Analogikal

Brunch! the glorious son of breakfast and lunch. The savior of our, sleepless, hardly working, confused generation. It is my favourite meal alongside breakfast, lunch, evening tea, dinner, late dinner, post football meal, post meal dessert, later dinner, early morning pre-breakfast and second breakfast as defined by the hobbits. Brunch on a Sunday morning is slowly becoming a beautiful tradition in my house.

When, by accident, we ended up in a cozy little brunch buffet place, i felt like how Vasco da Gama did when he found India, “Brothers, we be looting this place!” and loot the place we did. Slowly the food, the beverages and the other paraphernalia disappeared from the table. With sausages flying around and forks and knives getting tossed around, our brunch routine was going true to style. We were reaching my favourite part of every meal. The part which i like to call ‘A friend in need’. Now this is the part of the meal where you fellow participants slowly bow out and ask for help in finishing off the monumental portions of food lying in their share. Man i love a good group meal with people with small appetites. So this particular brunch was going down the same path. I recited my customary quote “With great powers comes great responsibilities” and got down to helping my friends in need. I mean, somebody had to step in. I had my eye on a particular cinnamon roll. That beauty of cinnamon and dough layered with walnuts and the tears of kindred spirits. When my attention was diverted by a flying fork, the cinnamon roll changed positions. I looked at my skinny little friend who had diverted the responsibility of eating that beautiful cinnamon roll by passing it on to the next person’s plate. It was involuntary, when I looked at him, he said “It was not mine bro!” I know you are reading this! I told you I’m gonna immortalise you, you sucker! Anyhow, this act of his took me back to two things from two days ago…

It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining through rain clouds, the smell of freshly watered dirt in the air, there were underpants drying on all the balconies adjacent to our place, the smell of cooked curry leaves over-powering the petrichor. I felt it was a good day for a jog. The kind that sweats you up but leaves your lungs asking for more. The smell of freshly moistened dirt, the cool breeze kissing every sweat as you move along abruptly to the disapproval of slow folks walking on the jogging track. It was a rather hectic morning from the sights and sounds of it.

The construction site was busier than usual. The not so faint smell of concrete, the rising dust clouds broken abruptly by silhouettes of toiling labourers. But there was a new addition to this alrady familiar scenery. Uniform clad soldiers of sanitation. They had come equipped with weapons of mass sanitation. gloves and masks and the whole works. Every strand of rubble and garbage was being moved from one place to another and then to a huge truck. Shoot! I looked around for an identification mark to see which section of the populace has suddenly woken up. There it was. Multiple banners which called out in bright red letters “Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan”. The soldiers of sanitation did not leave a stone unturned, literally. They ripped apart things as deemed fit. It seemed like a battalion of mercenaries ordered to “Clean at will boys”. And clean they did! From one gigantic mess to another it went on.

I continued with my run. Shook my head in disapproval and moved along. I mean how could I not be a part of something so cool. Soon the social media would be erupting with messages of cleanliness is next to gawdiness and the likes. There were flex (PVC) banners with messages and images of every leader remotely associated with the event. I could not help but appreciate the irony in the whole thing. As the day wandered on the crowd got lesser and after every selfie opportunity the ‘jhund’ and ‘janta’ wilted away. Soon, only the hired hands remained. They loaded the whole thing into a truck and left the area. Out of sheer curiosity i followed them for a while. I didn’t have to follow them for too long. Like a heist gone wrong, the convoy came to a sudden stop near a seemingly abandoned area. With the subtlety of Arnab Goswami and the mercilessness of a baby seal hunter, they got down and emptied every single strand of garbage into somebody else’s land. Well at least the area they had set out to clean was clean. For now. Much like the penguins of madagascar there were celebrations and hi-5s all around.

I walked back home with the spirit and gusto of a stand-up comedian who had put his audience to sleep. To my bewilderment there were two gentlemen on the terrace. I love the terrace and there is a no admission policy on the terrace. So when I saw these fine gentlemen, both clad in the most colourful and choicest of boxer shorts, it piqued my curiosity. The over exposure of ass-crack got my judgment senses tingling. I snuck up on them like a manager sneaking up on a slacky employee. They were armed with small pebbles and they were wrestling with their mattress. My stomach churned, I knew what was happening. I did not want to believe it. But I had to enquire since the sacrifice and brutality was happening, quite literally, right at my doorstep. The interaction goes something like this:

Me: Guys, what are you doing?

Guy1: We are killing bed bugs! (without blinking)

Guy2: uh huh! We are killing bedbugs! (Sounded to me like, you know it bi**h)

Me: I live right here (pointing to the door 5 feet away from they were standing)

Guy1: Oh! Hi, nice to meet you.

Guy2: Oh! We have never come here (I wonder why)

Me: Could you go kill bedbugs somewhere else?

Guy1: We don’t have anywhere else.

Me: Oh! so my place has to give asylum to your bedbugs. That sounds fair!

At this point, I felt like taking those tiny blood clad pebbles from their hands and acquainting their faces with it till they started seeing batman in broad daylight! By now the realization had dawned that subtlety is definitely not their thing.

Me: Could you get rid of your bed bugs somewhere else? And did you bring the mattress through the lift?

Guy2: (beaming proudly) Yes. we thought that was convenient. We had to bend the mattre….

Me (Cutting him off abruptly): That is a brave feat. Do you realise that you nitwits have infested the whole building with bedbugs

Guy1 & Guy2: Blank expression!

Awkward silence…

<End of scene one>

We just love the feeling of having no responsibility, no residual guilt and no accountability. A clean slate, a clean dashboard at work, a clean table, a clean house. Especially when the work and headache is somebody else’s. The supreme confidence with which we can put our hands up and say “bro, that’s not my responsibility”, like the guy who dragged the banner on cleanliness, across the mud, is quite appalling. Well, as long as we have the once in a year cleanse events were selfies are clicked, presentations are made and as a bi-product garbage gets moved from one point to another, everything is hunky dory. I grew up next to an abandoned construction site. The garbage flinging riders in that alley would put any cowboy with a lasso to shame.

The bed bug boys, as they have come to be known, decided to pack up and leave. I felt proud of my act of bravery and about my confrontation skills. I felt I had educated two lost souls and put the sheep back on track; until, of course, they packed the mattress and took the next lift down. I facepalmed massively and walked along to get some bug spray! I bumped into the security guard on the way back and handed him a bottle of bug spray telling him to spray it across all floors of the building. He asked with a sheepish grin, should we just not put it at our respective places. I felt like the guy who watched a baby panda choke on a pinecone. I mumbled “Your place or mine, anything is good”.

This is dedicated to my flat mate. Thanks for the inspiration you skinny rascal!