A PLATEFUL OF CARROTS

The city's vegetarian restaurants are truly in the soup; not one of those 'two-handed' restaurants where you eat with one hand while holding your nose with the other and where cockroaches always enjoy pride of place. Nor the upscale eat-now-pay-waiter joints where waiters think that money grows on trays. My allusion is to the decent middle class haunts where the snacks have become so small that you start laughing and prices so high that you start crying, turning the eateries into 'whine and dine' centres.

With restaurants battling inflationary pressures, one can expect, for instance, the idli to deflate to the size of a paracetamol tablet; you pop it in and wash it down with water. And with their meal tickets coming under threat, the restaurant owners are leaving no (grinding) stone unturned to strike a balance between the size of snacks and the price line. For this, they are purportedly using an ingenious equation : Size x Price ÷ Improvise = Monetize.

To give the clients wider choice, WYPIWYG - What You Pay(for) Is What You Get - system may be introduced. Consequently, the restaurant menu cards may come to resemble car sales brochures that show the price of  the basic model and then go higher up to GL, LX, AX etc, depending on the value addition. So, you may find on the menu something like this : Masala Dosa OS(Onion-only Stuffing)..Rs 20. Masala Dosa OP(Onion-Potato)..Rs 30. Masala Dosa FL(Fully Loaded)..Rs 50. Besides snacks, ‘watered-down’ versions of coffee/tea will spice up the menu.

Walls of the eateries may be plastered with sign boards that offer discount incentives. A poster may say,  ‘50% off on all yesterday’s leftovers.’ Or, ‘Avail Upma Family Pack (ten portions for price of eight)’ Or, ‘Eat premium idlis–Idli Plus(30% extra - hurry, limited period offer).’ Besides, a 'Frequent Eater Scheme' too is on the anvil. By this, you earn one point for every ten rupees spent (fractions ignored).You can exchange 10 points for a free plate of idlis or upma or a vada. 50 points will fetch you a free masala dosa FL(fully loaded).

In days of yore, some of the finest citizens of the land were forced to grind dosa batter or wash dishes when they failed to square up after a square meal. Drawing heavily form this concept, our beleaguered restaurateurs might cook up new schemes to lure in the clientele. Under this, you get gift coupons for, say, cleaning your table and washing your dishes. Or, by choosing the roll-and-fry-your-own-chapatis plan. The coupons may be used during future visits to the restaurant (conditions apply).

Be that as it may, I know of one restaurateur who neither decreased the size nor increased the price of his medu vadas. He merely kept on increasing the size of the vada's hole!
******************************************************************

THE SLEUTH SURGES ON

Continued form the last post, A Sleuth Is Born ......

At 14, during the Christmas season, I had scripted and directed a drama called 'Murder by Poison' in which the children from the neighbourhood donned the grease-paint. The enactment progressed without a hitch till the interval when the events took an unforeseen twist. In the drama, the hero was to drink a glass of lime juice to which the would-be murderer had surreptitiously added the poison. Soon after drinking the juice the hero had 'fallen down dead' as dictated by the script. But when the time came for the hero's 'body' to be produced for post mortem, the 'corpse' was nowhere in sight. Without the knowledge mine, the script writer, the plot had thickened. The actor ( who played the murder victim ) had quietly slipped into the loo, leaking, as he was, like a defective municipal tap, from the wrong end of his alimentary canal. And he refused to come out of his sanctuary.

As was found out later, a boy had played a prank by adding a dose of castor oil to the lime juice. In the mean time, pandemonium had broken out in the auditorium as the drama had come to a grinding halt. It was, indeed, a testimonial to my ingenuity that I managed to effect impromptu changes to the script and went on to complete the play by changing the title from 'Murder by Poison' to 'A Case of Missing Corpse' !!

The Sleuth Turns Scribe

With such background, it was no wonder that in my late teens, the cacoethes scribendi (persistent itch to write) took the better of me. I came to the conclusion that the time was ripe to transcribe my fertile imagination into concrete words and write a murder mystery of my own. After protracted mental churning, a plot emerged which I considered at that time to be the cream of an idea.

The story revolved around a love triangle involving two friends, let's say, men A and B, and a girl C. A was murdered and B was implicated for the crime based on:
a) presence of the accused at the scene of crime on the day of the murder
b) the obvious motive, the love triangle
c) B's finger prints on the murder weapon - a knife
d) presence of A's blood in the scrapings of B's palm collected soon after murder

B's pleadings of innocence were rejected by the court against the backdrop of foolproof set of evidences, particularly the the blood on B's palm on which the outcome of the case hinged. Just when an adverse verdict was about to be delivered, entered the super sleuth, Merry Passion(no relative of Perry Mason).

