Group 2
Marium Nasir 2016280092
Liu Yinglun 2016213044
Xu Jia 2016213050
Roopesh and Harshnika
The first thing Roopesh mastered after he left India to be a Ph.D. candidate at Tsinghua was bargaining with the grocers in Zhaolan Yuan market, one of the only two grocery stores on the sprawling 3.29 million square meter campus.
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“Everything is just so expensive here, especially the peas,” said Roopesh, wagging a peasecod pinched between his fingers. “How am I supposed to make Bhaji without peas?”
Bhaji is the most common dish for Roobesh and the other 360,576,000 vegans in vegetarians in India. And haggling over 15 cents on the price of luffa is a daily ritual for Roopesh for one ironically simple reason—he just can’t find vegetarian food in any of the 18 cafeterias on campus.
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Roopesh's grocery shopping at Zhaolan Yuan Market
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There is, however, an upside to such inconvenience for Roopesh. Harshnika, a cherubic young woman with smiling eyes and a pair of dimples, will always be waiting in their dorm room for Roopesh to bring back groceries. They’ll make a nice simple meal usually comprised of stir-fried vegetables and some rice, and share it quietly, as man and wife.
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“We are hardly living married life,” Harshnika winced, wearing a mustered grin. “We both have so many assignments from school.”
For a computer science major and a Ph.D. candidate in automotive engineering, cooking and eating together are rare treats of intimacy. Sometimes the couple gets so swamped by assignments that even such minimum relish is taken away from them, leaving them with no option but eating only fruit for the entire day.
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“I mean, what to do?” Roopesh shrugged with the heartfelt sincerity of a 9-year-old schoolboy praying for an exam he never studied for to be cancelled.