Domain Maximus

Defenceless prey

So we’re all trooping out of the in-law’s place in Ashok Vihar last weekend for a spot of shopping. We walk out of the door, past the stairwell and down the narrow drive way with low boundary walls on both sides.

Suddenly the mom-in-law freezes in her tracks. She cranes her neck over the chest-high boundary wall on the left. Like an alert documentary lioness, she has spotted something far way in the prairie grass of… er… Ashok Vihar BA Block. (Since the in-laws are staunch vegetarians let us assume that the prey is a wildebeest-shaped block of fresh paneer. Or kulfi.)

She turned around and asked us to be very quiet indeed. And then, following her lead, we all proceeded towards the car in a crouched posture. As soon as reached the car, we leapt into our seats nimble-fully and careened out of the colony at full speed, through the gates, swooped into the main road outside and then took a tyre-screeching u-turn before stopping at the Reliance Fresh on the other side.

Mom-in-law emoted the Punjabi equivalent of “Phew” and then explained how we’d just managed to avoid one of her more nosy neighbours, the retired VRS-accepted bank manager, uncle Zaphinder Singh Beeblotra (name changed). Read the rest of this entry »

When we first met and got talking, it sounded just like another one of those coffee-shop mouth-off sessions with Pastrami. (No. Not that Pastrami. This is about the other one. Different business. Same complicated personality.)

Every couple of weeks Pastrami, the missus, a few other mutual friends and yours truly get together to, by and large, make fun of each other. Take each other’s trip. Now you might be forgiven for thinking that this sort of routine gets lame after a while. How much fun can you poke at the same people fortnight after fortnight right? Right?

Wrong.

Pastrami and I once spent an entire overnight train journey making fun of a particular female friend’s nose. Five, maybe six hours of purely nose-based humour.

It was quite a remarkable nose of course. Long, pointed and with a mid-stream course correction that made it hook downwards, and slightly to the left hawkishly before ending in a well-tapered, not at all chunky point. It was not a freakish nose. Some people could have pulled it off. Alas our friend was not one of those. And when extreme boredom struck Pastrami and me minutes after leaving Aurangabad station, we quickly converged on the nose for amusement:

“So does it echo a little bit when you sneeze?”

“Can you touch your tongue with the tip of your nose?”

And the classic:

“How can you possibly head-butt anything at all?”

Alas this particular evening Pastrami had other things to talk about. Which, if I had known about, I would have made up some random excuse, something marriage related perhaps, to avoid meeting him.

Let me explain.

As soon as we settled into one of the tables in the corner at the Costa(lot for) Coffee at Connaught Place, Pastrami squirmed a little uncomfortably in his chair, as men do in such circumstances. And then he said: “Sidin. I have fallen in love. I have asked her to marry me.”

I kept scrolling through Twitter updates on Blackberry hoping that the moment would pass and Pastrami would move on to something else. But he did not. He repeated: “Dude! I am in love. I have asked this girl to marry me! Dude. Listen!”

And so I had to.

Now in most cases when a close friend falls in love and decides to propose to someone, this is a cause of great joy for the entire friends circle. And naturally so. Aren’t we all glad to see a friend find that someone special to spend the rest of his or her life with in love and affection, till some form of gaming console or broadband connection do them apart?

Not exactly. In reality there are several base, negative and downright selfish reasons why we are glad to see a friend hook up with someone.

For instance married men love to see single male friends hook up because there are really only so many times you can laugh off other people’s bachelor exploits before slowly crying yourself to sleep on your side of the double bed. Single men also love to see other single men hook up because, thanks to the weird probabilities that govern male life, your friend is going to date some smoking-hot Anjana Sukhani look alike. A babe who is SO out of your league that she is in some completely other sport if you know what I mean. (Anjana will then fool around with you because you are harmless and call her “bhabhi” all the time, when your actual mental train of thought is more along the lines of “slutty nurse”.)

