On Chicago’s Little India and the never ending quest to find good Indian Food 

“I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” — Groucho Marx

Multifilaments

I turned 21 the other day. All I wanted to eat was Indian food. It’s been happening to me a lot lately. I’ve been walking around in this kind of daze the last couple of months, lost with a hopeless desire for a cuisine that is always just out of reach from me in Chicago. Everything is catered for the American palate; I have no go-to spot to rely on here. The few Indian places I used to like have grown stale — it’s like having no good music to listen to, it’s torture.

Growing up, I didn’t have to go far for good food. Any time my parents cooked anything, the aromas announced to the whole house what we were going to eat for dinner. All I had to do was go downstairs to feel like I had someplace in this universe. Any grievance or ailment I had could always be solved with whatever was in the pantry or the fridge — there was always a packet of biscuits in the corner or a hidden bag of frozen parathas that could calm me down.

But in Chicago, I’ve had such a tough time because the food I want to eat always seems to be an afterthought, pushed to the outskirts as some sort of cruel consolation.

I can only talk about this with my parents; they understand the problem I’ve been facing much better than me. After emigrating from India in the early 90s, they lived in Manhattan for a few years, but after my dad finished his residency at NYU, they moved to Savannah, Georgia. New York City is a haven for global cuisine. My dad always likes to say that in Manhattan, you could eat out for dinner at a different restaurant every day and still not come close to trying them all. Only a handful of cities can compete with that type of culinary depth, and no disrespect to Savannah, Georgia, but it doesn’t come close to that list. My parents had lived their entire lives in a country with as many cuisines as languages, with many of them being entirely vegetarian. Forget about culinary depth, in Savannah, the only vegetarian options back then were salads (the ones without meat) and water. For many Indian and South Asian immigrants at the time, there was a steep learning curve to surviving within a hegemony with almost no room for new and different ideas, food or people. I have no earthly idea how they did it. I’m a first-generation Indian-American. I got it much easier than they did. Times have changed for the better, and even though I was lucky enough to always have my parent’s cooking, I also had the privilege of growing up with American food. The world has become more globally connected now; we’re all wound with these different strands of nationalities and cultures. I’ve known the words McDonald’s and Pizza for as long as I’ve known Masala Dosa and Methi Paratha. But those fibers can fray and diminish. We can remove them entirely from ourselves if we choose. It’s up to us to decide who we want to be, what cultures make us up. 

So many of the fibers that make up my being have been fraying ever since elementary school. It was inevitable. There’s a brutal binary forced onto so many first-generation Asian Americans, trapped in communities that don’t reflect how we look while growing up with a culture at home that doesn’t reflect the world around us. Far before we have to make any important decisions in our life, we have to begin to choose who we want to be in every realm of our existence. Religion, language, down to the clothes we wear all get put on the stand, questioned relentlessly and without remorse. For me, it started with the food I ate.

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My mom used to pack my lunch every day in elementary school.  When things got busy and she didn’t have that much time, she packed whatever ready-made parathas we had in the fridge. Parathas are a type of Indian flat bread, usually stuffed with vegetables or herbs. Methi Parathas are a variety of paratha made with fenugreek or methi leaves and have a distinct dark-green hue. They are absolutely incredible after being heated on a tawa (a flat pan), then served with butter on top and yogurt on the side with a touch of salt and pepper. And so on a busy day sometime in the third or fourth grade, I opened my lunchbox and saw a few wrapped up inside. As I started to eat, a kid named Cameron, a good friend of mine at the time, unprompted, said they looked like s—t. I questioned him on it a little, thinking he was joking. I knew he wasn’t. He said it again, but the words didn’t matter; I could read it in his eyes. Pure disgust. 

I remember exactly what octagonal table we were sitting at in the cafeteria of Cromwell Valley Elementary School when he said that to me. I remember what seats we were sitting in and what the parking lot and playground looked like outside the windows surrounding the large room. I remember hiding the rest of my food away. And I remember on the car ride home asking my mom, who worked so hard to pack our lunches every day, to never do it again. 

Even before that day, those lunch tables were brutal for the kids who looked different and whose food always smells different. Every day after, since I was about 8 or 9 years old till the day I graduated from Dulaney High School, I made my own lunch. 

And I was really bad at it. 

And anytime a kid made a comment about my food or skin color (which happened quite a lot more than you’d think), or about my culture, without hesitation, I chose to become more American. Out of the two Indian kids in my elementary school, I was the lamer one. Why in the world would I continue to be something everybody around me will never understand, and therefore can never really accept? I wanted that strange and alluring comfort afforded to those who grew up in the hegemony, who always seemed to have a little bit more control over their life than me. So I changed, I ripped out parts of myself, changed others so I could sit at those lunch tables and not feel out of place. Before entering rooms, I used to calculate what parts of me would help me fit in the best, how Indian I should be around certain people. Around some people, I didn’t want to be Indian at all. But I was an Indian kid growing up in a very white suburb of Baltimore, I’ve never really had that control, I was never going to fit in. However many years later, I can still feel scars in my memory, they poke me every so often, reminding me of those choices I so wish I could go back and change. But I can’t, so after a while, I tried to ignore them, push them away, write them off as demons from my past never to be seen again.

