Life, One Egg At A Time

Eggs and me go a long way. As a kid I ate one half-boiled egg just before leaving for school. I still remember I'd sit outside on the verandah and sip it off a red cup. That was my favourite cup, red on the outside and white inside. I used it for egg, water, milk, and even watery noodles. On our trip to Kashmir, which my brother sort of bunked because it'd make him miss the annual play at his school, I lost the cup. After having milk or something I insisted on drying the cup by hanging it out of the train. Of course it went flying by.

Anyway, when you are a kid you get over cups easily. Over most things actually. Plus I was not drinking noodles anymore.

In school we got served eggs every morning. Fried eggs that were cold and insipid and covered in silvery bits of hardened oil, on Mondays and Fridays. I ate these without salt for some reason. Two boring boiled eggs on Thursday. Scrambled eggs on Wednesdays which were traded at the rate of three plates for one out of two pieces of Chicken on Special Dinner Night. Yeah, scrambled eggs were the 'in' thing back in the 90s. Or at least on the table I sat on in Class 6. On Saturdays, we got served these cold Omelettes that were 80% onion and holes.

Kashmir was great fun by the way. I got lost in Pehalgaon, slapped a kid 'smoking' a toffee-cigarette, ate a million apples, and called shikaras, chikaras.

Sundays - we got cheese toast and fries, with locally made sauce that was bright pink in colour and more pungent than anything I had ever had. Almost always I settled for the porridge and cheese toast and waited for the canteen to open.

In college, a cousin of mine thought he introduced me to scrambled eggs. He called it bhurji. I told him all about how it was worth one-third of a chicken's leg. Anyway, the eggs at college were mighty fine, plus there were the all-night canteen serving their traditional fare of alu paratha, egg bhurji, and Amul butter. But by then food had lost much of its romance, it was too easy to get, nobody was snatching it from you like in school, you couldn't be bothered about stealing it in the hostel or in bulk from the canteen itself , or with hoarding it under your bed. My parents stopped sending me parcels with dry fruits, coke cans and chips. All in all, food became, well just food. In school our lives revolved around food, and girls of course.

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So the other day I forgot lunch. Then I walked to the corner of the street to eat something. There was someone selling half-boiled eggs.

Innocuous memories are great fun too. You can watch them trickle down the snowy slope of time and grow in size. And when they slow down as they approach the present, bits of our lives stick out aimlessly from a lump of forgotten time.

I like remembering the past in minute and exact detail. However bland it might have been. It makes me feel like I have lived longer than just yesterday.

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I ate six half-boiled eggs in a row.