BURNING HEAT, burnt popcorns and a bowl of thayirsaadam!

Who would have thought that the garden city of Bengaluru would take on a Rudra Avatar – or manifest as a fire-breathing dragon, bringing in summer in its fiercest form? And yet summer it was in Bengaluru - the once popular getaway for sun-scorched people of the neighboring states, who would fancy the ‘green’ city as their safe haven, gently afloat on a wisp of a cool breeze, even during the harshest of summer-months.

A decade back, the soaring mercury of mornings in the city would bring the clouds  together in a rain-dance by evening; but the heat wave in present-day Bengaluru only showed signs of burning everything to a crisp. So the city that was once bestowed with an aura of the old-world charm was heaving  like the desert whose inhabitants had just had a narrow escape from the desert king cobra!(What was the city escaping from – the summer heat, the man-plunderers who had razed its green cover to the ground, or the chain smokers – vehicles, factories, humans or the smog that hung thick, never showing any signs of dissipation?)

 Reeling under the heat wave, Mom, Sanzi and Bro(Sanzi’s brother, who was referred more as “Bro” than by his actual name) were fidgeting about, their tempers frail. Mercurial Mom was dragging herself from point A to point B aimlessly. Under pleasant weather conditions, Sanzi and Bro on watching their Mom, would chime in chorus  “Mom, walruses can drag themselves faster”, followed by a guffaw. Mom would usually laugh it out, for she knew that despite age and Mommy-hood, she had managed not to look expansive around her waistlines. She prided on that and therefore dismissed her kids’ ‘juvenile’ remarks. But at other times like the one at present, she would  glower so hard at them for letting loose such a remark that had she been gifted with a third invisible eye, she would have  annihilated everything around.

To break the monotony of the simmering day, Sanzi decided to break the silence, “I am hungry, is there something good to eat?”. Now, the relentless heat was piled on with endless demands from the kids, whose 24*7 presence in the home-space threatened to convert sweet home into a helter-skelter arena. Two years since the pandemic struck and schools shut down, home-bound children had turned into blubber balls(Remember the absent-minded professor’s ingenious creation blubber that would send its wearer skyrocketing in all directions- wreaking havoc everywhere? Children’s containment during the pandemic had turned them into these dangerous blubber balls who would go flying and crashland in no time).

 So, when Sanzi’s hunger-pangs struck at odd times, Mom  would talk at length about how irregular eating habits and binging, can lead to acid reflux (Pittha)with long-term effects. Reiterating this time, Mom replied in a stern voice “You just had your meal, being bored does not mean you have to keep chewing cud like cattle. How many times do I have to keep telling you!” But Sanzi , unperturbed by Mom’s lectures would persist “I am hungry”, and bound off to the larder to find something to munch on. Driving an already frenzied Mom up the wall, Sanzi would happily sport the ‘hidden treasures’ retrieved from the cabinet – which never fared well on the health quotient! Mom’s attempts at caching  junk food in the hidden nooks of the house were foiled by kids-turned-investigators, who would sniff the trail of forbidden food from any distance, anytime.

 While the crunching of Pringles was happening at one end, Bro was fast zoning out, in one corner of the couch, with his iPAD.  The droning commentary of some whacko gamer ran in the background, and that seemed to satiate his hunger and thirst, basically control his other bodily functions as well for the rest of the day. The sight of Bro cocooned in a corner always made Mom bawl out with so much lung power that had the builders of her apartment not installed the right iron pillars; the window panes of the house would have broken to smithereens. But for Bro, he remained unfazed – and as for the window panes, the rest of the  family wondered when those would succumb to Mom’s amplified sound effects and the shockwaves.

Gadget-addled Bro always left mom and Sanzi exasperated, who were sure that even an earthquake or a Tsunami would not budge this fella from his gaming spree. Mom would swear, lash out with choicest expletives in all the possible languages known to her but Bro would remain non-plussed till the gadget was wrested out of his grip. Post the confiscation, Mom would stomp on an verbally-abusive trail: of cursing the gaming apps, the “weirdos” who develop such apps, the unaccountable parents whose kids wielded a wrong ‘n’ strong influence on Bro for his gadget-craze and not to mention, the country’s arch-nemesis China whose products (especially video games)were infiltrating into the mindspace of youngsters, sucking their minds too(Mom’s decisive conclusion was a looming Chinese conspiracy to create a generation of Frankenstein monsters for sucking out every bit of human intelligence from the rest of the world).

 Mom would have continued to unleash a flurry of lava -  but had to hold back as her phone buzzed. It took a while for her to switch tracks – from the “war trumpets ” mode to “moonlight sonata” mode -  especially since she sensed that the prospective caller was a Recruitment Consultant.

So, while prepping to refuel her energy reserves, she answered the call, and at the same time turned on the gas-stove for popping corn. After hanging up, she realized that she had missed an interview call.  She placed the cooker, on the stove hurriedly, dashed off to groom herself a bit, calling out to Sanzi, “ Sanzi, I have a call. Expect you both to be considerate and not act like JUNGLEES. I don’t want my recruiters to feel that we are living in the amazon forests” .No sooner did she settle herself in front of the laptop, her TEAMS app started to blink, indicating the interviewer was online. By that time, Mom had totally forgotten about the cooker on the lit gas stove. But it all came back in a flash, when she was apologizing to her callers for being late for the call. She realized the gas was on and the slit pop corn packet was delicately balancing itself against a dangling oil can in the kitchen. So,  while facing the same old drill of questions, Mom signaled to Sanzi with her right hand to turn off the stove, ensuring that her flailing limbs did not get captured by the web cam. She did not want to project a lost-in-space as well to be caught by those who were trying to assess her in the virtual mode(Mom could only wish that had she been  technically adept with using filters and frames, she would make-do with a freezed frame for situations like this).

