Our Cook Who Can't Cook

I've always been a real foodie.I can recognise spices in food.Food gets me worked up.The best way to keep me happy is to feed me. My nickname at home is 'andha kua' which, as you may have guessed, underlines my capability of stashing away the good stuff in enormous amounts.So when people ask you what irony is, you can tell them about this post.

Our cook is this nice woman from some picturesque village who should have learnt cooking,at leat how to boil an egg, while being dandled in her mother's lap. But, somehow, she missed out that vital part of a cook's education and is now, unfortunately for us, a cook who can't cook.

Take a simple example of something like toast. What she does is, burn one side and rub the butter on it so that the butter gets black flecks and the toast gets, well, no butter. Then again, her favourite spice happens to be turmeric. so the predominant colour on the table is..yes, it's yellow. yellow dal, yellow chicken, yellow vegetables, yellow everything. And then there was the deadly lunch box. Before I wised up and stopped taking food to school, my lunch box was a time bomb. The friends would watch with panic stricken eyes when the clock struck 12:00 and it was time to get the box out. Of course, no one could eat a bite, least of all me and so I invariably brought it back untouched.

So, painstakingly and with much trial and error, mostly error, I learnt to cook. And surprise...I could cook, and well. I learnt how to make the heavenly chingri macher malai curry and chicken in white sauce and fragrant pulao and even maggi(which is really hard to make well). ....God I'm hungry already.And all thanks to our cook who can't cook.
So really, when my people say it I get all cynical, but they're right-all's well that ends well.Sorry-I meant everything happens for the best. and so on and so forth.


This post was really an attempt to make me feel better. Maths exam was dismal(i thought it'd go great) but physics was great(I thought i'd flunk; such is the contrariness of life), so I thought a bit of philosophy mixed with some own-trumpet blowing (at least I blow it in tune) would do me good. And it did.
Think I'll go and get some french fries.shubu mashi's (the c. who can't c.) gone home for a holiday. Time to hide the turmeric.

Oh to be young again...

Some more memories...
Looking back from the ripe old age of 17, I guess some of the most fun times have been when we at school (the Exciting Eleven, we were young and fond of Enid Blyton so excuse the name) were inventing up some of our weird scrapes to fall into, because the actual carrying out of them always made us so damn nervous that we always came within a hair's edge of being caught.Once we did get caught and were almost suspended, but I'm not gonna mention that here!

So-some-only some- of the great times:

All the times we bunked classes and hid backstairs and 'practiced' for our band(doomed from the start, as I've said) and forced our classmates to perjure their souls. One time, we nearly broke the lock of the school terrace and went up, but good sense and a darwanji's yells prevailed and we made good our escape.

Then there was the secret passage(there were many we'd found, but this was forbidden fruit so irresistible) with the 'shaft of light'(!), a perfectly innocent gully between the sports complex and the boundary wall which we were morbidly curious about and HAD to get into. But then, you can't blame little curious girls for being curious when there were always two or three darwanjis hanging around the gully with shifty eyes like they were guarding something-which made it even more suspicious in our young eyes. Of course, me and sreerupa (I think) did take a chance with our lives and sneaked in once (what did you expect) and saw a small door-ish type of thing, but then were ignominiously dragged out ...so that's one unsolved mystery.

Speaking of mysteries reminds me of our 'Detective club' back in 4rth grade-which involved being suspicious of everybody in school, trying to prove the school had been a graveyard ages ago, believing that heinous crimes were going on in school under our very noses, and gathering up kites that fell into the school courtyard and feverishy analysing them for secret messages. One time we foung a plastic bag full of some white powder in the school workroom.we retrieved it, risking our necks in the process, and I took it home, bubbling with enthusiasm, to have it 'analysed' by an uncle who was a forensic scientist. He wisely took it without comment, and we forgot all about it in the excitement of discovering a bone(chicken, sadly) in the school grounds, (that proved it to have been a graveyard).
In 5th grade, I got to know-life, thy name is disappointment- it had been chalk powder.

more later.

Nothing Doing

We, being the absent minded giggling girls we sadly are, lost the card.
Talk about anticlimax.

(Oh and to the anonymous guy who resented our guywatching in his comment, I thumb my nose.Like he wouldn't like two pretty young things looking at him.yeah, rrright.)