Getting a massage

When we went to Phuket, one of the joys that my wife primed me to look forward to was getting a Thai massage. Apparently it is therapeutic, does wonders for your body and soul and best of all, in Phuket off season, it is to say the least, cheap: for the equivalent of six dollars, you can get someone to try re-align your musco-skeletal structure for an hour.

We were staying at a little-known hotel on one of the lesser known beaches, during the definite non-tourist season of Phuket. Thanks to my early training in Economics, I realized that the weather, on an average, was very good - it would rain one day and be blazing hot and humid the next. Actually to be fair, for two of the five days, it was actually pleasant for major parts of the day with the threat of rain, a pleasant breeze and no sun.

There was a small place right across the small street from our hotel called 'Leelawadi Thai Massage'. It was a room about thirty feet long and fifteen wide, with a bathroom at the far left corner. Inside, along the wall on one side of the room were five chairs that would recline a fair bit and where one could get a foot massage and along the other side were five beds separated by pull around curtains - the sort you have around hospital beds which make the beds sort of private, except these were in a rather cheerful print.

There were three ladies in the massage place and they followed a pattern of communication similar to the one followed in most places in the small enclave we were staying in: one member of the establishment communicated with all customers. Any questions directed to any other individual representing the establishment were directed to this individual to answer. This was the policy followed by the hotel we stayed in, the restaurants we ate in, the tour operator we booked with and also this massage establishment. Initially I thought it was due to possibly fewer English speaking people. This theory of mine was disproved at the hotel at which we were staying, once when the regular question taker was missing, the deputy effortlessly stepped into the breach.

My wife, who is the family expert on the subject of spas and massages, tried the place first and recommended a Thai massage.
You'll come back wonderfully relaxed and all your joints will be loose and free.

"Hard or medium?" The lady there asked me upon hearing my request.

"Hard." More value for money was the thought that prompted this reply.

The lady asking the question got up with a weary smile. She was short and stocky - like the Tommy stout who pulled the cat out of the well - and she looked strong, a bit like a professional wrestler.

She gave me a pair of shorts to change into and directed me to lie down on one of the beds.

She started with the legs. The only communication she did from now on were a series of clucks in varying pitches.

One thing was evident. She did not like the way God had screwed my legs in. She tried to solve the problem by wrenching my left leg out at the hip.

God might not have screwed it in right, but He had screwed it in tight. Still, I couldn't fault her for effort.

A few cracks and creaks later she started on the other leg. It was a beginning, though her clucks were far from happy. I mentally thanked God for good handiwork. If she had her way she would retain one or both of my legs for a day or two for maintenance.

She gave me five seconds to breathe and did a light jig on my legs. Since the wrenching was not wholly successful, she tried re-screwing them. I came to the realization that had I crossed her path early in life, career avenues in the contortionist line might have been open to me:

PJ the Fluid Wonder - Pack him in a box, pour him in a glass.

The activity thus far was apparently just the warm up (for her) and stretching (for me). Next she proceeded to unleash the full fury of her talent on me.

She put me in a figure-four leglock. I always thought that 90% of the professional wrestling shown on TV was play-acting. Not true. I hung in there, biting my lip and resisting the urge to tap out. After three seconds I gave in and tapped the bed once, twice, thrice.

She chuckled. Apparently in a massage one cannot tap out.

Her signature move was the drop-elbow slam. I couldn't actually see if she climbed up anywhere, but I did get a few elbows in my back. She was pretty accurate. She hit a sore spot every time. The series of well directed slams was followed by another jig on my back. No, this time I think it was a reel. She then tried to figure out if my ribcage could serve as a possible diving board. A few disappointed clucks later she got off.

Now it was back and arm time.

She went in for another submission move - a variant of the backbreaker - pulling both my arms out behind me with her knee to my back. There was a small fusillade from my back and I think I gained an inch or two in height.

"You paining?" She asked me. I was glad for the communication to finally move into a realm I readily understood from the Morse code of clicks and clucks she had been so intent on pursuing previously.