I am not one to hypothesize how women’s minds work. But when a girl decides to hook up with a guy, I believe her female friends’ mental flowchart is as follows:

1. Wow she is going out with someone!
2. The bastard better agree to marry her…
3. Because she would look so AWESOME on her wedding day (leading to the most important and critical next thought…)
4. AND THEN I CAN GET MEHNDI DONE!!! WOO HOO!!!

But in Pastrami’s case things are not so. When Pastrami tells me he is in love, my train of thought is along the lines of:

Oh. Shit.

This is because, for all the years I have known gentle, sensitive, prone-to-auto-accident Pastrami he always, without fail or exception, falls for the MOST CRAZY ASS WOMEN in the world.

I do not jest. These women are freaking night-mare inducing, restraining order generating insane. Stark raving. And that is saying something for that gender.

For instance there was the one that would always drop in, to say hi and possibly make out a little, by barging into his room without warning Kramer-like. Initially this was a cute quirk that temporarily suspended Pastrami’s “I will be naked when I am alone” habit. Later we discovered it was because she wanted to know if he was ever with any other women in person or on the phone.

Then there was the one that, in her spare time, wrote jolly comic verse about people who wanted to commit suicide.

And who can forget that crazy girl from Goa who’d break up one day, drop in for the night the next, then break up again. And then sex chat with him on Google Talk only to break up again and then make up again and then sex chat again all in the space of a brief afternoon. She left poor Pastrami a mess of mixed messages and hair-trigger emotions for weeks. I’d ask him if he wanted to do coffee and he’d ask, reflexively, if it was because he’d ”screwed up something again without knowing.”

And in each of these cases Pastrami wanted to marry them immediately and have children and a house in the hills. Alas it would be left to his friends to pick up the pieces and console poor Pastrami and nurse him back to sanity. Largely by making jokes about unrequited love around him till his sorrow was spent and he laughed along.

So when he sits in a cafe and breaks the news that he is in love yet again, ideal responses would be to talk him out of it, hit him over the head with that humongous cup at Costa and hope he develops retrograde amnesia, or stab yourself in the throat with that ridiculous cheese twisty thing they serve there and then die a slow death. Anything but the crazy woman you’d have to handle for him.

Alas I was just in the middle of Retweeting something on the Berry and, before I could pick up an ornamental polished marble ball from the potted plant, Pastrami blurted it all out.

The young lass was well-known to all of us having been a year junior to us in college. She was of sound mind and had a penchant for some emotional poetry. And a looker to boot. So prima facie there was nothing to suggest a mental imbalance other than the usual womanly foibles. (Stuff like “You just like Yoda because he talks funny.”)

And then Pastrami began to speak of how they’d been in touch for a long time over email and chat—the lass works abroad. And how after a recent visit by her to Delhi he’d decided that they were meant to be together forever:

P: “Sidin, she came all the way to Delhi just to meet me. For a few hours. From XXXXX!”
S: “No shit. Did she say that? Did she say she came JUST to see you?”
P: “Well not in as many words. But she has no other friends. No other family. Only me. ONLY ME! DON’T YOU SEE! IT IS FINALLY HAPPENING!”
S: “Are you’re sure she did absolutely nothing else at all in Delhi?”
P: “There was this friend’s wedding. But otherwise every minute of her day was Pastrami-time!”
S: “Oh shit.” (Reaches for cheese twisty.)

And if that wasn’t weird enough Pastrami then narrated, in great unnecessary detail, about all the conversations that they had and all the subsequent insights into her personality.

For instance he was going to propose to her in Paris (The city. Ha!). Because that’s the place she’d got on her “Which is your favourite city in the world?” quiz on Facebook. Also he had discovered that her favourite poem in the entire world was Rabbi Ben Ezra by Robert Browning. So he’d asked for her hand in go-out-ship by quoting the “Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be.” lines from that poem.

Pastrami also said that the few moments they’d spent together in her hotel room was heavy with sentiment and emotion. They had hugged at some point and according to Pastrami it felt “just right”. And even the woman said that she “loved the hug”.

