The small kitchen room is filled to the brim with the smell of fried dough and warm bananas. Rutvik and I are squatting on the floor around the small stove and talking about how we want to design our next pancake. It turned out to be a little more challenging to create banana pancakes than we initially thought it would, especially considering that none of us seemed quite sure how to do regular pancakes in the first place. But three trips to the nearby village to get bananas, sugar, eggs and again bananas – because the other guys just ate them all up – turned out to be worth it and we even somehow got the twist of how to creatauburn-mark-free pancakes with a nice and mushy banana filling inside. Praveen enters the kitchen, a plate in his hand. “Can I have one more?”. We look at him suspiciously and then at the already dangerously empty pot of dough. Both Rutvik and I haven’t had more than a few test bites of the pancakes we made so far and which we prepared so hard-headedly for. “It’s so delicious!”, Praveen continues in his broken English. “Maybe half?”. His smile wins us over and as he leaves the kitchen, excited like a child over his piece of brown, warm, sweet dough, all our worries disappear like flour in the wind. In the end we actually get to eat the last small pancakes ourselves, before going to help the men at the construction site. They are building a community kitchen which is soon to become the new social center of the village. In the heat of the rising midday sun work is harder than it should be, but the plastering of the beautifully twisted pillars turns out to be a quite fun and rewarding learning experience and I feel good about my work and what I’ve learned when I head for lunch. After lunch it is too hot to go outside and continue with the work, so I stay in and write on my internship report, that I promised myself to finish while staying here. Sitting next to my bag, I unconsciously dig between my clothes until I feel the satisfying phone-like shape of a chocolate bar I kept hidden from the cat, dogs and other predators around the house. Trisha, the 11-year-old daughter of the founder couple sees me. “Hey, what is that?” – “Chocolate”, I answer, truthfully, but as low and casually as possible, as to not let too many others know about it. She seems to get the hint, because she lowers her voice a little as well. “May I have a piece, please?”. I give her one when catching Rishab’s, her brother’s eye, taxing my chocolate bar. When I am done distributing chocolate to everybody nearby, only less than half of the once so proud bar is left. Soon I get enough of squeezing lines out of the insides of my brain and open the browser on my tablet. I seem to currently find myself in a small crisis, because I fail to come to a decision on where to go next, after I leave this village. A feeling in the gut tells me, India shouldn’t be the last place to stay after already almost five months here, but Japan is too far away and cold right now, Bhutan and Bangladesh not really a change of perspective, Burma and China too restricted with regulations and I don’t know much about other places around. I ask a friend in China and she recommends Thailand, so I type it into Google image search. Pictures of the white beaches around Phuket and Bangkok’s pulsing night life fill up my screen. Maybe that’s a good way to go. They might even have mangoes there that time of the year. “Hey Mattyoos!” Rafiq sticks his head up to the platform right under the roof where I am sitting. He seems to have found my camera lying around somewhere, because he is demonstratively holding it up now. “Oh, where?”, I ask. He points to some corner of the room. “Great, thank you so mu… huh?” Rafiq is still holding the camera in his hands and doesn’t seem too eager on letting it go that soon. He is holding it to his chest now and points towards the door. “You wanna take it out and make some pictures?” I mimic holding a camera in front of my face and pressing the release. He nods enthusiastically. I tilt my head to one side for a moment, then I shrug and make a gesture as if to shoo a fly, the way I have seen it Indians do it countless times. “Ok, sure.” He grins excitedly and runs off, camera at the ready. I sink back into the research about Thailand and lose myself in time. Soon it is growing darker outside and in the blink of an eye the sun has gone down with me still sitting between the mattresses on the platform. “Mattyoos!”, somebody is calling me. “What?”, I answer absent-minded. “Dinner”, Rutviks voice replies. “Huh, yes, in a minute.” I take probably ten minutes in the end, before I join the others. Rutvik, Praveen, Rafiq, Trisha, Rishab and a couple of other guys are sitting in the main room and the kitchen scooping up hot and spicy Sambal with small balls of rice they mush between their fingers before skillfully lifting them up into their mouths. Arriving in the kitchen, however, I am staring at an empty pot. “What happened to dinner?”, I ask, to no one in particular. “Ah, I think there’s only rice left.”, Rutvik answers. I stare at the half filled pot of plain, tasteless Basmati rice next to what seems to have been the Sambal pot. “Only rice?”, I ask, incredulously. Rutvik helplessly lifts his shoulders. Praveen looks at me mimicking what seems to be an apologetic smile, his hand still sunk deep into his portion. The kids don’t even … Read morePancakes Please