"Y e s." I managed to croak.

"No Pain. No Gain." She told me rather smugly.

She was carrying on the good work that the Inquisitors had started in the fifteenth century, only this time I had no idea what I needed to repent for.

It was simple. If there was a joint, she cracked it. If it didn't crack, she worked it till it buggered well did crack. The only joints saved from this treatment were my cranial sutures.

When it came to my neck, I said my prayers and prepared to meet my maker. There was only one way this ended and I had seen it innumerable times in Bruce Lee movies. She followed exactly the same technique (with, of course, the EEEEIIYYAAAAH replaced by a cluck) and elicited the same series of fatal cracks.


But I was still aware of my surroundings.

I pinched my arm.


And alive.

I wiggled my toes.


And still had use of legs.

I was unscathed.

I had walked the bridge to the other side and come back to tell the tale.

This apparently was the finale. She let me go. I gratefully paid the money and made a quick getaway lest she forget that she hadn't demonstrated the sharpshooter or the piledriver or a drop-kick.

And yes, it did make me limber. For the next couple of days, I could scratch all the way down from my shoulder blade to the small of my back in one fluid motion.

Rambabu ke Parathe

My first job had taken me to Indore, a city of about 1.5 million people, slightly to the left of the middle of India. Even though Wikipedia lists it as the 147th largest city in the world, Indore behaved like a small town - the people were very polite, nice, helpful and friendly, the streets were crowded, but the people were patient. People talked to each other and smiled.

Indore is famous, among other things for its food. This is an anecdote about one of these excellent eating places that dot the city.

Whiling away our time after office one day, me and NP chanced upon a new eating place that had opened close to our office. It was called Rambabu ke Parathe. Both of us liked parathe and so we decided to dine there the following afternoon. The place seemed nice, the smells were good and above all, in contrast to most places that we generally ate in where the menu followed an ancient oral tradition, passed down through generations of waiters, this place had a printed, laminated multi-page booklet listing the fare.

By force of habit, I have to read the complete menu of any restaurant I go to, and this one was a rather interesting menu for in addition to giving a list of the food available and prices charged, the menu also had a short history of the restaurant, how it started, who Rambabu was, how it got famous in Agra a long while ago and how they came to be in Indore and so on.

While reading through the menu, each of us made a significant discovery. NP went to the nub of the matter as he usually did: the price of one paratha was the princely sum of Rs. 35. This amount would usually buy a complete meal at the other places we ate at. It was, in foreign currency equivalence, about 20% lesser than the number of cents required to make a full US Dollar, but was still a good amount of money in those days. NP beckoned the waiter.

"Why is this so expensive." he asked, getting to the root of the matter.

"Sir, these are special and good." The waiter said.

"Which waiter says his food is lousy and expensive?" NP countered. His logic, it must be said, was impeccable.

"No, sir, the parathas are really good. Once you try, you will agree as well."

"What's so special?" NP generally had fun conducting such inquisitions.

"Well, you just have to try them to know. I can guarantee that you will like them." The waiter had apparently been coached not to sway from the "try it and know it" line.

"Will you give me money back if I don't like them?"

In the meantime, I hit paydirt - or what I thought was paydirt. There, in black and white, was stated in the menu that "If a patron ate three parathas, the patron would not have to pay for the meal."

This was outrageous! It was the stuff dream are made of. I showed this statement to NP. He was immediately suspicious. He was of the opinion that the parathas would be terribly large, else the place would be out of business soon.

"How big are the parathas?" he asked our friend the waiter.

"Normal size sir."

"What is normal size? My friend who is six foot four can hold three cricket balls in his hand. For him that is normal. What is normal for a paratha here?"

He indicated that the order for the table next to ours was ready. We could see what was the normal size of the paratha when it was brought in. That seemed fine.
Well, the parathas were a tad above normal, say about seven inches in diameter. There were some vegetables in the plate along with some curd and salad.

