On one such lunch outing at a food court; after spending a considerable time in the queue thinking about a poem to write on salads (which I thankfully scrapped) I got my turn to proudly present my “make your own salad” coupon to the Salad engineer; then started the struggle.

Choice is a luxury and for indecisive souls like me it would rather be an unattainable one. No seriously. When I was standing at the majestic all-glass counter and looking at the incredible display of countless sprouts and even more varieties of cut fruits, all I could think is that I made a wrong choice to choose my own salad. I remember that the last I felt like that was when my mother left me at an ice cream parlor and headed for some work, asking me to choose my own ice cream. Believe me the person in charge would have considered strangulating me among million other options and at the end of the exercise all the flavors would have tasted the same.

This time I did not want to reveal my indecisive nature. I started giving specific instructions to the salad engineer with me myself not knowing what I was up to.

No channa please. I said with stern eyes

Sir we don’t have channa! The salad engineer replied with an apologetic smile.

Add some more green-gram. I said and then shouted No! Don’t add that! When the salad engineer started putting some other pulse than what I wanted. I tried to look as stern as possible in a desperate bid to make sure that I knew what exactly I am up to.

Sir, but, this is green-gram!

I wanted you to add that then! I pointed my finger like a child choosing ice cream flavors by virtue of their color than anything else.

Sir, but, this is black-gram! With an emphatic smile good enough to crucify me!

Yeah!

Yeah! (I don’t remember anytime before when I wanted to disappear from the place so badly)

I went on to give more instructions taking enough care that they were well within my knowledge. The salad engineer followed them meticulously. I‘d already started feeling the value for money. Never before did any one follow my instructions with so much of docility. I’m sure you are aware of the gratification that you get when someone follows your instructions, it never happened for me at office and this all the more doubled the fun.

So at the end of it all with much ruckus, which would be otherwise possible only in a cross-country teleconference, I had my salad ready. I was so impressed with it that I hardly hesitated to judge it as the most beautiful salad ever. And I was ready to show off my colorful salad to all the I-eat-thali-no-matter-where-I-go clad people.

photo credit: Mr. T in DC

I headed towards my place with the bowl of exotic colorful salad. There was a joyous spring in me and I almost started flowing across the floor only to be stopped by a shockingly beautiful young lady. I never knew she would be my Murphy, the spoilsport for me that afternoon.

All she had to ask me was. Yeh bhel kitne ka hain?

Bhel? I scowled, frowned and grunted simultaneously thinking that would change the young lady’s nomenclature for salad. I mean why she couldn’t say salad? It sounds so romantic and sexy. I thought to myself!

Yeh! She pointed her petite angelic fingers towards my salad and continued as if I couldn’t comprehend her Bhel kitne ka hain?

Even an unsuspecting onlooker would have vividly heard the sounds of shattering glass. It was my heart. I mean, I stood in the line for more than 10 minutes and was so impressed with the salads there that I almost wrote a poem on them and meticulously negotiated with the salad engineer to design, build and operate the world’s most beautiful, state of the art salad and this lady comes and shatters it all in a matter of seconds?

This is salad! I resisted in a stern voice refusing to budge in and hoping to all the gods I knew that she calls it salad.

Ha! Wohi, bhel! Kitne ka hain? She frowned this time as if I am wasting her time and that the name doesn’t make any difference in cosmic sense. She seemed like one of those big thinking people who hardly care about inconsequential things.

50 bucks! I relented. Oh! She rolled her eyes as if it was too much. She left leaving a trail of perfumed air. I looked at my salad again, it looked paler. It was as if someone just stole everything exotic about it. I drooped my shoulders instantly and felt like dropping the bowl then and there. She made me feel that the fifty I’d invested was some five hundred or something like that.

And for the rest of the afternoon only oneword echoed my empty brain “ye bhel kitne ka hain”

P.S: This was already posted on Infosys BB

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