La di di

heya world..am happy happy today…why? Cos I had a wonderful yesterday…. I met up with this friend after ages…….what fun 🙂

Ok, first lemme introduce u to S, my friend through and since college…..S and me were in the same class during junior college after which we went on to become buddies…..He is my Kishore Kumar, Mohamad Rafi and whoever else u can think of..all rolled into one. There was a point in time when the only angrezi songs I knew were the ones by S and we all thought he was much better than the original. Most of my college memories revolve around S singing and playing the guitar and all having an awesome time. Those days……….

Well, now he is a hot-shot globe trotting i-banker who always goes out of his way to convince the rest of us that he is on a hand to mouth existence… Gahhhhhh We still believe u S. Thankfully one of his innumerable clients operate from Chennai and he makes this occassional trip down here. Its so much fun to meet friends, especially in a new place. I always thought this whole i-am-so-happy-seeing-an-Indian-in USA act which lot of my relatives and acquaintances regularly put up was just that. An act! But now I realise they probably meant it……I am so Mumbai sick, to be read home sick, that anyone with a connection to Mumbai falls in the descended-from-heaven-just-for-me category. And if it is a good friend of over a decade (Gosh! is it that long? Am I so old?), then what more can I ask for 😀

S called me on Tues pretending to be some guy from a placement agency with this American twang. I answered all his questions with this half suspicious half serious tone…….I was so right. It was S, damn him. We fixed up dinner plans on Wed. Yipeee!!  Went to the Taj Coramandel. You know this crazy thing which always happens to me. My office is just behind this Taj but by some crazy twist of fate I always land up at vague meetings and client locations exactly on those days when my post-work meet happens in the Nungambakkam area. Just like this other time when Sri and me were scheduled to check out this play on Harrington Road. The whole week i was twiddling thumbs at my N office and teasing Sri about the enormous distance he would have to travel and how I would be there in exactly a hop-skip-jump routine. But come Friday, that very sultry Friday, i just had to go to this client place at godforsaken Guindy. Picked up smirking Sri on my way to the play. Wierd!

Anyway, I bargained my auto-way to Taj, as usual. Seems like I have become an expert bargainer of sorts. Heard some guy giving 30% more than me for the same location. Was so heartened that I was being screwed far lesser by the divine beings (read auto guys) as compared to my fellow city-mates. Reaching there I found S had yet to arrive. Thats something never changed about him, always late. But all of us are so used to it that I am sure we would fall off our chairs in case he chose to turn up on time. But this time, it was barely 10 mins, so forgave him heartily….the fact that he was taking me out to dinner also helped 😉

During my brief waiting period, I checked out this really cool autograph collection of a Mr.Lakshman (I think ?!) who was the grandson of Raja Annamalai Chettiar (You would know if u hv any kind of Chennai connection. else Google-it or keep watching this space, I’ll let you know the minute I do. Oh wait! I can call the ever-reliable encyclopediac Sri…gimme a minute. Grrrr he is busy!) Anyway, he was this big shot of the yester-years. The autograph collection had the who’s who of that time like Gandhiji, Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel (imagine!!!!), Lord Mountbatten and all the crickets of that time you can think of, like, Vijay Hazare, Duleepsingji, everyone…..awesome collection. Each had given their signatures accompanied by a personal motto or a one-liner. Damn good ones.

S arrived when I was in this signature-sea and we decided to have dinner after dumping his new DVD collection in his room. (Yup! For S, Mr.Bachchan rulz. Even today!) Being a 6 ft something himself, S did have his moments thinking of himself as Big B…..in those Kabhi Kabhi / Silsila kinda moods….not your Amar Akbar Anthony thingy. I still remember S going through the entire Mai aur meri tanhai stuff on our way back from a Jagjit Singh concert when he was incidently wearing typical AB type clothes with pockets high up on your coat / jacket (or whatever its called). And even that one time when, at this Natural ice-cream parlour, we could only hear the dialogues of AB movies and S and me were guessing which line belonged to which movie without seeing the visuals. He was bang-on everytime! That day was crazier since we had our dinner upside down starting with 3 scoops of ice-cream, ginger-lemon, then curd rice and finally a soup/starter. What were we thinking???

Anyways, back to the present now………I declared I could not stand another South Indian dinner. yeah, yeah, I am a southie and love my roots, pulses, rice everything. But there is only so much idli and dosa a Mumbaite can have without diving for an occassional chaat or pav bhaji or some such high calorie stuff. And I was already full to my neck with the S Bhavan, AA Bhavan, V Bhavan routine of Chennai. Since, unfortunately Taj did not serve either chaat or pav bhaji we settled for an Italian dinner. Pizza, Hurrah! ‘Sorry Sir, we do not serve pizza. Its a fine dining Italian restuarant’, said the manager guy. Oh well, unpronouncable food, here we come. We successfully figured our way through the menu and maybe learned some Italian in the bargian. I would’nt really know. Do you know someone Italian? Maybe I can try it then. So S and me ordered a starter and the main course both of which, we were 80% sure, were vegetarian. They, thankfully, were.

Alongwith the dishes came another mother-of-god inventions -the salt and pepper shaker. Whats the big deal you would ask. Hey, just drop by that place today and let me know if you figure, in less than half hour without a manual that is, how to get the salt out. Eventually we discovered it was a hold-your-breath, battery operated shaker. Of all things!!!!!!!! It had some kind of button, which when pressed, would give some light at the end of the tunnel (it was torch shaped) and a whrrrrrr grinding sound as the salt/ pepper flowed freely. It was so much fun that S and I almost ended up oversalting our dishes for the pure purpose of using the salt shaker. hehe! what fun 😀

Thus dinner was 3 types of mozarella cheese (yum yum), incomprehensible dish 1, incomprehensible dish 2 then my favorite part -incomprehensible dessert…..also some Irish coffee to boot (S recomends! Like that ‘Sriram recommends’ stuff at Crossword) The sugar was not in its usually cube cube avtar but had chosen to mount a toothpickand ready to be stirred. The 2 of us were just marvelling at the people who actually rack their brains and come up with such stuff.

Anyways, silly me to be going on and on about the food when I had a such a wonderful time with S. We caught up on each other’s lives….not that we r not in touch or anything but it was ages since we just sat and talked. Felt so light at the end of that heavy dinner cos I rattled on and on about anything and everything and nothing in particular. We updated ourselves on other close friends’ lives, marriages, visas, kids, the like…….Awesome fun. Just like old times. Never told you this yesterday but S, thank you for an extraordinary evening. Do come home next time for a full fledged south indian fare with Sri and me. (Now I have to get him to read this blog. Hmph!!!)

Is anyone else from Mumbai listening??? Visit me visit me