Tea off

The flavoured tea tastes so tasteless as old age when I drink it after having balls of lal mohon, I cerebrated. When the land smells of blood and bullets incessantly, the people concluded the score of men and women dying every month in gun-shooting matches is just trifling. The organisations of the government had managed the swindle of 10 million rupees quite efficiently after handling that of 100 million. Proportion and relation were written large in our world before the gunslingers had bent their knees before the idols of easy money.

Yet life is no tea and lal mohon only. So I was, around 9 o’clock this morning, sitting on the Ivory Tower reading the newspaper. I read it from bottom to top. I read the papers are the tools for the advertising people. Between the ads I did read several news stories: the Egyptians were walking like themselves after a successful revolution yesterday on page 1; a minister had his penis amputated after peeing on an electrified cellphone tower on page 2; an AIIMS doctor was offered a role in a documentary on condom after he was caught molesting a boy on page 3; inflation has been poking its fingers into economy's ribs on page 4, and so forth.

Then my monophonic cell, it rang, a friend had called me from the two-day far hometown, where he had gone for a pilgrimage. He quetched he can find no tea there. In the morning he can do nothing, start nothing without the tea. Without tea, he suffers from constipation and that’s one of the worst ways to begin a day. Green pastures and luck here; crimson empty skies and luckless there. I tried to console him. He explained the roads from the tea-harvesting land are blocked by countless corpses these days. The corpses are demanding life from the people. The roads are filled with waist-deep shits, dumped by the corpses.

So unfortunate it is. But he likes tea so much and he drinks too frequently, more oft than rapes in this city. And he harped life has been like drinking tea after relishing a couple of lal mohon. We exchanged more pleasantries to ignore the tea story, but not before I gave him a suggestion to drink a spoonful of olive oil before going to bed each night. I agreed we do have tasted different teas — of ginger, lemon, milk, cardamom, and copacabacana and of green, red, black and white — and what we should sample are more teas that are available elsewhere.

Just as I hung up the phone, the tea-leaf bottle laughed riotously in the kitchen. It had been eavesdropping. In its sardonic tone, the bottle yelped, “You are equally alien to the place where you originally belong to and where you are belonging today without any sense of belongingness.” I don’t know where I belong to, but why the heck should a bottle care where I belong to. I was so lost that I took one more lal mohon; and the bland tea, it was only half drank. But I ignored the cup for it measured relatively naught to my forsaken soul and went to take a bath. Oh the soul — I had left it hanging topsy-turvy on a tree near the Nambul riverbank a long time ago.