But for the last 10 months of living in this food desert, I’ve felt this painful itch under my skin; I could feel those fibers that make me up begin to start tearing again. Three years after moving to Chicago, I’ve landed in an apartment nestled into a quiet corner of suburbia, away from everything else. Signing the lease, I knew I was signing up to live away from restaurants and grocery stores; I knew I’d be separated from the food I ate every day growing up. Maybe if I chose not to care about it, I could get by. I didn’t think that on my 21st birthday, I’d be roaming around Lincoln Park alone again, unsure with who or where I was. I didn’t expect moving here would cause me this type of pain. This is Chicago, whose metro population has the second-largest number of South Asians in the country (second only to New York City). Coming here, I hoped there would always be good Indian food right around the corner. There isn’t. You have to go a lot further than that.

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A Brief Recap of an Amateur Sociolingustics Project

Like many other American cities, Chicago has a “Little India,” but unfortunately, without a car, it’s a lengthy journey from Lincoln Park. A long train ride followed by a long bus ride is the most accessible way to go to the heart of Devon Avenue, the only hub of South Asian culture that exists in this city. My dad had been guilting me every time I complained about the distinct lack of good Indian food in my immediate vicinity. “Just go to Devon,” he routinely reminded me. “I’m sure there is good filter coffee and masala dosa there” (the South Indian staples that can fix any problem, aid any heartbreak and make life that much more worth living). After such a long time, I knew that I had to make some excuse to go there. So, in the Winter Quarter of 2024, for my Honors Seminar in Multiculturalism, a class on Language and Identity in the US, I decided to create a Linguistic Landscape of Devon Avenue. This type of study is a map that logs all of the written and physical signage of an area. Sociolinguistics creates this type of landscape in order to understand demographic trends in locations where surveys don’t tell the full story. 

I’m not a sociolinguist, let’s get that out of the way right off the bat (although the title itself is enough to make me consider the risky career change). But I’ve loved being in the Honors College because I have been challenged with new and foreign worlds of study. I’ve forced myself to survive by finding my niche within those topics, the parts I can find a passion for investigating deeper. This was the easiest niche I’ve ever had access to in one of these classes; I’ve wanted to see Chicago’s “Little India” for so long. I knew as soon as I heard the options for final papers, I wanted to use this project as a method of understanding this place I’ve been told, so often, offers a safe harbor to those suffering the sore pains of being away from home. 

Photo by Varun Khushalani.

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Don’t even try and imagine this place, it’s like nothing you’ve seen before. The second you enter its atmosphere, you can tell this isn’t Jackson Heights, the “Little India” of New York. This is Chicago, after all. 

There was a silent emptiness to it. Everybody on the street walking, acknowledging the fact that they are miles from the action, from the trains or the cities, there was no pulse. Devon Ave isn’t just a neighborhood, it feels like a forgotten suburb marooned on the outskirts of the surrounding neighborhoods of Rogers Park, North Park and Andersonville.

Before the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, Devon Ave was primarily Jewish and Eastern European. As immigrants slowly began coming to the U.S. from countries like India, and later on from the rest of South Asia, they began to create their own culture here, slowly growing a hub for a new generation of Asian Americans. As that community grew and evolved, and after another boom of Indian immigration in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the area of Devon Ave became known officially as Little India.

Photo by Varun Khushalani.

As I began to construct this landscape of the physical and written signage, it was clear that the makeup of Devon Ave is more complex than many people would notice from a passing glance. This is a product of the last few decades, where immigration has skyrocketed from the entire South Asian diaspora. As I walked up and down the neighborhood, I was amazed by the diversity of Pakistani, Nepalese, Bangladeshi and Indian restaurants, businesses, religious institutions, etc. I never thought I’d be so happy seeing Hindi and Arabic in front of me again.

One of the reasons Devon has diminished since its heyday in the ‘90s was the emergence of similar cultural hubs in the surrounding Chicago suburbs. Once affluent Indian-Americans began to move out of the city, they transplanted those same cultural hubs in their own suburbs of Naperville, Aurora and Schaumburg, lessening the influence and necessity of Devon Ave over time. I would have loved to see this place at its height, a beacon of cultural identity in one of the most vibrant cities in the US. What the parties must have been like. I arrived 20-40 years too late, watching a relic of a time long past silently grow old. And yet when I walked into every restaurant, grocery store and establishment I could, Chicago surprised me in a way it had never done before: it made me nostalgic.

