“My mom has given my matrimonial ad,” my coworker Anurag told me one day. “One of the respondents is an account manager with an ad agency in Mumbai. Drawing seven lahks per annum! That’s double my salary. So I told my mom, ‘I don’t think she’s my type.’”

Not your type…? I was dumbfounded. What could be a more perfect type than a wife who pulls in a boatload of cash?

So I argued with him. I tried to explain the benefits of that arrangement from the perspective of his future financial security, to say nothing of all the extra time he’d get to watch TV. But my arguments of real estate prices, private school tuition, and syndicated sitcoms didn’t make a dent. He wanted to be the breadwinner because, well, that’s what men were supposed to do. “What about my self-respect?”

“My friend,” I said, “you can drive your self-respect around in a gold-plated BMW.”

He laughed. And then: “You have absolutely no male ego. Are all American men like that?”

A few weeks into my career in India, my coworker Dipankar and I decided that we needed some beanbag chairs to turn our shared cubicle into the “cool” corner of the office. This was back when MG Road was still apocalyptic, and the only sign of life along the road was those abandoned storefronts where a few beanbag vendors had set up shop.

So Dipankar and I skipped out on work and headed up MG Road, shockingly free of traffic at this time of day. Approaching a vendor sitting by a stack of dust-covered beanbags, Dipankar explained our intention to buy. We followed the vendor through an alley and into the bowels of the abandoned building, where empty beanbag skins were piled in clear plastic bags in areas cleared of debris from the attempted “sealing” of the building. A stairwell rose to the sunlight where a second floor used to be.

Dipankar and the vendor got down to business. The bargaining took place in Hindi I couldn’t understand, a rapid back-and-forth that seemed to be going nowhere until Dipankar said something that made the vendor laugh. Suddenly the vendor clapped Dipankar on the back and agreed to a price. I gaped at the suddenness of the completion to the negotiations. The vendor waved someone over to clean the beanbags of the road dust that permeated even this far indoors, and then we were on our way.

“What did you say to him? What did you say to him?” I asked eagerly, bounding along in Dipankar’s triumphant wake. Dipankar told me his magic words: once they’d reached impasse, with Dipankar pushing for less and the vendor refusing, Dipankar suggested they meet in the middle. He named a price and then made it seem fair by saying, “It’s not your price, it’s not my price.” It was a friendly tactic that made it sound like both parties were making a concession — as if both had an equal stake in the outcome. At the same time, it was so absurd that the vendor couldn’t help but laugh, and then agree.

Jenny and I added it to our repertoire of bargaining techniques. It worked really well on auto drivers.

*   *   *

When Jenny and I moved out of Brooklyn, we posted our stuff on Craigslist and sold as much as we could. There was very little bargaining involved, because most Americans see a number attached to an item and accept it as take-it-or-leave-it. Our dresser, our Ikea rug, our second-hand couch — we advertised a price, and if it didn’t sell, we advertised a lower price.

Obviously it didn’t work like that in Delhi. Anyone who showed up at our flat to look at our stuff would immediately offer half of whatever price we’d written down. “1200 rupees for that electric heater?” They’d say. “It’s too small to heat my flat, it’s not a name brand, and winter is over anyway. I’ll give you 600.”

With bargaining thus initiated, it was then up to me to make some concession to their offers. They expected me to drop my price by 200 rupees or so, after which they’d probably move up 200, until we met at 900. But I didn’t want to play their game — so instead, I tried to short-circuit it.

“I’m an American,” I’d say back.  “Americans don’t know how to bargain. We both know that you’re better at bargaining than me. So can you just give me 1200 rupees so I don’t get confused?”

Believe it or not, once or twice, that actually worked.

In Delhi’s GK II market, we found this: the most amazing use of literary rhythm and internal rhyme I’ve ever seen in corporate branding. We have no idea what it means, but we love saying it out loud.

The manuscript is finally finished. Ten months after I started writing it, three months after I quit my job to work on it full time, and two weeks after I locked myself in the spare bedroom for a marathon of fourteen-hour writing days, it is done.

