See you at the buffet!

seed #358

Prologue: Too much on your plate?

David couldn’t breathe.

But that wasn’t good enough a reason for him to stop eating.

David was a square fellow, never boozed much, never really doped. He would always dream of a day when he would have enough money to splurge on good cuisines, from across the world made of exotic spices.

This was his dream come true. He forked the meat, hogged the noodle, and chewed the bun. All went down his throat, smooth like silk. Within a few minutes, he was almost choking on the food. Strangely, he thought, every dream turns into a nightmare when it turns real.

Like now, he couldn’t eat another grain of anything, whereas only a minute back, he was decimating the contents on his plate like a monster.

So was he a different person now? Better or worse?  Questions rattled him.

Now his plate was empty, and his stomach bloated like an air balloon ready to rise up. Under any other circumstance, he would have been logical- he would have left. In fact, in the past, he was the more rational kind than his friend, Sumit. Sumit would want to go for one more cake or a little more of that date palm chutney. He could not tame his taste buds. He was a greedy boy, perhaps, which is why he did so well with himself, kept asking for more, kept getting more. But back then, David would control his friend’s appetite along with that of his.

But today things weren’t the same. This wasn’t some local village function. This was a fucking food fiesta—some of the best foods in front. A fortune has been dissipated on all this. There wasn’t a tinker’s chance he would get to see these things again in life, much less have them for dinner, like this. He couldn’t help but have another go, and this time, he lifted from items he hadn’t the previous time. This time it was a different mix on his plate. He bit into the majestic Scione, an awesome Sicilian pizza specialty, and as the caciocavallo cheese melted on his tongue, he felt his presence melting too. The passage of time stopped. Then a sudden flush of pleasure tore through him, and he felt a hard-on. Again, a wrong organ had responded.

He would usually jerk off in half thereness; he was not much into pornography, sometimes he even would leave before ejaculation out of sheer boredom. A boner was like a whiny baby; it demanded attention. But he had always responded more to his tongue than his cock. Today was no exception.

He began eating again. The chocolate, the custard, the pie. He continued till seriatim hiccups hindered his progress.

‘When you think of giving up just try one more unit’, he had read it somewhere. Another bite and he would explode, but he tried ‘one more unit.’ He somehow forced a noiseless fart and farted again; it was pretty loud this time. He glanced mousily; thankfully, nobody had heard his breaking of wind in that glossy party. Such an embarrassment it would have been. Fuck too much food; he shouldn’t have eaten so much, that too, uninvited. He eased the loop of his belt.

“Let’s leave.” A voice echoed within.

“Are you serious, such food, and you want to leave?” Another voice echoed.

The sitar tunes consumed the bright dining hall, the voice inside him became louder, and breathing became more complex. People stood like

statues, not moving much, stationary, still eating as they were. What’s wrong with them, he thought? What gluttons these rich people can be! He grinned at that thought. He tried to spot where the lady in the maroon dress was, but he couldn’t. This was such a large dining hall that it was easy to lose sight of someone. Don’t waste time; you dick, get out of here. There will be trouble.

Returning to his plate, he made a decision, a tough one indeed- not to continue eating. He burped thrice, swallowing the vomit that came along with it.

1.  Blood on your hanky

Earlier that evening, David sat listlessly in a park.

He exhaled a husk of smoke into the fading hues of twilight. An evil spell of coughing sucked him in. The bout subsided after forty seconds leaving behind a sore throat, a pounding heart, and a tongue full of phlegm. He took out his kerchief from the right pocket of his pleat-less cotton trousers and spit into the cloth. The clear blue was tarnished by a loud stain of red. He stared at the design so formed for a good few seconds, then gave it a neat fold, repeated, stuffed it in his left pocket. He scanned the park, found couples kissing, and felt immediate pinpricks of annoyance. He took a deep breath and returned internally to temper his confusion— one that was currently eating him in big pieces.

