Before you begin reading, there are a few facts that you might want to get privy with:
- We cook two times in a month, at the most.
- Any spill in the kitchen is taken care of, 48-72 hours after the incident, at the least.
- The door on the ground floor never locks, unless we drag it along on the way out.
- The probability of a random cordless handset dying out, on a random hour of a random day of a random year, is quite honestly, very very very low.
Saturday evening. A time of endless bliss and joy, for Sunday is next. For the near sighted, like me, the fact that the Monday comes right after, is invariably lost in the bliss of the approaching Sunday. We loiter around the house, on the seventh heaven, planning for the next dinner. Eating out is no more a fancy. It is a drawn out procedure that goes thus:
- deciding on an eatery (choosing between a hotel that provides crap and a hotel that provides crap - tough choice)
- driving to the eatery (the SUV takes more gas than a camel could take water; might exchange the Suzuki for a camel)
- ordering (meekly browsing the menu for non-existent vegetables)
- waiting in hunger (quite like standing in line, in a public toilet, in India; you realize you are headed toward piles of smelly crap, but you gotta go anyway.)
- eating (a euphemism for forcing junk down the esophagus due to growing-out-of-proportion hunger)
- paying the bill (that is quite like a blood donation camp for the Vampire needy)
- driving back (camel starts sounding like a good option. And maybe it could live on coke. Its cheaper than water.)
We decide to cook. Menu turns out to be vaangi bhaat masala and potato curry. Roommate is on one side of the stove cooking brinjal. I stand beside him cooking potato. The prospect of a wonderful vaangi bhaat with alu curry is mouth watering. We relish the growing smell of the masala, which lingers on, in all of our first floor apartment. Ah! Ecstasy. I pick up the box of chilli powder and place it to my left. I pick up the spoon and shower glorious chilli powder gently over the potato, stirring all the while. Ah! The smell! As I pull my hand back to stir again, I knock the box over the edge.
The floor mat is showered with glorious chilli powder too; about 200 gms. We realize that we are standing on the floor mat. Our feet could get smeared with chilli powder. Extrapolating this possibility, we see ourselves walking around the house with chilli powder on our feet, spreading it around the house and onto our comforter on the floor. Further extrapolation reveals us waking up the next morning with chilli powder in our eyes, disabling eyesight temporarily. Having 'seen the dark future' using extrapolation, we resort to the unthinkable.
We clean. I leave the gas on sim. He leaves the gas on. I pick one end of the floor mat and force all the powder to the center. He picks up the other end. We walk out of the kitchen toward the main door. He is wearing a t-shirt and shorts. I am wearing just shorts, no shirt, no undershirt. We make our way down the steps and open the door on the ground floor. He walks out first, I follow. He leaves the mat for me to dust. I go down the couple or so steps and dust the thing. The mat has probably never been dusted since its inception. So I make sure its a pretty good dusting job. I turn around and find my roommate standing facing me, looking on rather strangely. I walk up to him and wait for him to open the door. He does not react. I insist. He moves away.
The door on the ground floor locks itself today. I have nothing on me. No key, no cell phone, no shirt. He has the shirt, no key, no cell phone. He suggests we sit outside and wait for roommate no. 2 to return. I realize the stoves are on. We panic. We look around for any kind of help, any kind of help. A neighbour provides her cordless phone. In panic, there are just a few numbers we can recall. We call. By good fortune, we reach whoever we are trying to call. By bad fortune, the cordless handset is screaming for power. Call gets dropped. Roommate runs down one block to an acquaintance for making the call to Roommate No. 2.
7 PM on one of the fifty odd Saturday evenings of the year 2008, one of the hundred odd cordless handsets in existence around us, is dying out in our hands. I stare in disbelief. We receive the call back from the one we called. We explain the problem in a hurry. He calls up Roommate No. 2. I call Roommate and tell him that Roommate No. 2 has been informed and is on the way. Roommate hurries back. We wait on the steps longingly for Roommate No. 2. Unnoticeable at first, stronger later, we smell the burning vaangi. With each breath, we see the vaangi 'passing away'. We sit outside hopelessly, he with the t-shirt, I with none. I wonder about the nausea I cause, to all that see me. I thank the lord for my shorts.
Roommate No. 2 arrives at length. We rush into the house in the hope of salvaging whatever is left of the vaangi and the alu. I open the alu. Delightfully, it is not burnt. Gas on sim did the trick. We try scraping off top layers of the vaangi, going down as far as we think we can without hitting carbon. We hit carbon. We stop scraping and decide that was it. We finally sit down, quite spent. The house is foggy.
We think: it cannot have been us; it has got to be fate.