So far things seemed normal. Apart from a penchant for poems that are over 190 lines long, our lass seemed largely harmless. And then, just when I thought he’d finally found a sane woman, Pastrami said:

“Just yesterday she called me at 4 in the morning and asked me to write a poem for her on the spot. It was magical Sidin. This despite the fact that she is yet to come to a decision whether she loves me.”

Completely unlike the CBI, I was stunned by this new evidence. What? She did not love him yet?  She was still making up her mind? Extempore poetry at 4 AM? WTF?

Apparently, Pastrami explained, our girl was still coming to terms with the fact that someone was in love with her. Apparently she did not know if she was ready to reciprocate. She was still not getting “goosebumps” when she thought about him. Also it seems she was sill trying to find out what the “concept of love” really meant to her.

Pastrami asked me if I got goosebumps when I thought about the missus. Because the missus was sitting with us at the time, I told him that in many parts of my body the skin was permanently goose-bumped, like a durian, from intense affection. I then asked Pastrami how HE knew that he was in love. He said that the magical moment had been when he had escorted her to Delhi airport.

They’d reached well in advance of her flight and he’d taken her to that shady south Indian restaurant near the terminal for a coffee. After snacking and chatting, presumably about weird poetry, they got up to leave. Both of them approached the cash counter and she’d insisted she’d pay. Suddenly her mind went blank calculating her bill, she fumbled for her wallet and, according to Pastrami, “she just looked so darned adorably silly fumbling with a simple bill.” Pastrami immediately swooped and picked up the tab.

She said that her brain was suited more for poetry than mathematics while Pastrami’s mind was so analytical and fast. Never to let a moment like this go waste, Pastrami uttered a line that has never been used between a man and a woman in a romantic setting before:

Multi-faceted

“Darling I just love to see you doing silly things. And fumbling with math. Frankly my dear, I think my left brain is in love with your right brain…”

She was left speechless. Also all of us and one passing-by Costa waiter.

It was clear that Pastrami was quite pleased with his monumental pick-up line. He sat back in his chair at Costa and smiled smugly. He asked me what I thought. I told him that it was a great line. And then made a joke about how Pastrami and Poetry Babe had at least one good brain between the both of them.

The rest of the night all of us just sat and mostly made fun of Pastrami’s brain. Or the left half in any case.

As for their love story it progresses gradually. The lass is still waiting for her moment of epiphany when she suddenly gets goosebumps and realizes her passionate love for good old Pastrami. Pastrami spends most of his nights, pen in hand, ready to create magnificent poetry for her at a moment’s notice. This is what he wrote that day at 4 in the morning:

To understand a love that is unrequited
Consider a candle that is, at one end, ignited.
If you respond that it’s the standard way it is conflagrated
Wait! I’m not done. Let me make it a little more complicated.
This one-side-lit candle, further, balances about a delicate axis
and, as one side wanes the other, relatively, waxes.
And this creates an imbalance which, as we know, Nature abhors.
But what is to be done when one party is indifferent while the other adores?

And the only thing keeping this world from going completely crazy
is that while A loves B, B loves C all the way through till Y loves Z.
Though the As, Bs, Cs, all the way through till the Ys will complain
that, with one-sided love, imbalance is, only, a minor pain.
And when A speaks of B
you can clearly see
that B’s mere presence
justifies A’s existence.
But when B speaks of A
suffice to say
from how A is derided
Love is, clearly, one-sided.

Unrequited love also, it seems, makes the skin thick.
Words from B that would, earlier, have cut to the quick
no longer seem to affect A in any way.
Also rendered ineffective is any passion A might display
What A and B fail to realize
is that as each candle diminishes in size
A and B, inexorably, draw near
and where A ends and B begins becomes unclear.
And while B is resisting and A is pining
even this dark cloud has a silver lining.

Let the Lovers and the Loved always recall
that ‘tis but one wick that connects us all.

Yes. Pastrami is really, really in love.

Crap.

Now I can finally tell you peeps why the blog slowed considerably over the last one year. Look what came in the mail today: (I’ve blacked yellowed out some bits due to contractual obligations.)