The book is a humorous travel memoir of expat life in Delhi — an all-encompassing look at the city from the perspective of two New Yorkers who get to know Delhi even as the city changes before their eyes. The final manuscript is twelve chapters and 108,033 words long — and lest you think it’s 300 pages of long-winded babble, here’s the statistic I’m most pleased about: 55,969 words were cut in the writing and editing process.

If all goes well, it’ll be hitting stores in India at the end of the summer, published by HarperCollins India. We’re still looking for our US and worldwide publishers — let us know if you have any contacts.

Until then, we’ll continue to post new essays this blog, of course, as well as our Twitter account. And make sure you send us your email address! We’ll make sure you get announcements, news, and invitations to the launch parties.

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 5, which is about our favorite subject: food. Enjoy!

One item of mine that my coworkers would never want to share was the carrot sticks I’d snack on to avoid the temptation of pre-lunch raids into my tiffin. Sometimes I’d coerce my coworkers Anurag or Soumya into eating one by telling them that, “In America, it’s considered an insult to my ancestors if you refuse to eat my vegetables.” They’d reluctantly agree and then scrunch their faces as they chewed. “Who eats raw carrots?” they’d ask me.

But raw carrots genuinely tasted better in India; in fact, all fruits and vegetables did. In the States, fruits and vegetables are bred to meet Americans’ demand for unnatural perfection: consumers prize produce that looks uniform and shining as if they rolled off a factory floor, with taste as a secondary consideration. We have huge white onions weighing a pound each but bland enough to eat like apples, consummate pink tomatoes with flawless skin and tasteless flesh, and green peppers that form rows of identical spheres but taste indistinguishable from celery. In Indian vegetable markets, the imperfection of unmediated nature is on full display: the vegetables are smaller, uglier, and more frequently blemished than those in America, but they’re far more flavorful. The tomatoes may be splashed with green and yellow patches, but they crunch deliciously in a salad. The onions may be smaller than softballs, but no American onion was ever sharp enough to make me cry when I cut it. And even the everyday green peppers—called “capsicum” in the local markets—were so full of flavor as to almost taste spicy.

As I round out my final chapter (the manuscript will be finished on Monday!), I want to get some input from you, the readers. Obviously our book is about Delhi as it was when we were there, but I want to provide some perspective from those who were there longer than us. So I turn this over to you:

1) What is the biggest change in Delhi in the last ten years? (Infrastructural, cultural, economic, or other…)

2) Are you optimistic about Delhi’s future? What do you think Delhi will be like ten years from now?

Thanks! There’s a chance I may be quoting you.

We had great difficulty motivating ourselves to leave the house on Sundays. Not just on Delhi’s sweltering summer Sundays, when my shirt would be sticking to my back before I even made it out of the stairwell; but on rainy Sundays, on cold Sundays, and even, I’m sorry to say, on perfect fall Sundays with the birds chirping and the smell of carrot halwa simmering outside of Jama Masjid beckoning our noses from miles away.

Why couldn’t we leave? It wasn’t because of the frustrations that awaited us outside — the pointless bargaining, the endless traffic, the suspensionless rides, the oxygenless air — but rather because those frustrations provided just enough of an excuse that we didn’t have to admit our real reason for staying home: Friends was on.

To be fair, Friends was always on. Between the two different English-language channels it aired morning and night every single day; but on Sundays, we could spend something like five non-stop hours watching it along with another hour of Seinfeld as a bonus. We hadn’t been particularly ardent fans of the show since college, when we’d gathered in Thursday night dorm rooms to see if this was the week for poor ol’ Ross. But the show’s cultural imperative had faded as the seasons went on and we learned that a starter apartment in New York wasn’t quite as grand as the show made it seem.

We tried, we tried to broaden our media horizons. We watched as many Bollywood movies as we could, but we always got too frustrated by the labored plot twists that kept the movies plodding beyond the intermission. There was always that pivotal moment when the hero and heroine arrive at the family farm and need only politely correct Maaji’s erroneous assumption that they’re married; but for some reason they opt instead to stare gape-mouthed as Maaji initiates a spontaneous song-and-dance number that drags the duo around to dance with every family member even as they maintain their fish faces of surprise, leading to another hour of sobbing and singing before they finally decide to get married after all.