"How much for the rest of the stuff in the plate?" asked NP.

"That's all free and unlimited."

NP thought the owner was slightly stupid. This seemed like a an opportunity for arbitrage that was not long for this world. Already both of us were making plans in our head to eat here everyday, thrice a day - to squeeze in as many meals as we could before the place went out of business or changed the rules.

I proposed that we order three each and be done with it. NP was of the opinion that we should declare our intention of eating three each but order them one by one so we got them hot. This seemed to be the logical thing to do, so this is what we did. The waiter said it would take ten minutes to get our first order. To kill time, we ordered a phirni (dessert) each and if it was anything to go by, the parathas would be worth the wait. 

Finally, in what seemed to be one of the longest ten minutes of my life till then, we got the first couple: the paratha was deep fried, resting in a small pool of ghee, very crisp, golden brown with deep brown patches, crisp flakes coming off on the top, steaming hot and smelled delicious. The first two had a cauliflower filling.

We started eating in earnest. For the next five minutes there was no conversation. We were keeping pace with each other. We had decided that we would order the next one halfway through the first so we didn't have to wait. This we duly did now. About three quarters of the way through the paratha, I realized, I was slowing down.

"Should have skipped the dessert," I thought.

I looked up and NP was giving voice to what I had just thought. "Should have kept the phirni for the end."

We were nearly through with the first one when the second lot came in. It was as pleasing to the senses as the first, but we were rapidly running out steam.

Of the two new ones, we split the first one between us and laboured through it.

Shamefully, we had to get the fourth one packed. Needless to say, we had no desserts after the meal.

The parathas were heavy. They just sank right to bottom of your stomach. Both of us were left in a food induced coma that took the better part of the afternoon to come out of. We paid the bill and kept sitting at the table for a quarter of an hour before being able to summon the will to move.

That night we met at my place to do a dissection of what went wrong: Why did we end up paying for food in a place that offered a chance to eat good food for free? These were just parathas. Extraordinary in taste, but not size. We figured:

1. Dessert immediately before was a bad idea

2. We had a late breakfast, so were not really hungry

3. Ate too much of the freebies on the plate - should focus on the parathas that we are paying for and not the free curds

4. Ban all liquids from the table - we drank nearly two glasses of water each during the meal - it all comes down to space.

Now it had become an issue of our honour. We had set out to eat three and we had failed. Next weekend we decided to plan a proper campaign. We skipped dinner. We drank lots of water to get water in the bloodstream and ensure we were well-hydrated and didn't feel thirsty while eating. This way water would not take up valuable stomach-space. The place apparently opened at eight. We landed there at a quarter past, shunned the desserts and placed our order, again, one paratha each to start with.

To cut a long story short, we both reached within a couple of bites of finishing two parathas each. We were spared the shame of having to get food that we had ordered but couldn't eat, packed, but we still ended up paying for what we ate.

The next two weeks brought two more tries with modifications of the same strategy, but we could never better our mark of eating almost two each. Four weeks into the whole thing and we had to admit that we were beaten, well and truly. We had to pay for every meal we had there. We needed to recoup our losses.

This was when NP's brilliance came to the fore. Rambabu ke Parathe, despite the excellent food and the offer of free eating remained little known. We got an old schoolmate of NP's over for dinner at the place. He was a smug sort of person who got along very well with himself but not very well with practically everyone else and who took pride in eating. 


A bet was made - If you eat three, we pay, else you pay for us.

Thrice we managed to get a free meal using this strategy, not bad for three attempts.

On the Rationalization of Clothes

They say when the universe was born and started expanding, it created it's own space and time.

So when my wife says "I shouldn't be buying more clothes, there's no place to keep them. You need to help me rationalize them," she is calling me to work on the space-time continuum. Create more space so she can have more time to shop. I have no choice but to try.

There are three philosophies for rationalizing clothes prevalent in our home.

One is mine. There are two sorts of clothes - those that you wear to office and those that you do not. Everything else is bunk.