Paper work

Couple of things to point out:

1. Yes my name is still causing trouble. Sigh. I might change it to something else so that it looks better in book stores. Like “Dan Brown Vadukut”.

2. Will update on expected dates, title, excerpts and so on as soon as I get inputs and go-aheads from the Penguin people. Currently I am thinking of calling it “A short history of nearly every five point someone slumdog white tiger’s letters to Penthouse”.

3. A very big thank you to all you guys. This blog is quite the community story you know. So collective high-fives all around.

4. Set aside money right now to buy it when it eventually comes out.

Yay!

After the thumping success of the inaugural season of the Indian Premier League last year, many people in India have just one thought on their minds right now: Is there any way to up the 1000 bucks per couple we charged last year for unlimited warm beer, vulcanized chicken tikka, and service with a smile when customers leave? Because when I say people, I mean the guys who run that bar at Phoenix Mills in Worli, Mumbai.

The rest of us, however, are already beginning to dust off our team jerseys from last year, ready to once again support our favourite franchises. Unless of course we have just moved from Mumbai to Delhi and recently found the missus, an ardent Daredevil fan, browsing this on the web:

Organized retailing in New Delhi

Now we are sooo into the Daredevils, it is not funny I tell you.

But what can one expect from the next season of the IPL? Will the Rajasthan Royals once again surprise everyone by emerging as underdogs and winning the tournament? (No. Because technically now that they have won it once already it shouldn’t be that surprising if they do it again no?) Or will the Chennai Super Kings finally listen to the pining of their ardent fans, rise to the challenge and get a team kit in a colour other than “Supernova Lemon Rice”? Or will the Deccan Chargers impose their cricketing superiority on… Ok wait, we can’t even type that with a straight face.

So we here at Domain Maximus spent the last many days and nights analysing every element of the second IPL from administration to team structures to even the current state of global cricket. We are pleased to say that we have drawn up a stunning, audacious list of detailed predictions for what is going to transpire over the course of IPL 2009. While every effort has been made to make up virtually every single point in the predictions, readers are encouraged to take these forecasts with utmost seriousness.

—***—

Remarkably detailed and individually dated predictions for IPL 2009:

April 3^rd 2009: During a press conference to unveil the second edition of the IPL, Chairman Lalit Modi is suddenly attacked by a masked assailant who, screaming the words “Saale illegal monopoly businessman! Mere joote da jawab nahin!“, hurls shoes at the cricket administrator before tearing out of the conference room and disappearing into the the crowds outside. Questions are raised about Modi’s popularity amongst the media and cricketing fraternity as the assailant was able to throw over 11 pairs of shoes at Modi before members of Rajasthan Cricket Association pounced upon the guards who had come to pounce upon the assailant. Kapil Dev expresses surprise and concern at the development when media ambush him at a Bata showroom a few hours later. Thankfully Modi is able to duck almost all of the shoes except the last four.

April 10^th 2009: Cricket fans all over India wake up in shock to see the Bangalore Royal Challengers on top of the Indian Premier League 2009 league tables. And then everyone laughs sheepishly when they realize that the tournament hasn’t started and the team names have been displayed in alphabetical order.

The inaugural match of the tournament is between the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Chennai Super Kings. For a long time it looks like the Knight Riders have a solid chance of winning before the Super Kings finally arrive from the airport after a delayed flight and beat them by 73 runs.

April 12^th 2009: On the same day as a Rajasthan Royals vs. Mumbai Indians match, rebel cricket league honcho Kapil Dev shrewdly convenes a press conference to divert attention. At the conference he outlines ICL’s strategy to overtake and crush the IPL to the assembled press, namely, one Mr. Parthasarathi Kalasalingam from Anna Nagar Weekly. After Dev’s address Mr. Kalasilangam asks the following question: “Mr Kapil Dev, can you kindly direct me to the room where the vegetarian buffet is being served?”

Dev breaks down.

