Have you ever walked into your kitchen and felt like giving blood? I do, now. All the time. I might go there, like Humpty Dumpty, to fetch a pail of sambar , and return with a glass of blood instead. How did I come to be like this? The answer, in one word: tiles.
It all began innocuously enough. To work off the excess patriotism coursing through my veins, I recently asked my wife what more I can do for my country.
“Save the economy,” she said. “Everyone says the problem is lack of demand. Let’s boost demand by putting more money, our own money, into the economy.”
“Super idea,” I said. “Let me order two pakodas on Zomato. It will revive the economy by boosting demand for pakodas.”
“No,” she said. “Let’s think big. Something like demonetisation. Where we tear something down, and build it up again.”
“What do you want to tear down and build again?”
“The kitchen? Let’s replace all the tiles.”
“What’s wrong with the existing tiles?”
“You know I’ve always wanted a different kind of kitchen. With green tiles and pinkish brown cabinets.”
“Oh no!” She was on her Matrix trip again.
“I want the kitchen where the Oracle bakes cookies for Neo.”
“It’s also the kitchen where Agent Smith breaks a vase and kills the Oracle,” I said. “No way.”
I’ve always found the Oracle’s kitchen too spooky in an Aadhaar-kind of way, and my instincts were proved right, for the Oracle turned out to be a software. At any rate, without agreement over choice of tiles, the kitchen renovation project stalled.
And then, a fortnight ago, as we were chatting with a young architect at a party, I ended up mentioning our kitchen stalemate.
“Go for Satwariyo,” he said. “It’s the best.”
My wife and I exchanged a look. It was clear neither of us had the faintest idea what Satwariyo meant. It could have been a certain brand of tile, or it could have been the name of his Japanese bull dog. But then, who has the courage these days to admit their ignorance? If that was easy, the economy wouldn’t be a mess.
“Ah, Satwariyo,” my wife murmured. “I’ve heard so much about it.”
From that moment on, the architect ignored me, and everyone else at the party, and focussed his entire attention on my wife, while I looked on passively, like The Merovingian’s wife.
“Satwariyo is the most premium, high-end, fashionable, ultra-luxurious thing in the market,” I heard him say.
“I know,” my wife nodded, as if she’d playing with Satwariyo since the age of three.
“She’s been playing the Satwariyo since the age of three,” I said. The architect pretended not to hear me.
“Satwariyo combines the distinguished eloquence of a Shashi Tharoor with the extravagant opulence of a Sanjay Leela Bhansali,” he went on. That still revealed very little about what the damn thing was. And what did Shashi Tharoor and Sanjay Leela Bhansali have to do with kitchen tiles anyway? But the wife seemed totally impressed. As we were leaving, I saw her take his business card.
This party was the last time kitchen tiles had come up in conversation. I soon forgot all about it. But last night, when I went to the kitchen for something, I felt myself transported. Not into the digital ultra-realism of Matrix but into Dr Lal Pathlabs, where I go once a month to donate blood. They analyse it to find out if I’m still human or have started turning, like so many people I know.
Our kitchen, now, was whiter than even a pathology lab. The walls were antiseptic white, the ceiling was ICU-white, and everything else was so acutely unpigmented my hands trembled with an overpowering urge to produce a blood sample.
“What have you done to the kitchen?” I said, confronting the wife. “And when? And how? That fraud architect has cheated you! This looks like a morgue without the corpses.”
“Calm down,” she said. “Instead of Matrix, which you didn’t want, you got another cool show.”
‘What do you mean?”
“Have you seen the kitchen in Hannibal ?
“You mean that cannibal?”
“You don’t have to be so judgemental, you know.”
“Hello! Doesn’t he kill people, cook them, and serve them to his guests as gourmet delicacies? Lawyer’s tongue marinated in the pancreatic juice of a politician, and stuff like that?”
“Sure,” she said. “But that’s what Hannibal does.”
“And you don’t have a problem with that?”
“Why should I,” she said, giving me a puzzled look. “He’s not committing genocide or something.”
“Fair enough,” I said, tipping a vase onto the Satwariyo. “Would it matter even if he was?”
The writer is Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
