A tree grew on Long Island

(This ain't strictly food, but it was fun, published yesterday in the paper I work on. And, yes, it is true!)

It was very late one Saturday night. My education in popular American culture has just received a fillip with a rollicking performance of Pirates of Penzance at the Port Jefferson Theatre. Long Island was quiet, but by no means asleep. A cruise ship moored just off the pier glowed with a party, the thumping syncopation of the music coming faintly over the water to where we stood on a sidewalk of Main Street in the village. Should we eat or should we not eat, was the question we had to deal with at that moment. And our tummies had their own rather insistent opinions to offer.

While the debate raged within and without, I decided that my ‘date’ needed a dose of Indian culture, in return for the favour he had just done me. So I carefully explained to him what a Hindi movie was like. I was not at any great advantage in this, since the only Bollywood production I had seen in a movie hall up to that point was Bobby, at a retro festival, which added little to my general state of awareness. But I had watched Chaya Geet and MTV, and I knew my tree from my Mughal garden from my jharokha. Any which way, I did know more than he, half-Italian, half-Hungarian and all Noo Yawker, did.

We had stopped just outside the mall in our wanderings, the car safe in its slot in the almost-empty parking lot. Lights and a warm wave of oregano and hot cheese wafted out of the pizzeria and a frozen yoghurt store was starting its nightly sluice-down. I looked around the scant greenery that rimmed that shopping area and spotted with my beady black eye, a tree. True, it was not a tree of the kind Rishi Kapoor and Dimple ran around, but it would serve the purpose of my demonstration. I hauled my friend over to it and we surveyed it thoughtfully.

“It’s a young beech, I think,” he said after some consideration. “It’s a tree,” I commented helpfully, and put one hand around a sprig that would one day grow into a branch. “And this is how you do it.” Humming what I fondly hoped to be Hum tune k kamre mein band ho - which on some further cogitation much later was obviously completely unsuited to the occasion – I swung gently around the slim bole of the sapling. He grinned fatuously and followed me, as directed.

It was then that things went off-script somewhat. On my second round, I heard the scream of sirens and saw the blue and red flash of police lights. Before I had aborted my swing, the cop-car was parked by us and a stern-faced official had stepped out, one hand on his holster, cold eyes on my gradually reddening face. My friend, being genetically chivalrous, tried to explain.

It took a few moments of pretending to be a ‘furriner who no spik Englees’ for me to get off the hook I had impaled myself on. It took my friend a few moments longer to extricate himself. Our crime would not have been noticed if we had chosen our location better: we were doing our running around trees just outside the plate-glass windows of a national bank.