April 16^th 2009: TV viewers have a treat today as Aussie great and senior Chennai Super Kings player Matthew Hayden joins the commentary and analysis crew looking bootilicious in a tight sports t-shirt and low waisted denim jeans. Hilarity ensues when the star-struck Bollywood starlet, hired to add sex appeal to the crew, goofs her lines all night and keeps saying “sirf Sex Matt par! Deewana bana de.” with longing glances at Hayden.

April 17^th 2009: After the first week of fixtures the league is intriguingly placed with the Rajasthan Royals, Mumbai Indians, and Delhi Daredevils all sharing first place. Bringing up the rear is the Deccan Chargers who are yet to find their groove in the tournament. So far the tournament has surprised everyone with its success. Stadiums are full of people and the cricket has been of a consistently high quality.

To celebrate, BCCI president Sharad Pawar organizes a celebratory parade for Lalit Modi on top of an open-top BEST bus from Wankhede Stadium to Bandra in Mumbai. The turnout is abysmal and Modi reaches Bandra in thirty-five minutes flat. None of the players come along to join in except Andrew Flintoff and Yuvraj Singh. However both players turn back in minutes when organizers clarify that they did not mean “topless bus parade” in that sense.

April 23^rd 2009: With sponsorship money dwindling Vijay Mallya decides to step up promotional and brand building activities for the Royal Challengers. In an internationally televised exhibition match the Kingfisher Calendar girls take on the Royal Challengers in a Twenty20 match which the models win by 32 runs. Monikangana Dutta takes 5 for 17 in a spell Laxman Sivaramakrishnan describes thus: “Oh… yeah… oh yeah… baby… throw that ball.. throw that ball to daddy…”

April 24^th 2009: Vijay Mallya replaces the entire Royal Challengers with models from the Kingfisher Calendar. The cricketers are spun off into a B-team called Royal Challengers Red which will play without uniform, cricketing gear or any catering. However tickets to their matches costs only Rs20 each (taxes and fuel surchages extra. Conditions apply).

May 1^st 2009: In a controversial but innovative move Lalit Modi announces that all Third Umpire decisions will henceforth be decided by the public via real-time SMS polls. The system is first tried out during a Mumbai Indians vs Delhi Daredevils match. JP Duminy tries to take a quick single when a direct throw from Gautam Gambhir rattles the stumps. The umpires immediately signal for an SMS poll by using a brand new gesture: they hold up a mobile phone. After three minutes of hectic SMS polling, with millions of votes coming in from West Bengal and the North-eastern states, Debojit Saha is once again chosen as Indian Idol.

May 3^rd 2009: Something happened to the Kings XI Punjab today. But it did not involve Preity Zinta. So nobody cares.

May 5^th 2009: Shahrukh Khan announces to the media that due to an uproar from knight riders all over the world, the name of his team was being shortened to just Kolkata. This however has no impact on the performance of the team which loses its fourth straight match and slumps to the bottom of the table just above the Deccan Chargers and the Kings XI Punjab.

May 6^th 2009: Just when everyone thought they had seen all the crisis they could handle in IPL 2009, a new one erupts at the Wankhede Stadium. As the Mumbai Indians walk back to the pavilion after beating the Kings XI Punjab, Harbhajan Singh is caught on camera whispering something to Sreesanth’s ear and shaking his fist in the sensitive Malayali’s face. Sreesanth is soon in tears. Lalit Modi orders an immediate enquiry.

May 12^th 2009: A crisis is averted. In the course of the enquiry Harbhajan’s case is explained by Sachin Tendulkar who was standing right next to the pair as the incident happened. Sreesanth is represented by the CPI(M) Politburo. Tendulkar goes on to explain how the whole thing was a misunderstanding. He clarifies that Harbhajan was not abusing Sreesanth. Instead Sreeseanth misheard a word while Harbhajan Singh was, in fact, singing the old Punjabi classic: “Tutak Tutak Tutak Tootiya.”

The impartial arbitrator, Vinod Kambli, accepts Tendulkar’s explanation and dismisses the case. The CPI(M) immediately calls for a nationwide strike in West Bengal and Kerala.