Merry Passion argued in front of the magistrate that B, in fact, was innocent. Mr Passion claimed that he had carefully examined the sample containing the scrapings the palms of the accused, B.
Apart from A's blood, it also showed a few parts of a dead mosquito under the microscope. Merry Passion contended that on the night of the murder when B was in A's house, the B had swatted a mosquito that had just bitten and sucked the blood of A. "That explains the presence of A's blood on on B's hands", declared Passion. The magistrate dismissed the prosecution's case and granted B an honourable acquittal.

At the time I wrote this murder mystery, I had no doubt that it was a masterpiece. So I sent it to a reputed periodical for publication. But, alas, someone in the editorial staff had killed the story.

And to this day I am searching for the killer. One more 'Case of Missing Killer' for you.

You Might Also Like

Whistler's Hall Of Fame
Hitched To Habit
Lock, Shock And Bare-all

A SLEUTH IS BORN

Murder mysteries and gory tales tickled my perverse sense right from early childhood. The flicker of interest ignited by the hair-raising tales by Earl Stanley Gardener( in which corpses got strewn around like junkyard garbage) soon turned into a burning flame by the blood-curdling fictions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. The passion finally became an obsession, thanks to the gore-in-gallons depictions on celluloid by that master 'terrorist' Alfred Hitchcock.

At the age of ten, inspired by the fluorescent hound in Sir A C Doyle's "Hound of Baskerville", I anointed our pet dog Jackie with some stinking ointment and watched him the whole night to see if he glowed in the dark but to no avail. The flip side of it was that the next morning saw Jacky shivering in cold after having lost all his fur, looking like a freshly shorn sheep. I can still hear the echoes of the sound thrashings I received from dad for my canine misadventure.

In those days, I was a miniature sleuth of sorts that earned me the sobriquet 'Nosy Parker". Though wet behind the ears, I always kept my powder dry. For, any matter needing nosing around in our neighbourhood was promptly referred to me, be it a pet that vanished or articles lost, needing to be found.

One fruitful mission that stood out in my detective 'archives' was the solving of the mystery surrounding the violent death of a pet cat in the neighbourhood. Having been summoned to the scene of the crime, I closely inspected the mutilated carcass of the cat(or what was left of it). Peeping from the torn entrails of the feline victim were a few bits of undigested dog biscuits that screamed out the evidence.

It didn't take long for me to to follow this lead to our own pet dog, Jackie. Blood stains on Jackie's snout and a piece of cat entrails in his kennel were unequivocal pointers to Jackie's being the psychopath killer. Apparently, the late cat had stolen a couple of biscuits from Jackie's larder and Jackie, a dog of few barks but firm and decisive action, took law into his own hands(or paws) and did the cat in. The whole murder investigation, as it turned out, was a open-and -shut case.

(To be continued in the other post "The Sleuth Surges On".)

You Might Also Like

Dollar Dreams
His Master's Vice
'B's Beneath My Bonnet

WHEN THE D-DAY CAME

The day dawned with peals of temple bells echoing right across the town as a special pooja(servise) was performed to the accompaniment of chants of hymns by a battery of priests. The rituals culminated in a 'Thulabharam'(an offering in weight equal to devotee's body weight) of coconuts to be destributed amongst the poor.

The occasion was my 55th birthday. I was, of course, niether a hotshot politician nor a fat-cat buisiness magnate to warrant such razzmatazz. I was just a commoner drilling a neat hole in my wallet to commemorate a mile stone I hadn't hoped to reach.

Oddly, it wasn't a clairvoyant who presaged my early passage through the Pearly Gates( a euphimism for dying). It was a formula I came across in a local rag, viz, TALE= GAS-LIE (where tale= total allowable life expectancy, GAS= general ancestral survival, and LIE= lethal indulgence effect) that portended a premature tryst with my maker. For, in my case TALE worked out to be 54 years.

But the motives behind my longing for longevity were purely altruistic. I just wanted to be around to applaud the world when the first man landed on Mars. To see global community, instead of fighting like cats and dogs over Global Warming, come to a radical decision to save the earth. Or to see my neighbour's son who had been studying medicine for a decade would ever pass his final degree.

Well, coming back to my tale, it made me feel likedrug on the chemist's shelf with the expiry date printed on it. The upshot was that I began reading the obituary columns avidly, merely to compare my age with the age of the people who went from dust to dust (younger they conked out, the shakier I became).

Each day I counted my falling hair (a hair on head worth two on brush) with concern. And I grew supersticious and seered clear of buckets, lest I should kick one of them.

And once the purported D-day passed off uneventfully, growing in confidence, I set out on a search for the elixir of life. As a part of my research, I attended a function to honour the pldest man on earth, a centenarian, just to hear him give away the secrets of his long life.

I was bitterly disappointed when the man didn't turn up owing to the illness of his father!

Then I read about a 90-year-old man who married an 18-year-old girl. At the wedding reception, her friends gave her an expensive night gown and his friends gave him two months.

My longivity research is going on.......so far.

You May Also Like:

Bollywood Medicine
A Free Hotdog Saga
Dictionary Of 'Woo Fix Klan'