Then there is my son's: There are clothes depicting modes of transport and these are the ones you wear. Every other item of clothing is not for wearing, but just to ensure accessibility to the above; that parents, friends and relatives have, hoping against hope, spent money buying this latter category is neither here nor there.

Last, is the method my wife follows: " ", " , ? . !" " , ; , ."

We begin the rationalization.

To set the initial criteria for selection, I suggest she discard everything that has not been used in the past six months. She agrees in principle or says something to that effect. We start. The plan is that she'd pull out clothes and we'll make two piles, 'yes' (keep) and 'no' (discard). It should be simple. She starts. First up is a white shirt. I ask her when she last wore it.

"I wore it to the meeting when we met the client for the initial briefing at the client's office after we won the project. We went for drinks later, remember you picked me up after the meeting? I think it looks good, though since it is white, I can't wear it too often, since white shirts, after a period just die. I remember Q in my office has a similar shirt though the colour is different." A keen observer might notice, that there is no mention of any temporal data that might lead us to infer whether the said meeting was in the past six months or no.

"Let me see if it still fits as well." She tries said shirt on. "What do you think?" I said it looked fine.

"Fine, not good?"

"No, good."

"No-good?"

"No, it looks good."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I am sure."

"Ok, so lets keep it."

I backpedaled a bit and reminded her that the criteria in question was whether she had worn it in the past six months. She said she just told me she wore it at the client meeting, plus the question is irrelevant considering we had just decided that it looked good.

I bring the fact up that I am not updated with her client meeting calendar. She tells me that given the time I spend on her laptop I should know her meeting calendar.

Finally, she does tell me the meeting happened three months ago.

"Ok," I said, "That's an automatic yes then."

Half an hour later we had gone through three more shirts. It was a Saturday afternoon. I had to get to office on Monday. We needed to speed things up. I asked her to change places with me. I would take clothes out of the cupboard and she would tell me which criterion they came under.

I held up a shirt.

"I bought it with you, remember, the evening before we were to leave for our vacation and we went out to dinner and there was this moving-out sale on?"

I was at my dogged best "Yes or no?"

"Yes," she said. We made great progress and had cleared two whole shelves when I realized that the pile of 'yes-es' seriously outweighed the pile of 'no-s'. To elaborate, there was nothing in the 'no' pile. I thought it warranted a quick check of our criteria.

"What are you saying 'Yes' for?"

"'Yes' means I want to keep it."

I patiently explained to her that the purpose of culling was to get rid of stuff. We had to harden our hearts and take tough decisions. It then transpired that she did not agree with the criteria of disposing of something with six months of disuse. Six months is apparently the fallow period for clothes. So we tried other time based criteria. There were drawbacks to them - six months was definitely too short. A year was not long enough either since seasons change. Three years wasn't enough since styles often came back. We settled on a decade.

She had a pair of jeans she last wore in college that was put in the discard pile. Actually it made up the discard pile. I told her she could buy an equivalent mass of clothing as that pair of jeans if she wanted to maintain the space she had.

A fresh start was needed. We decided to approach the problem from a new angle. I told her my philosophy on segmenting clothes: There were office clothes and non-office clothes and all other clothes one got rid of.

She warmed to this criteria - she called it the 'purpose-based' segmentation of attire. So she would make a few buckets based on when or how she used the clothes. If they did not fall into any of the pre-designated criteria, no matter how much we liked them, they would need to go.

We started again. I asked her what her criteria would be. She said she liked what I said - she would go with office clothes and other clothes.

I picked up a white shirt.

"Office" she said.

Another shirt.

"Client meetings."

"Is that office or no?"

"What do you think?"

I told her I was just making sure. "Why can't you just say office instead?"

"Because I won't wear it if I am only going to office." Well that was pretty clear now.

I picked up another piece of clothing.

"Going out shopping."

I reminded her that this last criterion was not on her original list of criteria.

"Yes," She said. "I can't have only two criteria. What do you do when you have to go out?"