 On any other occasion, her wishful thinking about still frames and stilled characters would have drifted away to the hilarious movie scenes of “Jaane Bhi Do yaaron”, where two amateur photographers tailing a corpse, run into a theatre enacting the Mahabharata scene, featuring the game of dice. To fit into the settings, the corpse is dressed up  as  the epic character Draupadi. What unfolds therefrom is a comedy of errors, sending the audience into a fit of laughter. 

But in this instant, neither did Mom go adrift, nor was she tickled to laughter. That was because she sensed the smell of burning corn. She realized that her hand-signals were misread.  Sanzi had not turned off the stove but instead emptied the contents of the corn sachet into the cooker and happily drifted away to her den. The smoke and the burning smell were slowly filling the air.

Mom made desperate attempts to look composed in the  camera but the smell was making her cough. Her voice changed into a croak.

(In any other scenario, crooning voices turning into abysmal croaks in a video call would have made Mom guffaw with no restraint had she been on the other side - the witnessing end of this drama! For her, it would have unfolded a fairy tale with a twist - a princess turned into a frog, with the sleight of the virtual?).

Excusing herself at this moment  would create a bad impression, she felt. Before she could embarrass herself further by clearing her throat and twitching her nose repeatedly, Sanzi appeared out of the smokescreen(in the current state of affiars, she could have been compared to  a day-dreaming demigod who snoozes off despite the morning alarm, and wakes up late for the mission ahead). However. she took control of the situation in the kitchen. Mom released herself from a state of stupor and told her interviewer that she needed to switch rooms because of lack of bandwidth. She carried out the switch nervously, settled in, cleared her throat and proceeded with the call.

The call over, she stepped out of the room, bewildered, demanding explanations from her kids. Sanzi went on defensive “It was just two minutes. I had gone to the loo. Bro – he was HAPPILY sitting and playing”. Bro retorted, while fingering on the touch screen – which without doubt was for a video game, “HEY YOU could have told me before you went to the loo”. MOM hushed them in the tenor of a foghorn “ENOUGH!” Bro and Sanzi knew better than to keep arguing – they quickly retracted into their shields of silence. The three of them went to the kitchen to check out whether something could be salvaged of the popped corn. To Mom’s dismay, nothing. The cooker was blackened, the corn, not even sparing a couple, were all charred. She threw away the remains of the burnt corn  into the bin. With hunger pangs making her dizzy, Mom decided to settle down for a fruit or two – for her snacks.

Mellowed down- with her HULK-like manifestation receding into her normal self, she mulled over the black residue left by the popcorns. She could not help thinking whether she was biting more than what she could chew – with the children, the family duties and the ambitious job-hunting. Should she take a step back? Was she adding more than necessary to an already plateful?  While munching on the fruity snacks, she felt her hunger appeased no less than what a bowl-of-popcorn would have achieved. On the one hand, she was relieved that her acid -reflux would not go out of control but on the other it irked her that it was not just the wasted popcorn, the episode pointed to an issue that was more deep-rooted than what it seemed.

 A general lack of contentment, the hankering for more than what is required and the excesses that had pervaded the modern lifestyle, was seeping into theirs too. The daily pursuits seemed to be centered around hoarding and cramming, like a glutton feeding on anything available whether hungry or not. Ruminating whether she should disembark from this train of excesses, she set off to make dinner. To wind up an absolutely chaotic day that sounded in no less than a simmering kettle, Mom decided to keep the dinner simple with the ultimate comfort food-Thayirsaadam(seasoned curd rice). Afterall, dousing the fire in the gut would mean less bowel disturbance which in turn control the greenhouse-gas emission – atleast from the four readily  bloat-able human species at home. 

Mom was definitely NOT on a launchpad of  a Greta-Thurnberg endeavour to spearhead climate-change missions for the planet). She  knew that one-meal-thayirsaadam a day, will not keep the planet ’s accumulated pithha away. Neither would it  put an end to global warming, all at once.

All she wanted to get started with was a detox regimen – to calm and sedate the living system to preempt any eruptive volcanic tendencies, spewing gases all the time, just like Mt Vesuvius that wreaked havoc… Here Mom’s  thought processes came to a grinding halt and just in time too. The mustard seasoning for her curd rice had started to crackle, turning a deep shade of brown, and she noticed that any bit longer on the stove  would have charred it! So, she took it off the stove and mixed it with the rice, adding generous spoonful of curd- the aroma of this plain meal was irresistible and at the same time soothing. She looked forward to savouring morsels, while feeling hopeful that Sanzi and Bro would gulp it down with the same gusto.

After dinner, she felt satiated, even though the burning ire of summer grimly reminded her of the charred popcorns and global warming adding fuel to the fire. But  the sight of a donnai of Thayirsaadam flooded her with hope of summer showers ever in the offing, to douse the heat!