner asking for cutlery, pick up the nearest piece and fling it HARD at him or her as you scream the following:

“TAKE A FLYING FORK!!”