I said I wore non-office clothes.

"What do you wear when you go out to meet friends?"

The same.

"What about when we go out shopping?"

Ditto.

"And when we go to a picnic?"

Yep. That too.

"And if it is a sit down dinner?"

"You mean a place with a tablecloth?"

"Yes"

"I might not wear keds."

She adopted the long-suffering martyred look common to women accustomed to dealing with imbecility on a regular basis.

"All these things are different." She managed to say. And that sounded the death knell of the 'rationalization process' we had adopted.

Apparently, "Office clothes" is a kingdom with myriad species inhabiting it. There are clothes to be worn to office on days with no meetings. Then there are clothes that are worn for meetings with colleagues and bosses, different ones for bosses' bosses and clients.

Same for going out. Taking our son to the playground downstairs involves apparel that is separate from the outfit worn while taking him for a picnic by the beach and still different if the playground happens to be in a mall. The garments for eating at a restaurant without a tablecloth are as different from the finery used for eating in a restaurant with a tablecloth as chalk and cheese.

Plus then there is portion of the wardrobe that one might never wear, but needs to have, primarily because.

The bed was now full of little piles, each with only a smattering of clothes. I had forgotten which pile was which. The only pile I was sure of was the one to discard. It still had the pair of her jeans from college.

On Cooking

"This weekend why don't you cook something for me?"

"You know I can't cook." I replied.

"I couldn't cook before I married you. I learnt to cook for you." I had to agree with that statement. It was a miracle, how it happened, so much so, I felt conned. Here we were, going out to dinner one day and the next day she whipped up a surprise in the kitchen. It was like she called up someone and got a cooking program uploaded like those nice folks in the Matrix did. True, I had not witnessed ineptitude from her in the kitchen before that astonishing dinner, but I take her word for it and home cooked food does beat fast food joints hollow.

"You could learn to cook and make something nice for me. It's all available on the internet. If you took out just 5% of the time you spend on Cricinfo-CNN-Wikipedia, you'd get some awesome recipes."

I omit to mention to her that if I reduced 5% of that time and spent it in pursuing my day job, I'd probably get a raise. Or at least get promoted.

This left me with a knotty problem. How to feed the woman I married and who is excellent at feeding me, without the use of a credit card and from within the confines of a kitchen. I know there are a host of technical loopholes in the statement I made, but you get the picture. She wanted me to create a meal; to cook something for her to eat.

The only silver lining I could see in that was that maybe, I would not have to eat what I cooked myself.

My wife saw it as an expression of love. I saw it as a recipe for disaster. I could see my marriage foundering in the soup I cooked. My previous culinary exploits have been considerable, but more on the demand side. There are people who remember me solely on the basis of my demonstrations of eating chocolate and milk-fat based products.

Even on the eating side though, there is enough evidence to corroborate my prescient visions of the boat called PJS Marriage capsizing. Once I ate a plateful of scrambled eggs without realizing sugar had been substituted for salt. To add insult to injury I lost ten dollars when I bet my roommate we had salt at home. It turned out to be fine white crystal sugar, that was without doubt, sweet. It sure did look like salt, so much so I had passed it off as salt to the person kind enough to cook the scrambled eggs in question.

In a nutshell, I am hopeless.

But then, the keen brain kicked in. I got the domed forehead to churn out some plans, devious or otherwise.

I offered to take her to one of those Japanese/Chinese restaurants that have a pot of soup cooking on your table and you can dip pieces of food into the boiling soup to cook and eat. I thought it would be rather nice - she could order, I could hold the stuff in the soup and then we could eat. 'Win-win' as someone put it so nicely.

She would have none of it.

"In the confines of our kitchen." she said by way of explanation.

The brain was flustered that this plan was so easily sidestepped. I pointed out that since I was going to such lengths as to cook for her, the least she could do was to waive a measly condition.

She said nothing.

This was serious.