Regardless of its diminished stature, far, far away, Devon Avenue still exists — it’s still out there, right now. This small pocket of rich culture exists despite being in the middle of nowhere, despite South Asians moving out and getting their fix somewhere else. While cultural hubs have begun growing rapidly in the suburbs, with more space and increasing money, I saw with my own eyes the origin of those communities still puttering along; to these people who continue to visit, shop or call this place their home, not only is their culture their life, but their life here is their culture. Devon Ave serves as a monument to the trailblazers who did this when it was so much harder for those who looked like us in this country, who gathered together and refused to sacrifice their culture for others because, at the end of the day, we are who we are. 

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We are what we eat

After spending a long day taking photos up and down a quiet, downtrodden street, I was desperately tired and needed a coffee. I googled places to eat around me and I saw Udupi Palace, a supremely familiar name a few hundred feet away. 

 A very, very long time ago my family took lengthy car rides down I-95 from Cockeysville, Maryland, to one of the only South Indian restaurants near us. There was a CD store right next to it that my dad always liked. The masala dosas (rice and lentil  crepes stuffed with potatoes) came in cones that were bigger than my head, and I always wanted to make a point of finishing it all (especially before my brother, who usually ordered the same thing). I can only imagine now the rich smells of sambar and rasam being cooked in the kitchen, the pleasing sizzling sound of vadas being fried. I don’t remember much about those times, but I remember always walking in hungry and walking out full. We usually met someone there, family or friends in the area and I always played on my Nintendo DS, bored, not understanding why everybody wanted to talk for so long.

And then one day we stopped going. Middle school and high school happened (yikes). The pandemic happened. My brother went off to college and then so did I. My family moved entirely out of Maryland a year after and Udupi Palace became a distant memory, one that had faded long before I even thought about coming to Chicago, before I’d heard the name Devon Ave. When my life was simpler, when I wasn’t asking myself so many pesky questions about who or where I am.

I walked into the restaurant at around 4 p.m., and it was empty, except for a family sitting in the corner and a manager rifling through the register. I sat down and looked at the placemats scattered across the table advertising two more Udupi Palaces in Schaumburg, Illinois, and College Park, Maryland. Immediately, I texted my family group chat about this incredible coincidence, and when the manager came over sometime later, before I ordered, I told him that I used to go to the other location all the time (a fact that didn’t seem to impress him all that much). Monotonously, he informed me that the location had shut down a while ago. I didn’t order any food, except for a coffee. I think it was out of respect.

~~~

It’s not the most scenic car ride back. Western Ave looked a little worse for wear as I still tried to digest what I had just seen. Devon Ave, while rough on the edges, holds something that tiny strip mall in College Park, Maryland, doesn’t have anymore. I barely had control of the present, and here the past was crumbling away without me even realizing. 

And for the first time in a while, those scars didn’t feel as painful anymore.

It wasn’t full self-actualization, but just smelling the aisles of Patel Brothers (a popular Indian grocery chain with store all across the country), was enough to calm an anxiety that I hadn’t even realized was there. For the first time in this city, I fit in walking down the street, that beautiful street that’s just too far away and beat up — just that much out of reach, but yet exists anyway. It’s home to this extraordinary group of people who have lasted so long in a place that has been left weathered and forgotten by the passage of time and all the people who came before. They get by with each other.

That dusty afternoon, I felt a sense of tranquility only briefly offered in this city when walking through a neighborhood during cooking times and stumbling upon the smells of the spices I loved growing up. Rapidly, I look around for the open window, desperately trying to hold on to those aromas of crackling mustard or cumin seeds that always fade too quickly. 

And in those moments, I smile to myself, knowing that someone in the damned place is desperatley trying to go back home as well.

~~~

I didn’t find anything good to eat on my 21st birthday. The next day, I took a pretty long walk in the rain to get lunch at an Indian place I used to like. I sat in an empty restaurant and ate a masala dosa that was too oily, watching people out the window scurry through the constant drizzle, wondering how in the world I’d found myself so far from home. There was no moment of elation, no snap realization to get me out of the funk I know isn’t easily fixed. I thought back to a few months  ago when I returned to Devon with a good friend of mine. We went to Patel Bros and showed each other snacks we loved as kids. It was checking out that I knew when I turned 22 the next year, I’d be at the end of my brief tenure in the city of Chicago. I know I can’t do this place long term; it’s just a little bit too tough for the soul.

But I haven’t given up on the dream of finding “my spot” yet. I know it’s out there somewhere, closer than it seems; waiting for me to turn the right corner and find it like it’s been there all along. We all fight these deeply personal battles for existence. We all yearn to be in a place where we’re not — where we can be accepted and not have to compromise who we are to walk down the street. It’s lonely out there when the world around you doesn’t think or look like you. But for all of us, there exists a restaurant, a community and a home that’s been fighting the same battle for a lot longer than we have. I guarantee the food there is incredible.

Header by Varun Khushalani