A Shot in the Dark

A week or so ago, I joined N and R for dinner at News Cafe. Quite excitedly, they told me about this new place called "Dialogue in the Dark." It has a restaurant, which is engulfed in pitch darkness and you are served by blind waiters.
Interesting idea. My story however doesn't end just yet. That very night I come back home and open  Midnight's Children to the page I had bookmarked it. I turn a few pages and I come across this:

Twin problem of the city's sophisticated, cosmopolitan youth: how to consume alcohol in a dry state; and how to romance girls in the best Western tradition, by taking them out to paint the town red, while at the same time preserving total secrecy, to avoid the very Oriental shame of a scandal? The Midnite-Confidential was Mr. Shroff's solution to the agonizing difficulties of the city's gilded youth. In that underground licentiousness, he had created a world of Stygian darkness, black as hell; in the secrecy of midnight darkness, the city's lovers met, drank imported liquor, and romanced; cocooned in the isolating, artificial night, they canoodled with impunity.
We were led down a lush black carpet --  midnight-black, black as lies, crow-black, anger-black, the black of 'hai-yo, black man!'; in short, a dark rug --  by a female attendant of ravishing sexual charms, who wore her sari erotically low on her hips, with a jasmine in her naval; but as we descended into the darkness, she turned towards us with a reassuring smile, and I saw that her eyes were closed; unearthly luminous eyes had been painted on her lids. I could not help but ask, 'Why...' To which she, simply: 'I am blind; and besides, nobody who comes here wants to be seen. Here you are in a world without faces or names; here people have no memories, families or past; here is for now, for nothing except right now.' 

I know, the chances of  reading something you came across during the day is not unreasonably low (in fact, Jabberwock has talked about something similar today!). So we shall not be creeped out too much by that. What I wonder however is, did life imitate art ? Dialogue in the Dark opened in 1988, Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children in 1981. While such dark restaurants are aplenty now, I could not find any reference to any other such concept that pre-dates Midnight's Children. Or did such a concept really exist in India, which Rushdie discovered during his travels in the country before he wrote the book?

I just wonder who owes whom a hat-tip here.

Message in a Bottle

Had a Vanilla Thunder moment from How I Met Your Mother.

So, today at lunch, S calls me and says, "You wrote on my orkut testimonial (yes, remember those?) that I wanted to do something different every five years, it's been less than 5 at my job and I quit today." 

I went back to see what I had written. The relevant lines, written on 15th Nov 2004 , were,

"Unique is one word for you, i specially loved your "i'll be doing something different every 5 years" i hope to do something like that too, just hope that i have the courage to carry through with it. "

I shall now spend the weekend to see what other clues I had left for the future me!

World Cups

Yes, it is related to today's match, in fact it is about the first match I ever saw.
Yes, it was a India Pakistan match in a World Cup.
Yes, you guessed it right.


February 1996, New Delhi: I am in the 7th grade.The gods have recovered from their milk drinking spree of last year and the girls on my school bus insist on singing, in  very nasal voices,  "Mere khwabon mein jo aaye...", the whole way to school, and back, everyday. We live in a small two room sub-let apartment in Naroji Nagar, which we share with my uncle P, aunt M, and the balcony is the realm of a Pomeranian very imaginatively named Chapantikli.
I am not yet a cricket watcher, but P is. He has already introduced me to several other interesting aspects of life like cheating in 29 ("Remember, when I scratch my nose it means diamonds are trumps".) P is a big cricket fan. He is known to shut himself up in a dark room for hours if India loses a match. M, his wife,  is all jitters before a match, since  India losing does not auger well for ghar ki shanti. India matches usually proceed with P in front of the TV, and M with an agarbatti in front of the gods.
I am given a crash course in the rules of cricket and given a seat next to P. Mom  takes a seat next to her sister in the puja ghar. The first match I ever see is India Vs. Pakistan, quarter-finals, Chinnaswamy Stadium. P and I  shout and scream throughout the match, the post match speeches are drowned by our victory dance and Chapantikli runs between our legs barking with unadulterated joy. But as all of you know, this happy household was rocked by tragedy in a mere matter of 4 days. Kambli cried, P was inconsolable, my head reeled, having experienced euphoria and despair in such quick succession. Needless to say I was hooked.