The rule of marriage is that the seriousness of the matter is generally in direct proportion to the amount of nothing a wife has said. Even though this was a small burst of nothing, it meant that we were already in the serious zone of post marriage discussions.

I asked for an extension of a timeline. This weekend was too close. She did not say more nothing. She said, "Whenever. Just sometime, whenever you feel comfortable."

I got more time, but it looked like I would need to cook.

I started at the base of the problem, the verb 'Cook'. I looked up the dictionary. There was a bit of hope. The online dictionary described 'Cook' as follows:

cook

¹ [kook]

–verb (used with object)

1.

to prepare (food) by the use of heat, as by boiling, baking, or roasting.

2.

to subject (anything) to the application of heat.

3.

Slang . to ruin; spoil.

4.

Informal . to falsify, as accounts: to cook the expense figures.

Based on what I could see, my cooking would lie largely in point 3 above. I really would have cooked the food once I was done with it. The other thing I could do was to try point 4. To cook my cooking.

Picasso said that it took him a lifetime of practice to paint like a child. Would I be able to find in this city someone who could cook believably, like me? It had to be just right. Not too good, look amateurish, taste passable, should show lots of effort and have no potential for development, so as to preclude other such demands in the future.

I took advice from a friend of mine, who can cook. He saw merit in the idea, but did not know of any such place. He also pointed out certain pitfalls in the plan. The food would need to be delivered. Which would mean my wife would need to be away from home. The payment for the food would need to be untraceable. Which meant cash, a commodity only infrequently in my possession owing to delinquent ATM visiting habits.

It meant a dirty kitchen. My initial enthusiasm was curbed when he said that a kitchen dirtied by cooking requires training. Any amateur dabbler in culinary forensics would be able to make out if the dirty stuff had been used to cook other stuff or no.

I put forward the idea that I could pretend that I cleaned up after cooking. He gave me a baleful look. He was right. She would smell a definite rat there. Better to curb all investigation.

Then he mentioned she might ask me how I did it. Not that she might suspect anything, but maybe even conversationally or because she was astonished and surprised or to really appreciate the effort I put it.

I was stumped.

He tried to coach me with answers. It was a disaster. I stammered and I stuttered pathetically.

Plus we could not find a place that could cook 'just like that'.

For all the investigation into the potential of point 4 as a plan, we had to shelve it. The risks were just too great.

I then went to point 2. Apparently the application of heat to an object is to cook it.

That weekend, I got up before my wife did and decided to do some cooking. I settled for toast and eggs. I cooked the bread in the toaster till it became a toast. I thought to start off with, I should not be very ambitious and decided to settle for boiled eggs. That was simple. I took two eggs, filled a bowl with water and put them in the microwave for five minutes on high. That would cook them for sure.

For sure, there was something akin to a muffled gunshot a couple of minutes later. The eggs had exploded. There was egg everywhere inside the microwave. And it smelled rather strongly of boiled egg as well, progressively getting worse. For a fleeting moment I thought maybe I could pass it off as a new poached egg recipe, but then a preliminary examination told me that getting the shell out of the egg would involve a lot of painstaking work.

The toasts popped. I buttered them. I am good at buttering toast. There is just one rule: The thickness of the butter on the slice of bread should be a significant percentage of the thickness of the toast.

I told my wife I had cooked breakfast for her. She blanched at the quantity of butter on the bread and made a great show of having to use both hands to lift it, but did not eat it.

Her first comment that it was not humanly possible to consume this quantity of butter on a single slice of bread was easily disproved. I ate a slice.

Her second comment took more. She said toasting bread was hardly cooking. I showed her point 2 from the dictionary:

2.

to subject (anything) to the application of heat.

It cut no ice with her. Cooking apparently is not only the application of heat (and laying on the butter does not count as processing), it should include utensils, involve an appliance (toasters don't count) and should have a significant change in appearance for the food in question. Maybe I should have used white bread instead of brown, but that too I figured was a technicality.

Back to square one.

The answer came later, by chance.

Barbecue.