Was he employed or not?

In the last six months, he had been fired thirty-six times. But he was brought back each time after a few days. The longest it took was 6 weeks.

“I, too, have seniors to answer to, you see. This is your last chance.”

Between this repetitive hiring and firing, David had grown up, aging in chaos instead of years, such that now, he was quite at ease with his fluctuating job, periodic pay-cuts, and consistently diminishing self- confidence. In fact, he could not imagine life without them any-longer.

For a 28-year old, David was a bit different. In fact, his being different was indifferent to time and space. His eyes blinked unusually less. He didn’t smile enough when happy, or cry enough when sad, or ache enough when hurt. What baffled him more than anything else was about the exact mark of being “normal” and “enough” or “should”. A real boring job of a junior accountant in an insurance company with tedious work-hours, peanuts for pay, a beefy boss with the temper of a mad bull had successfully extracted emotions from his system, and replaced it with a strange mute void that sucked in all sounds. Today, as his boss was foul mouthing him sitting across the table for screwing up a calculation for the n-th time on the ledger book, he felt that he was unable to hear him as if the words shooting out of his mouth were drowning somewhere midway.

He lit the fourteenth cigarette of the day. Puffed smoke slowly, fearing another evil cough attack. Sitting on a solitary bench amid kissing lovers, drawing smoke into his battered lungs, with time moving at the pace of a tortoise, he figured out the answer to his question. Of course, he was jobless, what else could he be, sitting like this, junked in this insipid pocket of time. He was a waste. This realization opened doors, which made way for a more solid reason to hit him. He preferred being sad and hopeless with that thought rather than yo-yo-ing between the two possibilities of employment and unemployment, both being equally shitty, feared, and loathed. At least, this had a few upsides to it, or so he thought. Maybe he could spend more constructive time hating himself that was the most fertile way of bursting stress.

He had no special misery that made him feel left out and unwanted. No broken relations, no death in family, no major physical deformity, just the repetitive sting of mundane life. His misery lay in no misery. There was nothing to overcome. There was no big fight anywhere in his life. He thought of his parents; the month was about to end. His hometown was located in a suburban district a hundred miles away. He would have a word with his parents once in the end of the month over the phone, sometimes not even that. When he did, they would invariably ask him about the status of that month’s salary and frequently punctuate it with sentences like “Can you send 3000 more this time, your father took a loan…”And, David would say, “Hmm,” half-heartedly and barely audible before hanging up. That was his family. And friends? Well, he had only one friend, Sumit, from his village. They grew up together, read in the same school, played cricket in the sun, and stole pickles from random jars. He was now a hotshot investment banker staying abroad, married, rich, and not in touch with him. So there you go, no friends either. David had a girlfriend who broke up with him one fine morning after an evening of quarrel (one-sided) over the excessive layering of cheese on her pizza (gf: I will gain weight. David: you are already quite fat.). Not much he could do about it. Not much did he care. To add to this gloating absence all around him, his basic interaction with human beings in this city was limited to his colleagues who made methodical fun of his nose that curved out of his face like a plantain splitting his face into two expressionless halves. There was also his landlady, who was an eighty- year-old senile woman, living with his unemployed fifty-year-old son who duped David in rummy games. Something he easily understood but could do nothing about it, for he felt that it would be impolite to catch him cheating. And the last person in his ledger of interaction was his reticent roomie, who worked as a small-time journalist in a web magazine that published content on local handicrafts. He read Nietzsche with profound interest, smoked hash, and also borrowed books from him that he never quite returned. He would mostly sweet talk him into a different topic when David would ask for it, like sharing a joint with him on which he would get so stoned that he would forget most things, including the money.

Losing his job would be to lose ninety percent of his life. Ninety percent of such a life, he thought, wasn’t much. He felt certain happiness about that. Perhaps for the first time, the uselessness of his life was coming handy. He exhaled a thick smoke, stubbed the cigarette, controlled another surging bout of cough, and breathed in the dry scent of winter.

