Goat. Brain. Curry.

I read the menu. I was about to order the palak paneer, chunks of unfermented cheese in a mildly spiced spinach sauce. Then I saw it. There was 'Brain Curry', and there was no backing down. "Excuse me," I asked "what is the Brain Curry?"

The waiter shrugged, then attempted to jolt his memory and hesitantly described "It is a gravy, made first with tomato sauce and some masalas." Fabulous, we've determined that the dish falls within the broad parameters in which hundreds of barely-related meals are called 'curry'.

"No, I mean the 'brain'. What is it?" He shrugged again, curled his lips and shook his head. A great mystery, no doubt. "The BRAIN" I said, smacking upon my own in frustration. "Is this thing?" I asked impatiently, cradling my cranium, shaking my skull with my hands to draw his fleeting attentions thence. "This thing we are supposed to have in our heads?!" I sputtered as his eyes glazed over yet again.

He missed the insult. "Oh yes, is brain!" he recovered, eyes bright with pride.

I concealed my exasperation to speak with the utmost clarity. "OK then, I'll have the brains."

"You are wanting brain curry?" he asked, eyes squinting askance.

I thrust my arms out over the table and groaned "Braaaaaiiiiinnnnssss", then set my stare upon him in anticipation of his next witless remark. It was to the point.

"Brain curry?"
"YES...and a chai."
"Chai? You want Indian tea?"

You have to be fucking kidding me.

By this point the rest of the staff was taking some interest in my dining. I was the only customer, an odd foreigner with a pile of stained notebooks asking to be fed brains. The manager and other waiters, all Punjabis, took frequent breaks from listening to their unusually tolerable pop music to watch me scrawl in my notes. Sometimes they even ventured over to my table to read over my shoulder, only to be thwarted by my poor penmanship and the oblique manner in which I typically malign Indian cities. After a considerable wait, my Rajasthani waiter arrived with my chai.

Though I may as well have asked a blind Cambodian orphan in semaphore, I queried "Excuse me, from which animal is the brain?" He did not comprehend. I decided to break it down into multiple-choice. "The animal: is it sheep brain? Goat brain? ...Chicken?" This was still too much. I rephrased the question as a true-or-false. "The brain: mutton?"

"Yes sir! Mutton!"

Mutton is one of those English words, like possible, that Indian culture has somehow endowed with ambiguity. Its meaning is more or less "could be sheep, but I'd wager on goat." This was Ajmer. I've walked its streets. The mutton was definitely goat.

After further delay, a small metal dish was brought to my table. This made sense. I could not expect goat brain to be very large, because goats are fucking idiots. The dish was filled in a light brown slop. Roughly half of North Indian cuisine consists of various substances - chicken, cheese, potatoes, peas, ping-pong balls, refrigerator magnets - drowned in a brownish slop. I tasted the sauce first. It was curry. Everything is curry. Curry is an almost Orwellian word. Curry is the apex of the disassociation of language from meaning. All one knows is that there will be sauce and there will be spices. In India this is as redundant as calling a dish "banana fruit" or "bread food". A curry of eggplant here bears no relation to a curry of eggplant there, yet there is no name to distinguish these; there is just Eggplant Curry. Indian Restaurant menus, with their meticulously categorized offerings and minuscule gradations of price, are but a mockery of a gastronomical order, an ancient-ciphered hieroglyphic codex to be vainly examined by the gourmand. As a Mesoamerican scholar might say "This cryptic frieze is only known to be of Olmec origin" so too did I ponder "Indeed, this is a curry."

As I delicately sipped quarter-spoonfuls of this concoction, the Punjabis huddled in conspiracy around their audio system. They switched CD's and the melody became familiar. I thought little of it. Punjabis are generally the most internationally-minded of the Indian peoples; these men simply seemed to have a broader taste in pop music. I took my fork and pierced a small, nondescript chunk of yellow matter from within the depths of the curry. I took a moment to savor it but it remained unremarkable. I poked around my tray and began to suspect I had been given paneer curry in a kind and secretive act of Sikh hospitality, the contemporary American tune chosen specifically to ease my mind.

