013: Taste of India
Location: 230 Wickenden St | Hours: Wednesday - Sunday: 11:30am - 9:30pm, Monday 9AM - 9:30pm | Date of Visit: July 2, 2026
This is Taste of India.
It is sweltering, well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and you've been nervous all day that the restaurant will close down rather than withstand the heat, which would be a shame because you have invited a whole collection of your friends. Quince and Quickly are here, as are Escalus and his wife. Ophelia has come, and you have invited Hero, who you met in the knitting circle you attended for about a year and who now goes to the movies with you, Beatrice, from your pub trivia team, and Celia, who leads your writing group. Prospero has driven down to crash on your couch to spend a few days with you as well.
Your head holds an indelible memory of rich red walls adorned with Mughal art, and your family seated at a long rectangular table in the center of the restaurant, celebrating some event, a birthday like the one you’re there for perhaps. But either they’ve changed the paint, or your mind is playing tricks on you. There’s no bright blood red, there’s a yellow wall and one is a light red in danger of dropping into pink. The art sits on the other walls. The indelible memory is only time’s plant.
You and Prospero picked up Hero two nights before to go see The Death of Robin Hood, and when Hero asked how you were doing, you told her about how the new med you are on (a combination of buproprion, often sold as Wellbutrin, and dextromethorphan, one of the world’s most ubiquitous cough suppressants albeit at something like seven times the standard dose) seems to be working well. You feel chipper.
“Yeah, you sound it!” Hero tells you, and you grin at it being so obvious it comes across in your voice. The effect is fleeting—the high lasts for about a week before your body adjusts—but it’s enough to move you out of the rut, and so you’re eager to see your friends, to invite them into this ritual. You have been asked many times, since starting this project, “so what’s your favorite restaurant in Providence?” and you have refined the answer into one that your favorite is dependent, but for pure nostalgia and significance, it’s Taste of India. This is the restaurant where you learned to love Indian food. In your family growing up, its price point meant it was a special occasion take-out, typically birthdays. When you finally got old enough to realize that, as an adult, the way to get the birthday you really want is to just go out and make it happen. People talk of comfort food; hearty soups, rib-sticking mac and cheese, or simple fare that transports them to the age when they were taken care of by others. This is yours.
For a while, you are the only ones in the restaurant. Your order of breads arrive, the chewy paratha and the thin, inflated bladder of poori. When you crack it, all the steam inside escapes and the thing deflates into a greasy mess. You observe this is your favorite thing, something you can only get in the restaurant (the bread implodes well before it reaches you if you get it delivered) and the waiter notes he made sure to bring it because he too loves the experience you get from it.
A long time ago, at the college you transferred from, you took a memoir class where a visiting professor was asked to come in lead the discussion for Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. Interpreter is not—strictly speaking—a memoir, but it contains semi-biographical details. The professor, from West Bengal herself, identified the details in Lahiri's story as being distinctly Bengali in ways that would be unfamiliar to people from different parts of India. Being "Indian," in her surmising, was less an identity than a concept. The nation of India itself contains possibly 2,000 distinct ethnic groups, many of which are not bound to each other by any particular shared cultural ritual, religion, or language. It's only when viewed from the outside that India becomes distinct. The clearest analogy for us non-Desi people is perhaps "European." You can describe the people of Europe as European, but few would identify themselves as European before they would be French or German or Czech or Walloon or Catalan or Sicilian. They only become European when arbitrarily assigned that category by dint of being on a subcontinent. So it is with India. Within the single nation of India they are Bengali, or Punjabi, or Telugu, or Tamil, or Bihari...or any of the 2,000 possible ethnic groups before someone is "Indian." Culture isn't uniform, religion isn't uniform, even language isn't uniform (the constitution of India recognizes 22 official languages). It is only when viewed from without, viewed by someone who isn't Indian, that all this vast diversity of humanity is reduced down into a single, simple "India."
This is the nature of exonyming, the naming by others not from a place. In the place called India, there is no “curry,” which is not a word in any language in India, and is likely an English corruption of a Dutch corruption of a Tamil word loaned into one of the Dravidian languages of southern India. There is no “chai” as a specific drink, because chai is tea, and to say “chai tea” is to say “tea tea.” Likewise, naan, which in the West is a specific type of Indian bread, often baked in a tandoor oven, just means, “bread.” One of Indian cuisine’s most famous dishes, the tikka masala, is the creation of an Edinburgh, Scotland restaurant, though which one in particular is still debated. It is faithfully served here as well.
Given all that, it seems to you that the name “Taste of India” is either the most hubristic or most apt name for the restaurant. Hubristic, because how could all the flavors and styles of Indian food ever be contained within one single restaurant? Apt, because you can eat through the entire menu and you will still have only the barest taste of all that Indian cuisines have to offer.