But living in Delhi, the show’s false New York suddenly spoke to us again. Was it homesickness? Nostalgia for college? Those establishing shots of the New York skyline? Whatever it was, Friends became our bedtime lullaby, our morning coffee.

And we weren’t the only ones. Scott and Sally told us that they got equally addicted. Which made us wonder if Friends was so ubiquitous because there were more expats nursing homesickness or hangovers in Delhi than we realized. We don’t think it had a very wide Delhiite audience — when discussing American TV with our coworkers, Friends rarely came up.

Although there were more than a few times when my boss Murali asked me to explain why Seinfeld was considered funny at all. I tried to explain, but ultimately I needed him to take it on faith: it’s funny, but it’s a New York thing. Maybe he’d get it if he watched more Friends.

We felt qualified to join the Facebook group “You know you are from Delhi when…” because we smiled at most of the jokes: power cuts, traffic fights, porn in Palika Bazaar, jugaad, late night Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, gol gappas, driving on the wrong side of the road, and bhaiya. Heck, we never made it to the Lotus Temple, either.And more than a few times our auto drivers pulled into the endless queue for the CNG station with us protesting weakly from the back seat.

But a few of the observations on their list that left us scratching our heads. Can anyone help us out?

You know you’re from Delhi when… (?)

3. Living in the most posh colonies, you get to hear, “Aloo, Bhindi Pyaaz, Tamatar le loo”… And you hear women asking the vegetable vendor “Bhaiyaa aapne free dhaniya nehi diya!”

30. If in school, Your conti got busted by cops, teachers or a combination of both.

40. You use the word and have described practically every other person on the planet as “Vella”.

68. One of your favorite yummiest ice-creams was “ORANGE – BAR”

70. When you feel lucky enough to have around 10 LOCAL FM STATIONS! Woho.!

Someone please explain!

(Also, here’s twenty bonus jokes from neoIndian’s 20 signs that you’ve successfully made the transition to living in India; we get every single one of them! What’s with the English subtitles on HBO anyway!?)

On our only visit to Jaipur, Jenny and I suddenly found ourselves swept into a wave of Spanish-speaking tourists. They were exiting a temple, and their guide was exhorting them onward to their next sight; since we were wandering aimlessly at the time, we figured that they might be headed somewhere interesting. So we allowed ourselves to bounce along in their wake, just to see where it would lead us.

Ten steps outside of the temple, the touts attacked.

It was like a goblin charge in Lord of the Rings: the enemy merchants appeared as a horde and rushed into the midst of our adopted group with a divide-and-conquer strategy, each hawker latching onto a tourist and battering him or her with puppets and flutes and other totally-authentic Jaipur knick-knacks until half of them bought something just to be left alone. In the churning waters of the moneyed and the moneyless, the sound of their sales pitches rose into the air.

Their pitches were in Spanish.

“Señor! Señora!” The touts shouted. “Especias! Artesanía! Trabajos manuales! Tengo siete hijos… señor, por favor…!”

The Spaniards pursed their lips and speed-walked towards a group of bicycle rickshaws waiting down the street. The rickshaw pullers had obviously been bribed to move from in front of the temple where the tourists had been dropped off; now they watched from down the street, a distance far enough that the touts had more than enough time to make their sales.

“Señor! Muy bonito brazalete!” One tout began pulling at my shirt, walking backwards alongside me with more deftness than I could walk forwards on the typically-uneven Indian sidewalk. He barraged me in Spanish far superior to that which I’d retained after two semesters studying it in college. “De la fábrica de mi tío. Señor, mira!“

Suddenly it was clear just how well organized Jaipur’s souvenir trade truly was. The touts had clearly been tipped off that Spanish-speaking tourists would be exiting this particular temple at this particular time. The fact that they’d so strategically organized the bicycle rickshaws implied a level of action on intelligence to be envied by militaries around the world.