The fire alarm goes off.
- We cook two times in a month, at the most.
- Any spill in the kitchen is taken care of, 48-72 hours after the incident, at the least.
- The door on the ground floor never locks, unless we drag it along on the way out.
- The probability of a random cordless handset dying out, on a random hour of a random day of a random year, is quite honestly, very very very low.
Saturday evening. A time of endless bliss and joy, for Sunday is next. For the near sighted, like me, the fact that the Monday comes right after, is invariably lost in the bliss of the approaching Sunday. We loiter around the house, on the seventh heaven, planning for the next dinner. Eating out is no more a fancy. It is a drawn out procedure that goes thus:
- deciding on an eatery (choosing between a hotel that provides crap and a hotel that provides crap - tough choice)
- driving to the eatery (the SUV takes more gas than a camel could take water; might exchange the Suzuki for a camel)
- ordering (meekly browsing the menu for non-existent vegetables)
- waiting in hunger (quite like standing in line, in a public toilet, in India; you realize you are headed toward piles of smelly crap, but you gotta go anyway.)
- eating (a euphemism for forcing junk down the esophagus due to growing-out-of-proportion hunger)
- paying the bill (that is quite like a blood donation camp for the Vampire needy)
- driving back (camel starts sounding like a good option. And maybe it could live on coke. Its cheaper than water.)
We decide to cook. Menu turns out to be vaangi bhaat masala and potato curry. Roommate is on one side of the stove cooking brinjal. I stand beside him cooking potato. The prospect of a wonderful vaangi bhaat with alu curry is mouth watering. We relish the growing smell of the masala, which lingers on, in all of our first floor apartment. Ah! Ecstasy. I pick up the box of chilli powder and place it to my left. I pick up the spoon and shower glorious chilli powder gently over the potato, stirring all the while. Ah! The smell! As I pull my hand back to stir again, I knock the box over the edge.
The floor mat is showered with glorious chilli powder too; about 200 gms. We realize that we are standing on the floor mat. Our feet could get smeared with chilli powder. Extrapolating this possibility, we see ourselves walking around the house with chilli powder on our feet, spreading it around the house and onto our comforter on the floor. Further extrapolation reveals us waking up the next morning with chilli powder in our eyes, disabling eyesight temporarily. Having 'seen the dark future' using extrapolation, we resort to the unthinkable.
We clean. I leave the gas on sim. He leaves the gas on. I pick one end of the floor mat and force all the powder to the center. He picks up the other end. We walk out of the kitchen toward the main door. He is wearing a t-shirt and shorts. I am wearing just shorts, no shirt, no undershirt. We make our way down the steps and open the door on the ground floor. He walks out first, I follow. He leaves the mat for me to dust. I go down the couple or so steps and dust the thing. The mat has probably never been dusted since its inception. So I make sure its a pretty good dusting job. I turn around and find my roommate standing facing me, looking on rather strangely. I walk up to him and wait for him to open the door. He does not react. I insist. He moves away.
The door on the ground floor locks itself today. I have nothing on me. No key, no cell phone, no shirt. He has the shirt, no key, no cell phone. He suggests we sit outside and wait for roommate no. 2 to return. I realize the stoves are on. We panic. We look around for any kind of help, any kind of help. A neighbour provides her cordless phone. In panic, there are just a few numbers we can recall. We call. By good fortune, we reach whoever we are trying to call. By bad fortune, the cordless handset is screaming for power. Call gets dropped. Roommate runs down one block to an acquaintance for making the call to Roommate No. 2.
7 PM on one of the fifty odd Saturday evenings of the year 2008, one of the hundred odd cordless handsets in existence around us, is dying out in our hands. I stare in disbelief. We receive the call back from the one we called. We explain the problem in a hurry. He calls up Roommate No. 2. I call Roommate and tell him that Roommate No. 2 has been informed and is on the way. Roommate hurries back. We wait on the steps longingly for Roommate No. 2. Unnoticeable at first, stronger later, we smell the burning vaangi. With each breath, we see the vaangi 'passing away'. We sit outside hopelessly, he with the t-shirt, I with none. I wonder about the nausea I cause, to all that see me. I thank the lord for my shorts.
Roommate No. 2 arrives at length. We rush into the house in the hope of salvaging whatever is left of the vaangi and the alu. I open the alu. Delightfully, it is not burnt. Gas on sim did the trick. We try scraping off top layers of the vaangi, going down as far as we think we can without hitting carbon. We hit carbon. We stop scraping and decide that was it. We finally sit down, quite spent. The house is foggy.
We think: it cannot have been us; it has got to be fate.
The fire alarm goes off.