He craned his neck to the right and saw a couple very passionately

kissing each other. The man’s hand squeezing the girl’s breasts. He felt aroused. But instead of waking the demons up between the legs, it arose the somnolent monsters living six inches above; he could feel a sudden uproar behind his belly button. Then a sharp stab of hunger on the abdomen, followed by a fit of nausea and another raging coughathon. He panted and spat blood into the handkerchief, more blood on a lessening blue. Gasping for air, he took out the wallet from his pocket, fingering it keenly; there were five bucks in all. Even if he walked all the way to his home, five bucks weren’t enough to tame this primal evil spewing fire within his tummy…or could it?

2.  Sirens from your stomach

He knew when his boss called him inside his room that there was something wrong. He had a feeling. He had anyway reached late five days straight. A meeting had just ended, and things looked bad. This was it again. He fired him following a savage tirade, raw enough to shatter one’s self-worth that could easily keep him buried under its ruins for days to come. It had happened so many times, but the boss had a good, he would plow David out of his burial and appoint him back to work every time he fired him.

“I too have seniors to answer. I am not that bad a person either, as you think me to be.”

The last time he was out of work, it was eleven days before his boss brought him back. That was in April… no, not April…in June. Yes, June. Every time he called him back and swamped him in a month’s work ordering him to finish all that in a week’s time, he would follow it up with a stern intimation: “This is your last chance David, I too have seniors to answer.”

Well of course, after the kind of callousness he had shown with his calculation on the ledger book today, there couldn’t be a “last chance “awaiting him anymore. The circus was over, and good that it was!

Exasperated, he jingled his pocket again. Five bucks it was.

He strolled out of the park. The evening was slowly spreading all over the sky as if someone had spilled a gigantic bottle of ink over it. Nausea intensified, so did the chill that pierced through his sweater and bit on his skin. His stomach emitted unearthly music as if the abyss of silence was now releasing locked up sounds and throwing them back at him. His teeth began to sour, and paralytic fatigue downed on him. To add to this, he realized that he was walking up and down a maze of lazy lanes for the last half an hour or so. His road sense had always been very bad; he had little knowledge of the city even after inhabiting it for four years now.

The city still tricked him into its bylanes and left him clueless. There was the usual assortment of the young crowd, the typical six -in-the-evening chattering crowd, the type he hated. All conceited motherfuckers who thought they were non-conformists and smoked dope, that kind. The air smelt of hot caffeine and chops fried in cheap oil in sporadic tiny shacks lining. He bought a potato and onion chop from one of these chop sellers, two and a half bucks each. It made his hunger only worse.

Loitering aimlessly, minutes later, he had veered into a dismal stretch of pitch, desolate as far as eyes could track. He could hear mellow strains of sitar coming from his north. Vacant and shivering out of hunger, he followed the music, took an abrupt right along the bend, then perhaps a left, followed by maybe another right. At every inflex, he hoped for something to appear as the tunes became clearer, but nothing really happened. Then suddenly, after a bend, there was a surprise that towered over the neighborhood.

3. Return of the hiccup

Right in front of his eyes stood a mansion, beating any explanation for its location in that godforsaken narrow street. Dazzling in multicolored lights, it stood like a majestic castle out of a morbid old bedtime storybook. Loud strains of sitar escaping it, whirled in the haze. That was weird, he thought, for till even a moment ago, there was an encapsulating solitude piercing his whole body like pins and needles. A building like these to be here was a bit strange, but nowadays, these isolated parts of the city are the spots for such thick parties. This sudden change was overwhelming, so much that he needed a smoke. He would have otherwise frayed his nerves when he found his matchbox empty, but he was surprised to see that he didn’t. Does this kind of prodding hunger make everything else go limp and blunt? Yes, obviously, you fool.

