I had lunch at Daawat Indian Grill and Bar. I sat at the bar because there were no free tables. On my plate was marinated cumbers, tomatoes, and olives; bits of butter masala and tandoori chicken; and slices of naan (flat bread). As I ate, I thought about how India has no indigenous coniferous trees. The reason for this is believed to be the eruption of volcanoes a very long time ago. And then it happened. The man sitting next to me, a handsome and brown South Asian, was eating with his hands—or, more exactly, with the tips of his fingers. I was eating with a fork and knife. He was eating in the traditional way, in the way the colonizers found primitive. I was eating like my colonizers. We had the same colonizers—the British. I thought of Fela Kuti's song "Colonial Mentality," put down my fork, and felt the guilt grow.

As I waited for the bill, I recalled the YouTube/Al Jazeera video of the black West Indian cricketer explaining the game in one minute. I recalled how when, in its final 10 seconds, he said, "Yes, we break for tea. Anything else would not be cricket," I really felt those words.

I really felt this civilized drinking of tea. After cricket matches at my boys high school in Harare, Zimbabwe, I would drink tea and eat biscuits with my teammates in the pavilion. Damn! Empire was that deep inside of me. The weight of my American experience failed break it. My distant African birth did not shake it. I felt guilty because I felt it like that Irish schoolmaster, Mr. Deasy, in James Joyce's Ulysses:

— Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth?

— That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

— Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

— I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way. Good man, good man.

— I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that?

I looked at the South Asian eating with his hands. Saw the waiter was removing my plate of shame (the fork and knife). And left.