Of struggles and wiggles

It wasn’t unusual that I arrived late for lunch. It wasn't unusual that the bus I was traveling in broke down. Nor was it unusual for there not being a single auto in sight to help me reach my destination. These are but the mundane things in my life, things which are to be taken in their stride and not those which are to be cursed and spent time lamenting upon. The unusual part was that it was with a member of the opposite sex. Wait it wasn't my girlfriend nor was it a date. It was just a lunch with a friend, just me and her.

Let us take a pause now while I launch into a tirade against all the narrow minded suburban folk masquerading as tabloid agents around me who treat this situation to come up with phrases like,"Kya baat hai lunch-wunch kissi aur ke saath........." and when you read that think of an absolutely vile and vulgar and almost disturbing tone with which people say such stuff.

Getting back to the usual. My friend, God bless her soul is not hot, or extremely beautiful (though I still value her more than anything else!) but better yet she was a calorie conscious friend obsessed with my expanding waistline. She brushed aside my excuse for being late. Apparently you cannot expect a person to believe that someone's bus broke down at a place without any other means of transportation in sight. This was one of my wild imaginations and I was an expert in creating fibs and fairytales. She ordered a salad. She then used the words calorie count, healthy, vegetarian, sweet and Russian. The platter about to be served was called a Russian salad. I made a quick calculation to ascertain how many Russian Rubles make the two hundred rupees that the salad was worth, not much but two hundred rupees still hurts!

As I was pretending to listen to her weight loss tips I spotted in my salad what can only be described as a bright green spineless creature. Now I am no Entomologist and I wasn’t certain if it was an insect but I could certainly call it a worm. It was wedged between two pieces of sweet potato covered with mayonnaise. It wiggled its way through there, its slimy skin covered in white sauce. I could not believe that I would have consumed the platter in front of me if I hadn’t chanced upon it. The sole objective of this being was to get past one piece of vegetable after the other. It went past the peas and was climbing upon its next obstacle a carrot piece, the human equivalent of which would be to crawl and climb over gutters and sewages in the dark underbelly of a metropolitan.

Yet what was more noticeable was the very skin and appearance that it was made of. Something about it just unnerves you. Its green skin almost resembling an extra-terrestrial life form from Steven Spielberg’s many productions. This miniscule creature was not an aberration of nature it was in many ways a norm. To think that a genetic formula could actually explain its existence, its purpose in this universe and most importantly its ugly and repulsive exoskeleton was both morbid and disturbing.

Worms, I read in an article were necessary to maintain the ecological balance and their large numbers help to almost recycle all that we consider messy, stools, dead plants, animals and host of other body fluids from the entire animal kingdom. Such a definition for the worm was what I consider appropriate. The worm at its moment of wiggling glory represented the mess that it was born to consume and not my Russian salad. The irony of it all was that no matter how disturbing its existence was to me it was essential to the microcosm around it.

The only word that I caught on from my friend was that the sweet potato in the salad was brought over everyday from a remote farm in Karnataka. This worm was one of the million eggs laid by an insect in Karnataka a week ago. It somehow survived an onslaught of insecticides and pesticides, formed into larvae and then into a worm, held on to its life through the cleansing and packaging procedures. In the fortnight of its existence this creature traveled a few thousand kilometers, crossed a state border and finally reached a restaurant in Mumbai and still survived further cleansing and cutting procedures on the potato. That is far more adventure and risk taken than I could ever imagine.

I brought to the attention of the manager that we had a rather hostile guest from Karnataka. And as the waiter took my dish away I could almost sense the worm rejoicing with mirth the fact that it survived for so long and that it continued to survive, that it continued to pollute and contaminate the food that I was to eat and the fact that it would forever creep up in a lifetime of horrific and disgusting moments.

But the last laugh was mine the manager offered me a free full course lunch in return. And much to the dismay of my friend, paneer butter masala and butter naan it was!