Extinguishing this hunger spreading like wildfire inside his midriff was his only wish now. There was a raging mix of bile, acid, and gas that could kill him in the next hour if not done away with. His Nietzsche reading roommate who’d always tell that everything was about the mind, was a load of crap. This could have nothing to do with the mind; everything about this raw molten suffering was about the body, about every nook, and corner of it. A delightful odor leaped into his nostrils. A happy chill ran up and down his spine; he identified it as the scent of saffron, highly, out of some Afghan cuisine. He had once cooked something of that sort taking help from a local food magazine his mother used to keep; that was some four years ago. It wasn’t that bad to eat, only that the next day he had a bad headache and a dry throat throughout.

Perhaps, the saffron in it was too much in quantity. The next thing he noted were the fancy cars, SUVs, sedans, queued up in front of the building. There was no shred of the doubt anymore that some fat shit was taking place inside.

Back in time, in his town, he and his friend, Sumit, used to sneak into local weddings and gorge a good bit of spicy steaming meat without carrying along gifts, or hesitation for that matter. This entire gate crashing thing went well for twelve in a row till the thirteenth one was a bit of howler. You know one of those days on which you least expect shit, but it falls straight on you like rain from a clear sky? That kind. That was long back, some fourteen years back to be precise. How old was he then? Fourteen? Yeah, fourteen. Everything is so easy when you are fourteen. You have dreams, most of them bigger than your eyes can accommodate, and you carry a bizarre affliction called hope that you keep transmitting unapologetically to others. Soon it becomes an epidemic of sorts, and you get away with almost anything you do. You can eat a bellyful at any point, yet still, eat much more with ease, and you can run fast enough faster chasing old men. You usually win such races at fourteen. That’s the worst part about getting older. With every passing day, things keep gaining in seriousness, and you screw it up a bit more than you did the day before. A hiccup brought him back to the present.

The sitar frothed in the air, the hunger punched inside, and he yearned to return to those days of walking into a wedding with extraordinary swag, feasting on a grand five-course meal and then walking out unscathed. This beastly urge to eat attained an excretory urgency and left him with no other option.

Let’s say I get in, but how… A party of this scale will invariably have a fucking invitation list and some beefy dolt at the gate stopping broke and famished freeloaders like me from getting in. And I am 28 now; If they catch me, they will beat me up…Let’s do it some other time.

4 . Welcome to your buffet

“Sorry, Sir, to have kept you waiting. This way…”

The woman who had opened the door was petite and elegant, wore a gentle smile and a knee-length viscose dress. It was maroon in color, donning a shade of pink under the golden light that filtered through the air. It reflected against her skin and scattered on David’s glasses. David wanted to say something, but nothing came out of his dry mouth. This hunger had obtuse the edges of his logic and forced him straight to the old fashioned wrought iron door. His heart began speeding like a train, about to tear out of his mouth.

What if they humiliate me?

You are a real pro at being humiliated.

Besides, compared to the fire burning his stomach, self-respect should go fuck itself. Self-respect was for humans; he was an animal now.

He walked close behind the woman down what seemed to be an endless jelly-like hallway soaked in the golden incandescence. The kick of hunger had subsided, the sitar wasn’t playing, but David didn’t notice either of that, he was too busy following the woman, momentarily free from his demons. Meanwhile, the sitar notes had reached a crescendo when the door latched open. His lanky frame quaked by this suddenness as if a tectonic shift had taken place beneath his feet, as another door opened and leveled the known and unknown, an enchanting aroma swam in the air. The headiness of the air was a bit too strong for his dry intestines; there was a sense of foreboding in him. He felt older by a decade.

A sudden torrent of Tungsten lights beamed on his eyes. Recovering from this assault took him a good few minutes, after which, a world drenched in lights appeared in front of his burning, watery eyes. It was a hall bigger than the size of a football field. Marbles of alternate black and white made the floor look like a huge chessboard. A dazzling chandelier hung from the central arch of the ceiling, flooding the entire hall with a light brighter than the eyes could take. White granite columns on either side supported the parabolic ceiling beneath which about a hundred men and women had gathered. He looked around him more carefully once again. The architecture of the hall resembled an opera hall he had seen before on TV.

