It will take more than two minutes though..

I am notorious for creating disasters and covering them lest someone notices. But when it comes to recovering them, atleast last Sunday gave me the prospect to glorify myself.

It was around 9 a.m, just after we (me and my roomie) were up from bed (rrrr…mattresses actually). We were shamelessly lethargic to walk a few minutes to the nearby tiffin centre and have our break-fast. However, we had stocks of Bachelor’s Staple Food – the one and only Maggie. So I initiated the proceedings by taking out the stain-rich, non-copper-bottom pan from underneath (I mean the shelf’s) and filled roughly half of it with water.

After a few minutes, the water stopped boiling. And my patience started withering. The 2-Kg cylinder has been in use for the past 3 months then and it showed up its ugly face. The usually thick blue flame started fainting, leaving my semi-cooked noodles lie there in the pan, unexcited and unmotivated. After two seconds, while I was resenting and was indignant at the situation, my roomie slowly tottered into the kitchen to take stock of the status.

“Hero, what happened, is the maggie ready?” he asked. I didn’t respond.
In a slightly irritated tone he enquired “Now, what does that gloomy look at the sky through the window mean?”

I gave him a melancholic look and pointed my sight on to the noodles lying there.

He gave a 2 second pause.
“Enough?....Enough? he said nodding his head twice. “Lets forget eating noodles today. I already told you not to trust this f*****g cylinder, instead we shall go out and have something non-junk, rather than this sticky stuff. Would you ever listen to wise advices?”

My self-respecting disposition could not oblige. I said “we are going to eat noodles today”

“Are you kidding me? I can’t eat this uncooked shit. You may eat up my share as well if you are so sure-footed” he said in an unusual tone and scuttled away from the spot.

As usual, I didn’t know what to do. “Was I unnecessarily heroic when I gallantly declared that we are going to eat noodles today?” I asked myself and started looking around confusedly. Then something caught my eye. I saw heaps of my unread economic times papers lying there at the corner. I haven’t read a single edition since subscription, and thought of using them for cooking atleast. Was into action quickly - stole a few bricks from my neighbourhood (would-be neighbour Mishra uncle placed the bricks out near the elevator to use them for his house-warming ceremony) Then I placed the stain-rich pan with the unboiled stuff on the gawkily arranged bricks and started burning each edition of the economic times, impatiently. After a not-so-comfortable 15-minutes, the room was filled with penetrating, stinking and dirty smoke, yet my noodles thoroughly over-boiled; Sensing the offensive smoke, my roomie rushed into the kitchen. I was sitting there with my limbs spread out in an uncivilized fashion - roughly an inch of my finger became tandoori, eyes bulged out red, and my face depressingly darker with ugly black patches – overall I looked like a tsunami victim. I could clearly see flakes of burnt paper neatly scattered over the surface of the noodles, making it look like some well-known French cuisine.

My roomie looked at me with an explicitly disrespectful and satirical grin, silently nodded his head, and walked out of the kitchen singing some damn hindi song…..