Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Chicken Soup

You can bet upon girls being born miser. They have plenty to spend on the expensive brand of cosmetics but when it comes on s spending or lending others, they have a pet dialogue " I am broke, u see"
Thankfully we never had those many outings to use these kinda dialogues but cost cutting was always our motive, Coz internet parlours were charging too high for mere surfing. Cost cutting did include cutting on food from big restaurants and we became vegetarians..diet concious u see...(read diet as price)

One fine day, our eyes caught a dhaba in the main market which remained unnoticed for 365 days. We in-decent girls looking at the painted rate card on the wall planned to checkout the stuff...Non veg was out of question but u still look at items u dont wish to eat just to increase your GK (or RK: Rate Knowledge)
we all were startled when we saw this "Chicken Hot and Sour @ 7 Rs". Our eyes twinkled with the prospect of having a chicken within budget and that too in a Veg college...veg hostel and veg mess...We ordered 3 soups and got them parcelled. One of us "Pooja" as the name suggest was a pure vegetarian and gave weird looks when saw us taking those parcels..(Hostel secret 1: she hid her bowl just to avoid the smell and avoid cleaning it..which none of us liked in winters until fungus and bad smell filled our rooms and corridors)

But attimes small things do motivate and soup was a big motivating factor and we did wash our long pending dirty utensils with ice cold water of winters. Hurried to room like a drooling dog for savoring the super HOt soup. Poured the soup in one bowl (to avoid cleaning 3 utensils next time) and were relishing that sombody knocked the door. (Hostel secret 2: We were in the habbit of eating good food with the rooms bolt)...seniors (also called as mangta party by us) were always in 24/7 enquiring for snacks or anything eatable and unfortunately most of them were non vegetarians. We opened the door after keeping the bowl down the bed with our dust platted sandals which i guess any decent person wud not have guessed on this earth. After few minutes we had to take out the soup, keeping the indian tradition in mind "Athithi devo bhava" ;)

We all were eating in the same bowl that in the meantime one of seniors asked the name of the restaurant. We three started looking at each other thinking that if we tell that we got it from a dhaba they will surely kill us..so we happily told the name of the best restaurant in the town.(Hostel secret 3: u can eat shit from the best restaurant in town and ppl will praise u and if u eat good stuff from a small joint..ppl will kill u virtually with their taunts and comments) We had not finshed half the quantity that someone from us uttered " 7 for a bowl isnt bad".That was it. All the faces tuned to us and they all had what-did-u-say looks. They kept the vessel on our study table (Hostel Secret 4: Study tables were used for all puposes but for study) and waited for a while..i guess were trying to recover from a shock. The next sentence from them was " bloody 7 bucks doesnt fetch u mineral water and u got hot and sour" could not answer that and were standing still looking at each other's faces. They instructed us in a harsh voice to 'throw the rotton stuff'....with a heavy heart we carried the bowl and went to washbasin...or wash-face-in during winters ;) and started cursing them.

All this while the soup was heaven and and 7 bucks made it hell. How can people be so diplomat? We sat on the bed quitely when the big lectured followed after a small silence " these chicken chunks are of infected ones...." as if the hen came and discussed her infection issues... "...and they have serious non curable disease..." which i guess a vetinary doc himself would not be aware of "...and can lead to serious health problems...blah blah blah" well i guess only brain would have got infected in worst case as our stomach became strong enough to digest an earthworm or a lizard.

That was end of our chicken soup story and i guess they scared us enough with those sickening infection stories that we never went to the dhaba again in next 365 days...