These people, he noticed, were really suave, immaculately dressed in expensive suits, dinner jackets, and women in long frizzy designer gowns. They were all holding plates in their hands overflowing with food, as they mindlessly talked it over. The air was suffused by a vinegary scent that reminded him of an Oriental restaurant he had gone to dine at some years back. He had had a delightful Gado Gado there. The memory rollicked his taste buds instantly.

That was all he wanted to do- travel around the world and eat everywhere and eat everything.

The sitar churned tunes out of silence; he followed the music. On the first floor, sitting on a mattress by the verandah, two men were playing sitar and one accompanied on the tabla. They were dressed in traditional Indian attires. He usually was fond of such tunes, but that moment was somehow disturbing. He looked for the woman with a petulant turn of his head again but could not trace her in the crowd. Everything seemed very distant; he realized that he was a misfit.

These were really rich and influential people, probably the elites of the city and some VVIPs under the roof. If they would figure out that he was uninvited, they would perhaps beat the shit out of him and put him in jail. He thought of leaving the place instantly, just then an elderly gentleman materialized from the left, placed his hand on his shoulder and with a poised face said, ”Have your food young man… there, in case

you hadn’t figured out where the buffet spread was.” The man pointed his finger toward David’s 6’0 clock , moving on in that direction to join a group of men .

David mustered the courage, inched towards the spread and picked his cutlery from the rack- a plate, a spoon and fork. The food laid out on a lapis lazuli inlaid dining table had more than a hundred food items on it. Lip-smacking kormas, delightful biryanis were emitting bewitching scent in the air, the finest of kinds of pasta he had ever seen, and meatballs seared in multicolored sauces, steaks of all shapes, grills of all kinds, kebabs on cinnamon sticks, breads looking fetching with rich toppings on them, desserts of another hundred kind. Here was sumptuous food from all parts of the world. A visceral exhibition of molecular gastronomy. He had never seen anything like that in reality before, much less had them for dinner. It was as if a food magazine page had come alive. The demon inside raised his head and started belching fire again. If the hunger till then was huge, now, it was boundless.

But, was this a dream? Till minutes back, he had no idea that his hunger would be satiated this way. If only luck would favor him like this more often, the world would become a better place to live in. He felt fourteen again as he stuffed his plate hastily with portions from as many items as he could at a go. It was how he used to do back then, as an adolescent gatecrasher. There are rules of the game that never change. Stick to basics, be yourself. Avoid eye contact, don’t be stiff, concentrate on the plate, enjoy the food. Easy. With his plate heaped, he spotted a snug corner by a column and stood there. There was no conspicuous gathering of these heavy weight people within afoot. The concocted odor reprieved him, he organized his plate and forked a meat. Heavens melted on his.

5. When the sitar stopped playing

David couldn’t breathe.

His body had had its run, but the mind refused to stop.

Ever since he had read about it in his mother’s culinary book at home, he had always dreamt of having a Cannoli, a fried pastry with rich cream filling. He had finally arrived at a Cannoli, but he couldn’t have it. His body was churning.

He noticed a waste bin within a few yards in one corner. He walked up to it, bisecting the crowd. He bent forward and looked inside upon reaching the bin; there were utensils piled on each other. He unloaded the waste into it, and as soon as the last morsel depleted the plate, a hooter cracked his eardrums, the bright light dimmed into that of pale red. People turned towards him and broke into collective high pitched laughter.

Sweat beaded on his forehead and his heart almost jumped out of his mouth. The hall droned with condescending galvanic giggles. He felt scared, a kind of scare that froze everything inside him.

They are laughing at you, you have been caught.

