Where in the world will I find a turkey?

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For more than 40 years, my family has gathered around the same table on Thanksgiving to overdose on tryptophan, share the news of our lives, watch the kids wreck the house and generally reknit any frayed edges of our family ties.

We have always come together. It has been a universal family priority. When the kids went to college and later moved away, they still found a way to come home for Thanksgiving. When my folks retired to Florida, they always made the trip up north for turkey time. It just wouldn’t feel like Thanksgiving if my mother and I didn’t argue about how long to cook the bird.

Last year there were three thermometers (three!) in the turkey, and we still couldn’t agree. Mom believes it is a cardinal sin to overcook a turkey. I prefer not to see any fresh blood on my plate. My cousin made a Victoria’s Secret, politically incorrect turkey with two lemons under the skin in just the right places. We’re a spirited group.

Since we all live far apart now, Thanksgiving means everyone stays here in the parental home, for a week or so. Imagine: 12 people, including two nonagenarians, four kids — 11, 9, 7 and 5 — three meals a day, sleeping bags in all the rooms, and someone banging on the piano pretty much 24/7. It’s a blast. I feel as if I’m being drawn and quartered during the experience, but, like childbirth, the process seems less painful when filtered through memory.

Anyway, this year will be different. For the first time in all these decades, we will write a new chapter into our family’s Thanksgiving saga. My husband and I leave this week on an extended trip that will bring us across the world and then some.

On Thanksgiving Day, if all goes well, we will be in Mumbai. I don’t expect to find a turkey dinner, but I may try a vada pav. This Indian snack food is a kind of spicy potato patty, dredged in flour, fried and covered in chutney. Long cherished as a “street food,” it is now being offered by modern chain restaurants that follow reasonably hygienic standards. Wish me luck. Should I fall victim to a local bug, I will break out my traveling MASH unit, which, I assure you, rivals any stateside E.R.

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