What’s more,  the fact that they were speaking Spanish suggested that multilingual street peddlers are dispatched in SWAT Team fashion. Buried in a mountain cave somewhere outside of Jaipur, we suspect, there is a gleamingly-futuristic central headquarters, in which street peddler generals plot the movements of tourists on high-tech command-and-control consoles. Their informants are everywhere: chaiwallahs at the train station scrutinize the debarking faces, autorickshaw drivers report on who is dropped off where, and hotel clerks transmit the nationality of the passports they collect when they register. All this information is relayed to central headquarters, where orders are barked based on the latest intelligence. “A Russian couple has been spotted at The Amber Fort! Don’t forget to make vodka jokes! Move, people, MOVE!”

Which is why we have so many sparkly bracelets and soapstone elephants in our possession today: they know that we’re coming. They know where we’re from. The speak our language. They know our next move. Everywhere we go, they’re already there.

The laws of physics suggest that two cars cannot possibly occupy the same point in space. But Delhi drivers regularly give it a shot anyway. Coming from opposite directions, two cars will both try to pass through the same intersection at the same time, sometimes ignoring traffic signals but often having none to ignore. Either way, when they meet in the middle, motion ceases. Gestures ensue.

Behind them, cars immediately begin to route around the obstruction. Which is fine—unless the subsequent cars meet and halt just like the initial cars. Suddenly the intersection becomes a jumble of too many cars occupying not enough space, with more cars halting and more cars still coming. Seconds later, autorickshaws and motorcycles eat up the space on the periphery, and the worst has happened: total gridlock.

Despite everyone’s best efforts to clear things up by honking their horns, nobody is going anywhere.

In the absence of traffic police to disentangle the mess, it seems like a hopeless situation. Unless everyone backs up as a unified collective, we’re all stuck. Self-interest got us into this mess; only collectivism can get is out.

Except in Delhi, self-interest suddenly solves the problem it created. In this city, there’s little incentive to obey traffic laws because there’s no one around to enforce them; but the system actually works even when the worst repercussion of the asphalt free-for-all comes to a head.

In these cases, heads begin to appear between the hoods and trunks.

Motivated by a meeting they wish to keep, men wade into the fray, examining the crystalline structure of the traffic, looking for gaps, irregularities, wiggle room. Because there’s always wiggle room. Six inches here, a foot there, and this makes all the difference. It’s reverse Tetris: move one this way, move another that way, and suddenly some cars are free.

The amazing thing is this: these men don’t coordinate their actions. They don’t formulate strategies. In fact, they probably think they’re working against each other—as passengers in trapped cars, they care about helping the other cars move only insofar as it helps get their own car on its way.

That was my motivation, at any rate, when I played gridlock warden at a t-shaped intersection a quarter-mile north of Hauz Khas Market. It was a standard scenario: two cars met froze in an intersection and others quickly clotted around them. My auto driver tried to work the periphery, but another car had the same idea coming from another direction, and soon we were boxed in.

Five minutes passed, and then ten. The honking did nothing. I considered paying the driver and walking beyond the jam, but I felt some sense bizarre of solidarity with him: I got him into this, I decided, and I was going to get him out.

I exited my auto and surveyed the situation. Possibilities materialized in my head. I mapped out moves like a game of chess—“If this car goes here, and that car goes there…”—and then I took action, standing in front of this car and pointing him that way, then standing in the hole he left until my auto driver could slip into it. Around me, other heads had appeared in the traffic, and the hole one of them created for their own car cascaded back to me. Using my gestures to move some cars and my body to block others, I worked us through the jam—me grinning, my driver grinning, other drivers staring, and still other drivers following behind my auto as he followed the path I blazed out of the jam.

As we pulled away, other cars followed us into the sweet freedom experienced only by bodies in motion. Until the next stoplight, at least.

It’s hard to get into the spirit when it’s 85 degrees and tropical birds are frolicking in the trees outside our window. We wish we were in Delhi right now, for the simple reason that winter should be cold and the holidays shouldn’t be celebrated while wearing shorts. But since we’re not, we’d like to share something that reminds us of our two Christmases spent in Delhi. We must have watched this first video a dozen times during each one.

There’s something about the way Boymongoose says “butter chicken” that we just love. But this year someone showed us this one, which is almost as much fun.

Does anyone know if those little three-legged things are supposed to represent something from Punjabi culture? Or are they just cute creatures?