As good as yesterday.
It was a Sunday like any other in Bangalore. Waking up just a few minutes short of noon, I harnessed all the energy I could from every inch of my body to pull myself up. It took sizeable effort to fight an urge to continue staying in bed, scrolling endlessly through my Facebook newsfeed on my phone, frequently liking photos, occasionally refreshing the feed and sporadically sharing a post or two. Once the posts that kept hopping up became familiar due to repeated views, I’d switch to my iPad, essentially doing the same exercise of scrolling down and refreshing. If that too became tiresome, I’d shift to my laptop, the exercise remaining the same.
“If this exercise could help us lose weight, I would have become half my size already.” Safwan would say, each time I rewound and repeated deep, pensive conversations about our pointless time wasting exercises which were on a daily loop.
“If it does anything related to your body, it only helps you add weight, and get out of shape.” I would explain.
“In that case why are you continuously calling it an ‘exercise’? Shouldn’t you be calling it something true to the result it creates?” Safwan would argue.
“Like what?” I’d ask.
“Gluttony.”
I’m now trying to wake Safwan up from his slumber. This Sunday was going to be slightly different from the others that had been populating our winter calendar, and he was the one who had promised to make it different. Safwan had been up the last night on a combination of late night phone calls and marathon television series viewing, hence, waking him up at noon would tantamount to difficultly similar to convincing a saffron lover that demonetization was a disaster. I pushed, pulled and almost kicked him out of his bed before he finally pulled himself up together.
“You told me you are taking me to a place where we’d get boiled rice and fish fry.” I reminded him.
“Yes but that’s in the afternoon.” He said, still reluctant to open his eyes.
“It is afternoon already.”
It wasn’t before another half an hour that Safwan came back into my room, and I had taken out a pair of jeans to get ready to go eat.
“Where are you going?” Safwan asked. He seemed to have freshened up, but still wore the same three fourths and loose shirt he had been wearing since the previous night.
“We are going out for lunch, right?”
“Yes. But are you planning to wear a jeans and all for that? Just come in that shorts you are wearing.”
Our bike navigated through a small yet reasonably crowded Taverekare Main Road before taking a right turn into a small pocket road where the place Safwan had suggested to make this Sunday different was located. It was more of a home run mess with a kitchen and space to sit and eat than a restaurant. I had moved in to Bangalore from many months of life in Gurgaon, where eating boiled rice was a luxury and getting good fish fry was next to impossible. As we stepped down from the bike and entered into the bench and chair clad interior of the mess, complete with old plastic water jugs, curved glass tumblers kept upside down on each table, men and women eating freshly served hot lunch on banana leaves and the smell of sambar that seem to have just graduated from the kitchen, I was transported to a time not so far back in our lives, where this bike ride for lunch and fish fry clad in shorts and t-shirts was a routine affair on most days of the week. I was back in Kozhikode.
“Can you please get me a spoon to eat this?” Yet another girl whom Shajeerkka had brought for a lunch date would ask the waiter of Lunch House, a small home run mess, right beside the Main Gate of IIM Kozhikode.
The waiter, clad in a lungi and a vest, holding a large basin of rice or a steel bucket of sambar, would sport a puzzling expression on his face, and gaze at the sadya that he just served on the banana leaf in front of the girl, wondering how someone could even remotely consider the idea of eating this with a spoon. The others in our J hostel floor side which we called The Rasta Corner, Adhnan (ji), Athul (Bhargavan), Reeshil (Nedu), Arjun Prakash (Youth), Safwan (ji again) and I, would be sitting at the table beside, eating in peace (with our hands of course), while Shajeerkka translates each of the girl’s demands into Malayalam for the waiter to understand. Once the waiter went back inside the kitchen to try and get what the girl had necessitated, we would shoot glances at Shajeerkka, with Adhnan occasionally dropping a comment or two. As the waiter got back to express regret to Shajeerkka and his date, we’d usually ask for more pieces of fish. No, not to save anyone of the embarrassment of refusal, but purely out of our own desire to eat more fish.
“Rice or biriyani?” A waiter sporting an undercut and wearing an Iron Maiden tee shirt at the Bangalore mess Safwan and I had now been seated in asked me, loud enough to bring me back from the memory into which the sense of déjà vu from the ambience of the mess had driven me back to. The tone of that question, without having given us a menu, would have come across as rude if it had been an upscale restaurant, but the sound of that rudeness almost brought a smile to my face. These were the kind of places I grown up eating at.
Shajeerkka had never given the lungi and vest waiter at Lunch House in Kozhikode an opportunity to become an expert in making his dates satisfied in their gastronomic experience (Though Shajeerkka being the hunk he was would have more than compensated for any disappointment in this aspect through his charisma in all the other aspects of the date). Major reason for this is that Shajeerkka turned up with a different girl every second day, and our poor lungi and vest waiter could only stand back in wonder at the different sorts of demands from different women from all across the country (actually, world) that this dude managed to bring in. Lunch House was a small mess which operated mainly for the security staff and labourers at construction projects which had been underway in and around both the IIM hills. A fair bunch of us who studied at Kozhikode between 2013 and 2015 used to skip the mediocre food at the mess to savour ourselves to a sumptuous lunch at this small space, complete with the most fresh fish fry any of us had eaten in our lives that far.
The undercut Iron Maiden waiter laid out banana leaves in front of us, served us boiled rice and sambar, after which he brought us a tray of assorted fishes, all friend, for us to choose from. I did turn around involuntarily in between the meal, but never found Shajeerkka sitting at the table beside with another date of his. He has been married for a couple of years now, and it was only wise for his own existence that he wasn’t there at the table beside.
“But it’s Shajeerkka, so you never know.” Safwan would say, when I tell him why my head had turned to the right when he had been putting all his efforts to eye a group of four pretty girls seated at the table to my left.
“Anyway you people can marry four times, can’t you?” I’d ask, with no worry of having offended anyone’s religion, for we were stupid enough to follow them, yet mature enough to overlook them.
“Yes all four seem good.” Safwan would say again, sending his gaze back at the table of girls to my right.
“Since when did you start taking interest in women?” I would ask, tongue in cheek, not worrying about having offended anyone’s sexuality, for we were naïve enough to feel odd by it, yet sophisticated enough to joke about it.
It was strange how the tables seemed to have turned just two years from having walked out of IIM hill at Kozhikode. For starters, the lunch and fish fry which was our staple daily diet was now the maker of a standout Sunday brunch. For main course, the group of people who would pull both your legs at the same time and still ensure that you don’t fall were now scattered across cities thousands of miles apart, and for dessert, we both were served a portion of kheer by our undercut Iron Maiden waiter. This wasn’t part of the flashback script from Lunch House, but of course, we had now grown up to be smarter, richer and more boring than we had been two years ago. We now lived in a fancy lakeside apartment in BTM, and not a hostel atop a hill in Kozhikode. We now rode through straight roads filled with traffic around Silk Board junction, not twisted hairpins with no one but us and pedestrians downhill Kunnamangalam. We had to wear that erudition on our sleeves, however much we loathed it. We had to carry that class on our shoulders, however heavy it had been. Most importantly, we had to come to terms to reminiscing times from days of the past, and that’s perhaps the only way to make today almost as good as yesterday.