May 16^th 2009: Driven to desperation Vijay Mallya sells the entire Royal Challengers operation via online bidding to Bollywood heart-throb Shakti Kapoor. Kapoor, in classic private equity style, dismantles the company into parts and sells everything except the cheerleaders part of the business.

May 19^th 2009: The season is building into a tremendous climax. The Rajasthan Royals, Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians and Deccan Chargers have made it to the final four. Oh wait. Scratch that. I can hear my wife coming down the hall. When I said Deccan Chargers I mean Delhi Daredevils. These four teams have qualified for the finals.

And it looks like the Delhi Daredevils will win IPL 2009. I cannot reiterate this point enough.

May 23^rd 2009: After the semi-finals, champions Rajasthan Royals and challengers Delhi Daredevils stand firm. Both teams have lasted through a gruelling season of Twenty20 matches and fans are all set all over the country for the thrilling finale scheduled to take place in a few days time…

May 25^th 2009: … when disaster strikes. This morning a personal fax is received by media outlets all over the country from the desk of Lalit Modi. In this fax he says that for the last seven years there have been irregularities with the finances of the Indian Premier League and the league was no longer in a position to continue. The tournament would have to stop with immediate effect. He apologized to all the players and the viewers and said that things had gotten worse and worse and it was like “a lot of money just kept coming into my account and I just never knew when to stop and get off.”

When the news breaks, the Sensex immediately crashes 23%. However it bounces back sharply later in the day ending on a slight positive on the back of fresh FDI inflows, strong currency markets and good volumes in open interest.

May 26^th 2009: Madhur Bhandarkar announces his newest film project at a press meet in Mumbai. The movie will be called “Cricket”. One of the assembled press, Mr. Kalasalingam from Anna Nagar Weekly asks him: “What will be the theme of your movie this time Mr. Bhandarkar?”

Disclaimer: Everything in this blogpost is meant to be satirical. So don’t send me hate mail. I love IPL. Also Test cricket.

Teen Patti

Now that Diwali is over and the in-laws have returned to Delhi after gifting me a PSP (yee-haw!) I can narrate recent Diwali related developments in peace.

As most of you may know Diwali is that annual festival where Hindus celebrate the return of Lord Ram, millennia ago, to Ayodhya. The natives, Ramanand Sagar reminded us so vividly, stood around looking overjoyed and waving their hands in the air (like they just didn’t care) but not so much that their fake wigs and beards would fall off.

And to celebrate this momentous occasion in our cultural history we invited the missus’ parents over from Delhi.

Some of you may know that last year we had celebrated our debut Diwali in Dilli where yours truly was subject to several bouts of point blank ambush laddoo feedings and excessive kurta wearings. Also I had to light many fireworks, some several megatons in explosive strength, with quivering knees while the young Punjabi nephews, as is their way, calmly lit hot dog sized sparklers with one hand, juggled exploding strings of firecrackers with the other while their mother fed them katoris of dahi balles as evening snack.

Unfortunately due to a respiratory system that has been week from birth I was soon overwhelmed by sulphur fumes and had to retire to the living room where aunts (bua-jees) attempted to revive me with laddoos. Their voices said “Koi nahi beta, koi nahi…” but their eyes said “Hey bhagwan (wahe guru!)… please don’t let the neighbours see our lily-livered javayi. Oy hoy!”

Or something to that effect.

This year, therefore, I jumped at the chance to bring the in-laws down to aamchi Mumbai to give them a dose of that good old Mumbai hospitality to people from the north of India. Of course the in-laws are possibly the sweetest people in the world and there was much fun and games and shopping from Fabindia.

On the way back from Fabindia in the car I suggested ways of spending a relaxing evening at home: “Perhaps we could see a movie or some sitcom. Or one of the Planet Earth DVDs. Better yet we can watch people lighting fireworks from the safety of our living room windows WHILE watching sitcoms…”

The missus interjected: “Nope. We are all going to play teen patti!” Everyone else immediately sounded their approval with shouts of “Oy Hoy”. I feigned tremendous enthusiasm as well of course.

