6 Months

BANG!!!!!!!!!!! No-its not a fire cracker going off in a celebration party, this is actually the sound of one of the unfortunate tires on which my Chariot of Fire(that’s what my car deserved to be called) runs on. 17 years and still running-first this wonder of technology used to be handled by my father ,who, one fine morning,(fortunately for me and unfortunately for the car) gave in to my whims (well partially as I was urging him to buy me a kinetic bike with my pocket money savings of the last four years so that I can participate in a bike rally) and decided to hand over the car keys to me with a never ending list of conditions which begins like this:
I should take care of the car, i.e., regularly wash it ,take it for servicing etc.
I should never drive alone and always take any one of the noisy ladies(well this is according to me not my father and this group includes my mother-heading the list, 3 of my aunts(masi ji) and 2 of my cousin sisters who are so scared of sitting in the car when I am behind the wheel that their screeches can mke my ear drum resemble a rag.)
This list goes on with several other conditions like I should listen to whatever suggestions our mechano-cum-driver bhaiya gives me about driving (and during driving)-but if I start imposing this condition on myself I and the bhaiya both might end up in a hospital because this guy not only have a gift of gab but he can shut up all the chatterboxes in the world with his never ending AkhandKatha which are more or less about his achievements in the field of repairing punctured tires, blown off horns, his Schumacher like driving skills et al. Sometimes I wonder that someday I might have to hear it from him that he has helped the ISRO guys in assembling the Chandrayan.
Back to the present scenario, here I am in the middle of a high road, with a punctured tire AND a punctured stepny in the hood.
This is one of the many incidents which imply the lashing of bad luck that I have to bear for the last 4 months now.Bad luck?Is it fair to call it a bad luck-well, I am confused there as well. This phase began with that Dumbo Singh(good for nothing) walking out of my life. Surprisingly I didn’t feel bad because of the break up-I tried to make myself cry( as girls and protagonists do in soap operas) but I ended up laughing thinking about the blunders I ve committed while I was with him-one among those numerous blinders being I gifted him a pink teddy bear on his birthday, because I couldn’t think of anything else. I mean what can you gift a person who talks about chocolates, cooking, soft toys and dresses and apparels (discussions about these made up most of our conversations). Till date I couldn’t figure out how I happen to be with him as I hate chocolates and soft toys and I can do anything but cooking.
Cooking- well, as far as this skill goes – we say that some skills are inherent in us or a certain person is god-gifted in a certain thing-well, as far as cooking is concerned, the above saying goes the other way round in my case. Ever since I completed my graduation, my masiji is making a fervent effort to teach me the basics of this skill-but as I said, some things are really not made for me. My venture into cooking enterprise( which happen to comprise my masiji’s kitchen as the head-office with my masiji being the CEO and her cook-Kadambari Kalavati Pan being the sole senior executive cum senior business analyst and resource manager) began with my masi’s endeavor to teach me cooking , especially kindled by the incident which took place when some bullies (that is what I consider them) disguised as groom’s family came to our place to consider my sister’s prowess to be their son’s bride. It so happened that the lady in the party happened to be a chalti firti encyclopedia of cooking and she expects her to be daughter-in-law the same, started a jargon- “What should be added to bitter gourd curry along with cardamom , sugar and salt to get aesthetic taste that Raja of Muzaffarpur used to get in his bitter gourd curry?” WHAT???? ‘cardamom + sugar’ that too in bitter gourd curry, and how would my sister know what some bullshit raja used to have for his lunch or dinner or whatever-I mean , what does she want?A daughter-in-law or a chemo-food lab assistant or a food historian or someone who cooks weird things like cardamom + sugar along with bitter gourd. Obviously my sister, who till then could prepare only a handful of dishes(that too in such a manner that even the stray dogs might sometimes refuse them )failed in her interview, and lo!, our family(according to the senior ladies in the family) lost a prospective groom,who according to them is “laakhon mein ek –heera tha who”. Well, I really wanted to tell them-that their statement has a folly in it-first of all-he cant be “laakhon mein ek” because whatever manipulations my aunts would like to make to the demographic reports of the current Census, a boy cant be “laakhon mein ek”, but the same can be said about a girl if she happens to hail from Hazari village of Haryana because that is approximately the sex ratio of that village( well , for this result multiply the numerator and denominator by100).
Anyways, that one hell of a cooking bum had started the epidemic in my family ,among my aunts (particularly),and I happen to be the sole victim of this because I am the only member in my big fat Bengali family who is still unmarried and who doesn’t possess any of the skills that are supposed to be the pre-requisites to launch oneself in the ,marriage market. So there I am-the very next day I was woken up at 4 in the morning and when I protested to the atrocities being committed on me, Hitler re-incarnated has a prompt answer for me- “If you don’t start cooking now how can you serve food at 8-that is the time when the breakfast is being served. You are such a spoil sport that you don’t even notice at what time you are being served. GET UP “, ok ok, I am getting up .Its really difficult to drag yourself at such an hour of night or day-what shall I call it-ok leave that for now.
Finally I managed to freshen myself and enter the kitchen. I was ordered by Kaddu(that’s what I call her-though she is frantically mad on me for this-but this is what she deserves, though I don’t call her by this name infront of her-then I would be sent on a no food ,no TV ,no mobile and no computer concentration camp by Hitler) to fry the eggs-on a non-stick pan. Oh..k-non-stick “Nothing sticks on it-Nothing. It is tiffin coated.”
“Teflon”-I corrected.
“Yes yes, that”.
“If nothing ever sticks to Teflon, how do they get Teflon to stick to the pan?”, I asked her.
“Shut up-otherwise I’ll call didi”
“Ok ok”
“Now back to work- get the eggs-and don’t break them, if you break even one I’ll make you lay one.”
How can she possibly make me do that? Does she have any idea as to what the hell is she talking about-ok,we will not go into the details of mammalian anatomy that I am sure Kaddu doesn’t have the capability to pass through her neural processors. But anyhow, Kaddu’s name is actually a pun on her just like her surname “Pan” and the comment she has passed just proves it. She has a Kaddu for a brain and she even looks like that- ok enough criticizing others ,even I don’t have Einstein brains and Aishwariya looks –so I think I shouldn’t be criticizing Kaddu like that.
So back to kitchen work, rather back to obeying Kaddu’s orders.

To be continued.............................

P.S.: The above work is purely a work of fiction and any resemblance to the real life characters is purely non-coincidental :D and for the sole purpose of fun.