How I earned a brownie

There’s nothing more blissful than waking up late on a working day. Or so I thought, when I woke up at 9 am today, a working day. But by 9 pm, I had realized in entirety that there was in fact nothing more blissful than a brownie. Period. Err, no, actually scratch the period. You earn a brownie, you don’t just eat it. And today, I earned it. Bliss. Now, period.

I wake up at 8 am today, as usual, but instead of creaking out of bed, scratching my neck, I roll over to a more comfortable position with evil pleasure. It is the time when all my colleagues are busy getting ready for work. And her highness is still in bed, lolling about in a sea of faded pink linen. At 9 am, when I finally crawl out, I decide I need a change. So, I take a pair of scissors and chop off the front of my hair. I now have a fringe. Then, the ablutions happen, I scrub myself with a rough coconut naar till i turn crimson and feel sufficiently clean. I get dressed, say bye to daddy and Lola and hop out. I manage to scratch the side of my car by skillfully grating it against the gate two times and then get caught in a traffic jam for one hour. I hate West Mambalam. May it be banned and sent to jail in some obscure place like Uganda. Ok fine, Somalia. I finally manage to get myself to my assignment destination- a hotel where an aqua aerobics demo is already underway. I watch as well-toned bodies and fat, podgy bodies dance in the pool to loud blah music. I take notes. I leave. I get caught in a traffic jam for half an hour. And my ipod cable refuses to relay music to the speaker. May the cable suffer. I shall throw it away in the kuppathotti at the end of Venkatachalam Street – officially the dirtiest kuppathotti. Rot cable, rot along with stale kalyana saapad, rotten banana peels and E-coli infested, decomposing unrecognizable masses of nonsense. I reach office. People say I look like a poodle with my fringe- then I remember, I now have a fringe. I say ‘whatever’ as coolly as I can and sit down at my desk, when Srini the Kalyana Correspondent tells Purba via chat that there’s a poodle in the house. She comes running, looking for a poodle. I stare at her with puppy eyes, not wanting to disappoint her. She smiles, but she is still disappointed. Noosh apparently doesn’t hold a candle to Poodle. Can I be Noodle (Noosh the Poodle) by the way? Meanwhile, Lak, my bezztezzt offizz friend, watches as I apply Vaseline on my lips and says I look like a bimbette. B for Bimbette. She is B for B****. I watch her cringe maamily when I say the B word and with much satisfaction, get down to writing two articles. And I’m soon off to a food review with Purba. The restaurant is fancy and we do a fair bit of visual eating before getting down to the truffle, morel, porcini, creamed spinach and broccoli. And the panacotta. Slurrrrp. Lakshmi is already frenetically calling me, demanding that I come right away to the office to honour our Winner’s Bakery appointment. I reach at 7 pm. We go to some random community hall to get ‘a jean’ (Hey, you are wearing a nice jean ya), and are pissed off that the pimply boys with blonde ponytails are more interested in staring dumbly than showing us ‘the jean’. So we go to Bestsellers where Lak finally gets a pair. And I buy two topss, because ‘tops’ is singular. For example: ‘Noodle wore a nice tops today’. Then, Lak starts whining because she wants a brownie. We go to Winners Bakery. No brownie. We go to Coffee World and ask for their Famous Brownie. Out of stock Madam. Coffee Day or Anokhi? Noodle says Anokhi and Lak follows because Noodle is older and Noodle has trained Lak to listen to elders. At Anokhi, we sample all the tables in the al fresco area before deciding we’d rather sit in AC comfort. We order a brownie each and look around to see if B-face look-alike is present. Absent. Glee!

And then the brownie comes. It is cold and hard. So I ask Chinese person # 1 to heat it up. Lak copies me. Copy cat, kill the rat. When my heated brownie arrives, I shut out Lak’s inane conversation entirely while soaking in the aroma of heated chocolate. I feel the warm chocolate coursing through my veins. I feel happy, relaxed with every bite. I have endured so much today. Traffic jam, heat, being called a poodle, not being accepted as a poodle, suffering Lak’s inane conversation… I had truly earned the brownie. Sigh.