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Tibbs
I love Franky. In red. Spiking the air with its insistent
eat-me song.
Plucking victims out of the air. Catching the drool inside
his mouth as he
passes. Anticipating the drool, causing it, catching it.
See his own shifty
longing in the eye of the shiny new bride brought all the
way to town
from Malad. The hesitation in the step. Shall we?
The meat nabs and
lures them all. The egg cracked and spilt all over the dough
to give
Franky a frill, a soft delightfully unexpected thrill. The
onions the slipping
gravy darkly pungent seeping through the twist of paper
falling dripdrop
on the little bride’s shifty little sari, spotting
it even as she pauses
halfway to give the second half to her man who bought it
for her and
with it the guilt of having eaten one irrevocable bite too
many. The juice
the bloody sauce the green spatter of chili the fried and
friendless meat.
And
the college students everywhere, richer than the ones across
the
street at the HajiAli Juice Centre, richer, loafing in their
loafers and their
windcheaters in the rainy season even when the sky is clear
and sea
saltily gentle and the air not windy but for the gust from
the kerosene
stoves and the gust of a hot warm human mouth opening and
closing
like a carnivorous cave. The rich boys eating Franky with
everything in it.
The rich girls not bothering, having it dropped to their
car windows
before the cops come and drive them away.
And
across the road, as in a love triangle, the naked chickens
turn,
skewered through their hearts dusted with oil and gleaming,
waiting for
hands to rip them limb from limb.
Meat must eat meat.
While for the fainthearted, the vada-man fries his balls.
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You
haven’t seen the squish-squash the mish-mashing of the potatoes
bright yellow pockmarked with green that claims and is either/or
corian-
der/green chilly snapping at your throat. You haven’t seen
the long-nailed
crusted fingers crushing mashing shaping into balls and dipping
in batter
and dropping in oil where they bloom expertly into yellow puffs
of want. All
you see is the huge black ladle straining them and tumbling them
out and
then smash it goes into the jaws of a split-open pau smeared with
red and
green as if red and yellow and green is all that anybody ever dares.
And
then the hands clasp the paus and almost weeping stuff them into
mouths
driven mad with waiting. And then the squish-squash the mish-mash
of
gums and teeth and tongues.
He
will wait. Maybe the bhajias are what he needs. Maybe a little bhajia,
crispy, is an easier thing to stomach after so many chewing spitting
hawk-
ing rinsing gargling eating drinking mouths. A small bhajia, burnt,
tasting of
fried onion cinder and salt. Or a fat triangular bread pakora bursting
bulging with the oil that oozes into your pores. Cold, it congeals
and long
after, the coating stays, a second roof to your tongue.
It
is too much.
Cold
samosas hot idlis the clotted mass of meat cutlets the cold slab
of
vegetable the oily aloo tikki leaking profusely between bread slices
the
scrambled eggs the slithering chow the cold samosas the green cake
the
creamcoloured chicken roll the soursmelling chicken roll the hot
samosa
the cold idli the puri flat the bhatura bloated the dhokla spotted
the gulab
jamun clotted the sear the gasp the burp the fingers the pans the
stoves
the mouths gorging showing the insides of their yellow tongues their
red
lips their green teeth the traffic lights that come on in the dark
and never
go to sleep and never have to wake, again, to eat.
He
stood motionless.
It was dark.
(And
unseen, in the beams of passing cars, a ragged man unrolls his
sack, and sleeps.)
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