Now, will they throw me in jail? How much does it hurt these rich wankers to feed an unemployed penurious twenty-eight-year-old man?

He was feeling naked under the gaze of these people, and shame was eating him up. He decided to get out. Immediately.

But, before he could take two steps in the direction of the exit, the lights of the hall went off. A pitch-black veil descended. A baritone spoke from a loudspeaker. It was in a language he had not heard before. French probably, he thought. It continued for two minutes that seemed to David to last longer than two hours. For those two minutes, the voice rose and fell several times. I became happy, sad, and angry all during that creepy little speech he couldn’t understand. Once it ended, some hundred-odd people chanted in unison. This, too, wasn’t a language David knew.

Chinese, maybe? The Sitar twanged mellow tunes, a biscuit-like fragrance calmed his nerves, and lights raged out of the darkness, almost smashing the pupils. He rubbed his eyes and looked before him. The people were busy eating in their former posture, things were normal, again.

You must leave. Now.

He hurried towards the gate. On his way, he saw shiny shoes gleaming, saw pedicured feet in high priced stilettos, and a momentary lapse of memory happened. “Sorry, sir, you have to come with me.” A tall man,

who looked like Johnny Bravo, stated politely after David was obstructed by him. David wanted to say that he was getting late, his parents were waiting for him back home, next time surely, he would go with him to wherever he asked. Thanks for the food, by the way. It was great. You know the things he would usually say when in trouble at fourteen. But the words entangled into a noose and tied his tongue. He fell into the blackness of his inner abyss.

A splash of cold water brought him back to consciousness. A terrible headache chewed his head like a beast. A hot metal dented on the right side of his head, exactly above the ear. But he didn’t move his head to see what that was. In fact, now he was too tired for any kind of shock, surprise or alarm. He failed to react. A high voltage bulb dangled from a holder illuminating the various dishes spread on the table. Commingling of scent emitting from them made him queasy. The very site of food repelled him. A good bit of gas clogged his respiratory lane. His stomach was bloated; his bladder was stressed. He needed to throw up. Across the table sat Johnny Bravo, his goggles gleaming in the golden light of the bulb. His face seemed dead as a doormat. Only his lips moved as if controlled by an algorithm.

“Sorry for this inconvenience, sir. I’d request you not to move; there is a gun stuck to your head, hope you cooperate.” He spoke as politely as the last time. He went on to add. “Our boss wants to speak to you. Please hear him out.”

No sooner had the man finished his sentence than he heard a faint strumming sound on the floor. David tried to panic, but couldn’t. The sound became clearer. A man entered from the periphery of the dark around the room and sat across the table. David tried to notice, but his face was obscured by the interplay of light and shadow. He had a feeling that he had seen the man somewhere. He was short and beefy. He felt the man would rant at him. He wanted to feel scared but couldn’t; the ability to react has been drained out from his body.

But the man started speaking in the gentlest way that was possible. He spoke soft and clear.

“You can’t waste food, you see. It’s not time nor money. It is food, helps us to live, people kill and die for this, everybody, you see, needs food.

That’s what unites humanity. We arrange these buffets as a humanitarian endeavor of peace and harmony. You can’t waste food, sir. No, you can’t. Now you have to eat all this food, all of it, or else we have to blow your skull off. We have certain rules, you see…”

David was too numb to react. He was overtaken by an immensely strong desire to see the man’s face; his rising impulse was punctuated fast enough.

“I, too, have seniors to answer… but I will give you one last chance.”

There it was. One last chance. He had heard that somewhere before. In some other life, maybe and the voice was something he had heard before too, the tone was faintly familiar. He wanted to tell that he didn’t want this one last chance, and neither did he want to eat. He was too full of talking or eating or having chances. He wanted to puke and shit and get the food out of his body. He hated all those gaudy dishes. Every morsel was turning into poison. He could hear the sitar again, then it stopped, and a silence gripped the air.