In 2010, in North Carolina, you told another student you were from Providence, and she said, “oh, I hear they’re very queer-friendly there.” You don’t quite know what to say, but your surprise is apparently evident on your face. Certainly, Providence is more LGBTQ+ friendly than North Carolina writ-large in that moment, but it’s not necessarily a perspective you could have gained growing up within the city. At that time, there were two states in the country with a majority of the population being adherents of the same religion: Utah, with Mormonism, and Rhode Island, with Roman Catholicism. Neither the Church of Latter Day Saints or the Roman Catholic Church have been well-known for being vanguards of tolerance of queer identities.
One of India’s Northeastern “Seven Sister” states, past West Bengal, nearly cut off entirely from the rest of the country by Bangladesh, is Nagaland. The state did not exist until 1963. It is the fourth smallest state of India’s 28 constituent states, which gives it an area approximately eleven times Rhode Island’s, and a population approximately twice as large. You mention Nagaland not because of that similarity, though, but rather because a startlingly large percentage of the population, nearly 87%, is Baptist, making it the world’s only predominantly Baptist state, possibly the only such state in history. Christianity is India’s third largest religion, but in a country of 1.5 billion people, the 28 million Christians represent just 1 in 50 Indians. More startling is that Nagaland’s conversion is not clearly the result of a colonial project. American Baptist Missions in the 19th century overwhelmingly failed to gain converts in an area that was largely given to animist and syncretic folk religions. Instead, roughly around the time of Nagaland’s admittance as a full state to the Union of India, the population experienced a Baptist Great Awakening, not unlike the Second Great Awakening of America’s early post-Founding, coupled with the country’s overall rapid population growth, so that the number of Baptists quickly grew from less than 150,000 in 1950 to 1.7 million today.
You have no idea what that actually looks like within Nagaland, this is only what a brief review of the internet tells you. Nagaland only came to your attention because a Desi commentator noted that its standing as the sole Baptist political state in the world is unknown to many white people (as it had been to you), especially those presenting neat little narratives about India online.
You have ordered a lamb korma and an appetizer platter; you snag a crisp vegetable samosa, the fried wrapper shattering under knife and fork in the most satisfying way. Cashews and lamb and sauce that is just at the dangerous line of being too rich spill over long-grain rice. Quickly is nearing the end of her pregnancy, but is not the type of person to easily submit to being coddled when she would rather be helpful, Quince having to convince her to take the seat most comfortable rather than the most convenient to others, and at one point she takes the opportunity of visiting the bathroom to ferry a plate down to you. Quince sighs in that way that comes when you have committed yourself to a lifelong relationship with someone, the resigned exhale of a person begrudged to pick the battles they wish to lose.
The dinner winds down, and you give a short speech thanking everyone for attending. You’ve been rehearsing this, telling people the gist of what you want to say, and there’s a memory of Viola leaving you that stands out, of you telling her if she leaves you’ll be completely alone, and her telling you back that you’re already alone.
But that’s not why it stands out. It stands out because when Saga gets a fever a month later and is so lethargic she lies down in the hallway two steps out of your door and you have to carry her down the stairs of your apartment to your father’s car, her skin so hot it feels like its burning through your clothes, and you tell Prospero about what Viola said and how relieved you are Saga’s completely recovered after a course of antibiotics, because if she died you thought, “then I will be truly and completely alone.”
And it stands out because you will never forget Prospero’s annoyed visage in your computer screen, and him telling you, that month later, “you know that’s bullshit, right? You're never alone.”
And he was right. And Prospero, and Quince, and Hero and everyone who has gathered to celebrate your birthday are a constant reminder of that. You tell the table this. You leave out the bit about Viola and the bit about Saga; those are significant only to you and only to your past. But you tell them how meaningful it is to have all of them, favorite people from all your favorite disparate points of life, gathered together at your favorite restaurant in the city.
Beatrice asserts that the rest of the table will be paying for your portion of the meal and leads them in determining the amount to amend to their portions. She takes it on herself to put it on her card, the table will pay her back, and you make sure everyone who met her for the first time tonight has her Venmo, hopeful no one will stiff her the bill.
Your friends dragoon the waiter into taking a group photo, which you end up doing out on the step on the front of the restaurant. The lighting is terrible and uneven and everyone is covered in a gentle sheen of sweat, and as much as you might wish to immortalize the night with a framed photo, you’ll do them (and yourself, frankly) the favor of never letting it see the light of day.
Everyone stands and talks for several minutes longer, making a nuisance for the handful of people walking down the street or trying to get into the restaurant until finally you call it a night. You love all these people, just as you love Indian cuisine. Some of them you know quite well, or think you do, although you suspect each of them still has Nagalands and other geography known only to themselves and maybe their partners or parents. And to know you, to experience all your pieces, to experience anyone so well you know what on their menu is something intimate to them and what they are just presenting to the outside world’s taste would be just as hard as collapsing all of Indian cuisine into a single restaurant.
This is Taste of India.