Disappointed and unsure how to proceed, I resolved to finish my meal in dignity. I forked a larger bite and directed it into my mouth. It was definitely brain. As I began to chew it squished palpably against my tongue, not oozing with juices, but merely soft and compressible like certain types of shellfish or other non-muscular animal organs I've tried. The texture, though unexpected, was unobjectionable. I had expected a more rubbery experience. The flavor was not too bad either, almost bland. I found I needed to coat bites with curry to make them more flavorful.

The truly disconcerting part of the meal was not its flavor or texture but its movement in the mouth. With each motion of the tongue and grinding of the molars it became more and more clear I was feasting on brains. As the brain piece tumbled in my mouth it began to unfold. Though I had not seen them, the intricate tucks and folds instantly recognizable as the anatomy of the mammalian brain began to unravel between my cheeks, flopping behind my gums, unfurling themselves like a damp carpet onto my taste buds. One by one my teeth tore apart the distinct nooks of the goat's mind. With one bite I severed its critical thoughts ("goat!"); with the next its uncanny sense for clambering upon rocks. I squashed and ground the matter and neurons that taught it to move in herds, to fear the stick ("biiiiiig stick"), and to leap on hind legs for bashing skulls.

At last, pressing a paste of cerebral cortex to my cheek with my tongue, I recognized the music. "I want to make love right now na na... Wish we hadn't broke up right now na na". I was eating goat brains to Akon. The Punjabis watched from the stereo console with shit-eating grins. This was an elaborate mockery, a pantomime of cross-cultural ridicule.

Piece by piece the brain disappeared into my undeterred oral cavity. A large mound protruded from the cream. I rolled it with my fork. It was a single chunk of brain and as sauce dribbled off from its underside it revealed to my eyes the curled labyrinth of snaking and spiraling brainflesh on my plate as clearly as in a textbook or a pickled jar. As I began my lengthy chewing of this specimen I wondered "To what extent do goats have memories?" Months among the Hindus stirred in me strange questions. Am I consuming the mind of a conscious being? Has this goat's soul been reborn or is it waiting for me to finish the last of its physical shell? Will my grisly devouring of its brain earn it some karmic reward, a lift from animaldom to perhaps being a humble street-sweeper or rural peasant? Is there some newborn baby across India unaware that I have pieces of its former consciousness stuck between my incisors?

The brain was almost gone and Akon wailed "You're so beaaauuuutiful...so damn beautifuuuu-ulll". Another Akon hit. The Punjabis' mirth at my expense was to extend to an entire Akon album.

The food could have been worse, and I was actually beginning to enjoy the relative restraint of auto-tuned R&B after months of screeched Hindi gibberish over too-fast basslines, cheap digital simulations of jangly Indian bells and stringed instruments, and poorly Orientalized euro-synth keyboards. Then, all of a sudden Akon's soothing robotic drone gave way to the frantic ostentation and outrageous lyricism of the hip-hop guest verse."... I'ma spend them grands but after you undress, not like a hooker but more like a princess". The pin on my cultivated self-restraint in the face of absurdity was pulled and I exploded in laughter, spewing curry all over my plate. The Punjabis rushed to my side, fearing the brain had done me in. I still rocked with laughter as a dabbed clumsily about with a napkin. "I'm all right, I'm all right" I reassured them, "it is because I laugh at the song. He is funny man." The Punjabis nodded and returned to their station. They rewound the track to hear the verse again. They were determined to understand it, as Punjabis consider themselves to be very funny men.

The brain was gone and I slurped at the last of the curry, cleansing my palate with mineral water and buttered bread. The Punjabis, now occupied with a large ledger and several calculators doing their daily accounting, left me to admire my conquests and rest upon my laurels. Sipping water, cooling myself from the heat of victorious battle in this gastronomic Coliseum, I was treated to the voices of the Empire's finest musicians. Almost as a tribute to a worthy foe, Akon sung "She's so dangerouuuusss, that girl's so dangeroouuuuuu-usss".

Dangerous? Danger? Bitch, please. My name is Ghostface Killah Gautama Buddha Maximus; Cow-Slapper of the West and Commander of the Army of the Just; a son in the Cobras' Lair and a brother in the Killers' Manse; and I will eat of Danger and shit of Victory, in this life and the next.