Difficulties of the miracle worker

King’s “Restaurant” for lunch. He ordered chicken fry with nan. ^* The chicken was literally a skeleton in chicken-flavored oil. Evidently the bird had been boiled and boiled into soup, and somebody else had ordered the soup. — As he was a foreigner, he was brought a knife and fork. The waiter and the owner stared with almost religious interest at his attempts to eat with these utensils, which he had seen before in this life, but which had never been applied by him to such difficult usages. The skeleton swam about halfheartedly (if that is the right word) when his proxies pursued it through its frictionless bath. The liquid ran through the tines of his fork. A perfect drop of oil remained on each point after immersion, so every now and then he raised the fork to his mouth coolly, as if he were getting somewhere, and sucked at it. It tasted as if they had cooked the entrails and feathers along with the bones. Fishing politely for a velvety snippet of blood clot or rooster’s comb at the bottom of the dish, he accidentally overturned the skeleton and discovered some meat on the wing. The fork and knife could not pull it loose, however, as he hadn’t been raised in France or Italy, where in the afternoons you could watch old men peel a peach with their silverware, wasting scarcely a molecule of fruit-flesh as the skin came perfectly off; no, the Young Man was an American, and so finally he plunged his hand into the lukewarm oil to get at the skeleton, and he disarticulated the wing joint so as to free that sliver of meat. — The unsprung bone snapped fiercely against the dish, and his table jerked. — The waiter tch-tch’ed, though whether out of pity or offense it was impossible to say.

“Very sorry, sir, ” the owner said from behind the counter. “Very fresh.” —He was a bald old man in the uniform of the Indian Army. Watching his almost empty establishment from the back of the room, he played a cassette over and over. Whenever it reached the end of a side, he flipped it again. The sound was a muffled drumming of static within static, with remnants of calliope in as much evidence as a whore’s hymen.

Well, the Young Man thought, giving up on the meat and dipping little bits of nan into the oil, at least they were subservient instead of inquisitive here; they said they were sorry, so, okay, okay; and believe you me, there’s no finer sight than a thousand waiters tacking into the wind, running for water at the snap of a finger or a waved rupee note, lighting cigarettes for the customer, his napkins blowing like racing pennants in the wind of the pukkas ^† as he steams on, crunching another bone, skipper of his appetite, proud, great and Yankee come to help the Third World.