I HEART PAAN

I bought tobacco paan from this walla near the Belur Math monastery along the banks of the Ganges in West Bengal, India.

The cover story on this week’s New York Press, “New York’s Plummy Weekly Newspaper,” is my monologue thinly disguised as an essay, ‘Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater’, the title a loose parody of Thomas de Quincey’s scandalous 1821 memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Enjoy the article, go to your nearest Indian grocer and enjoy some meeta paan, and if you’re craving more dope on the delicacy here’s a short clip of me ordering it from a paan walla just across from the ancient Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Orissa in eastern India, this past January (footage courtesy of documentary filmmaker David Gaynes).

Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater

Jeffrey Stanley is addicted to what may arguably be India’s most disgusting export

I pull my hat low as I pound the rain-slicked sidewalks of Curry Hill around noon on a frigid November weekday. I look about furtively as I walk up Lexington, stopping outside of a DVD shop before I dart inside. There I meet my sugar man, a Punjabi who only goes by the nom de commerce Arora.  By now I know his real name, but he likes to go by the one-word moniker.  I’m happy to…CONT’D>>