Ravi's Work Ethic

Summer of '07 I was working in Chennai in a customer service role. Three days of the week, I would travel close to 60km  to a client factory to watch over our products being used in their assembly lines. My only companion during these travels was the driver of the company car, Ravi.

Chennai summers; if you haven't lived it, you have no idea what it's like. We never talked much. Exchange of pleasantries was a long abandoned exercise, there was a mutual understanding that these weren't good days for either of us. My role was dealing with unhappy customers (neat graphic on customer service here) and Ravi had to wait in the heat, in the uncovered parking lot of the factory, till the end of the day.

Still there he would be, every morning,  in his sparkling white uniform, flashing two rows of sparkling white teeth in his sparkling white Ambassador.

One day, towards the end of summer and the close to the end of my stint in that role, both of us were uncharacteristically loquacious. I asked him, "Ravi, how come you are so cheerful every morning?"

I will always remember Ravi's reply, "Sir, every morning while I put on my uniform, I tell myself, today nobody will be unhappy because of me, nobody will reach their destination late, I will drive safe and I will come back to my wife and kids for dinner. With every minute I spend at this job I am buying my family food and security. My father taught me this and I have been doing this for ten years now."

Flash Fiction-From Archives

I have always felt shorthanded when it comes to writing fiction and the tiniest of achievements makes me feel good. Around October '08 I had participated in the "Caferati-LiveJournal Flash Fiction Writing Contest" and my story had made it to the top 100 out of 1052 entries. Inspite of frantic voting by friends and family (thank you guys!), I couldn't make it to the final 10. Lately, I have not been updating this blog as often as I would like to. Untill I find something better to put up, here is my entry. Inspirations being Arthur C. Clarke's History Lesson and the Terra Nova Expedition.

The Journal

The objects lay on the table, exactly as the Scout had left them two days ago. The Researcher had delayed analyzing them. The lethargy in him had been well fed by the warmth of his chamber and the excruciatingly slow progress he had been making in the past four months. Every discovery just tangled it ever more.

He had been tracking the movements of his subjects, following a trail of excavated objects that was distinctive to the species. It was known that this particular patch of land had been their last refuge against an increasingly belligerent climate, what he hoped to contribute was the beginnings of this island, how and why had they chanced upon this land mass.

He picked up the fossilized bone first, and tossed it aside with a grunt. It was useless, there were many more he had found, they belonged to a later time. The second was a moss covered object, slightly large, about the size of his palm, the moss on it was patchy. He was doing his routine check of scratching the moss out, something was different this time, a darker more uniform green shone underneath.

He was sure the object had a purpose, unlike most of his finds. It stood on his table, cleaned, it was dark green, and reflected the sunlight. When he put it up against the sun, and it sparkled even more. The Researcher had just managed to get his first smile of the day looking at the green sparkle when he froze. In the next few moments all he could feel were the flies buzzing in his chamber, his heart beating and the dripping of moist air condensing on the glass walls. There was something cylindrical inside it. It moved around as he shook the green object, which he now understood to be just an outer covering.

Excitement mingled with frustration, he banged it on the table, it made a tinkling sound and shattered to pieces, and the kernel dropped to the floor. It seemed organic. The Researcher picked the kernel with his forceps and put it inside the Date Machine. A number popped up. The researcher could hardly believe the figure that showed up. It was possibly the oldest man-made object he had found in these parts. He picked the kernel out from the machine, and inspected it. Its surface had dark smudgy inscriptions, it rolled open to become completely flat and the edges were rough and looked like it fitted into a larger whole. The inscriptions belonged to one of the broad categories that had still not been translated.

The Researcher sighed, those little squiggly marks possibly told a story of the genesis of civilization on this part of Earth, but it also meant another dead end to bang his head against.

He ran his fingers through the marks, it was written,

“Damn you Amundsen”

He looked out of the walls in exasperation at his inability to understand the script.

The sun continued on its incessant circular path an inch above the horizon, its rays cutting across dense fauna.