The thing is this. I don’t really get that teen patti game. And by extension I don’t get poker as well.

As long as a card game involves strategy, planning and no betting, as is the case with 13-card rummy, UNO and Top Trumps Monster Trucks, I am not so bad and seldom finish last. But as soon as a gambling component is involved I completely lose my composure. I simply cannot process that level of probability under those levels of pressure with those levels of speed. Combine that with the worst poker face in the galaxy and you have Sidin Sunny Vadukut: the Tilak Raj of Diwali night card playing.

As soon as we reached home, and while mom-in-law (a dear loving woman I might add who religiously reads every single blogpost I read before making fluffy aloo parathas that no hotel can replicate) cleared the living room floor, I confided my teenpattiophobia to the missus in the bedroom behind closed door. She assured me that she would keep an eye on me, and ensure that everyone involved me in a sporting manner. “After all it is just some good-natured Diwali fun. It’s not about winning or losing honey…”

An hour later, when I lost my fourteenth straight hand, the missus understood completely and threw my Guitar Hero 2 guitar at me.

Even accounting for my gambling ineptitude I was performing spectacularly badly. And not just because I suck at cards. The atmosphere was crackling a little too much you see.

So we sat down on the floor, doled out chips and began to play teen patti. Three minutes later the brother-in-law burst into song and punched the air with clenched fists… and this was just because he got to shuffle the cards. The in-laws and the missus–sane, normal and completely lovable people otherwise–suddenly turned into hyper-excited, adrenaline-overdosed, back-slapping, high-fiving, air-dhol playing card fiends. And the aakhri nail in the coffin was the that exquisite punjabi-hindi-card-lingo:

“Gole ka trail! Gole ka trail!” followed by “Sau ki salaami! Sau ki salaami!”

“Mere paas duggi ka pair…”

“Chaar ki chaal hai Sidin… CHAAR KI CHAAL!”

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD… Now first of all I don’t even know what a Gola is. There used to be a Gomathi Lakshmi in engineering college who we all lovingly referred to as “Gola” when she was around and as “The girl with the…”… okay that’s besides the point and she probably reads this blog.

So no, I had no idea what a studious Electrical Engineering babe had to do with my father-in-law’s killer hand that wiped the table clean and made the entire Kapoor khaandhaan explode like a can of Diet Seven-up that had been left in the freezer overnight*.

At first I tried to fit in inconspicuously by folding my cards every time before I had to bet at all. But after four or five times the missus caught on and screamed her head off telling me to be a sport using only her eyes in the way that wives can after three months or so of marriage.

So I tried to play along by making the minimum possible bets and waiting for someone to say “Chalo show karo sab log…”

Of course I would lose every time because one of the Kapoors had a “tiggi, duggi, ikka ka (ki?) sequence” or a “figgy ki trail ki chaal ka hukum”. Or some such thing. I always did exactly what my wife did and all was well. One round I won twenty-four rupees and a huge “sabaash bete!!!” but I cannot explain how.

Then after three hours or so everyone got fed up and my heart leapt for joy secretly when the wife suggested we play “Mufflis”. But then when I tried to clear the cards the missus lightly rapped me over the knuckles with the PS2 and told me that “Mufflis” was merely an alternate version of teen patti where the person with the worst cards won.

“Ab to javayi jeetega bhai!” said the father-in-law excitedly.

I got three aces in the first hand and was almost about to slit my throat with one when the missus stopped me and told me to use one of the discarded jokers instead.

A little after one in the morning, when enthusiasm had finally drained away from everyone, the in-laws decided to get up and then settle into the couches for a few hours of Diwali Dumb Charades. After a few cans of Red Bull I was feeling quite up for it actually. After all, Dumb-C was one of those events that yours truly excelled in at the inter-school and inter-college levels. And even when we all decided to do only Hindi movies I was still very upbeat.

Of course, I was randomly chosen to start. But my joy was short-lived. The mom-in-law whispered the movie name and my crest fell.

“Bedard Zamaana Kya Jaane” she said in my ear.

Oy hoy indeed.

*This actually happened later that night.