Salil's Hell-Broth

Double-Double Toil and Trouble
Fire Burn and Cauldorn Bubble

Those are my favorite Shakesperean lines, which should tell you that I'm not much into drama. Anyway, I just happened to remember something from 1999 and needed to pen it down in case I forgot.

I lived alone in Michigan at the time and was still single. I had found out that my good friend from undergrad college Salil was at Michigan State University in 1999, preoccupied with getting a Phd in Pattern Recognition, an abstruse and thoroughly dense branch of Computer Science. Salil was a brilliant student and a fun guy. Apart from pondering over algorithms (which he often tried to explain to me and failed miserably..you know, I did the half-smile, slow-nod routine to falsely convey clearing up of the fog), he liked his food, his booze, his pot and his rock and roll. Needless to say we got on great. Every weekend, I’d drive 2 hours North to East Lansing to hang out with him. We had a nice routine. On Friday night, I’d enter his apartment at around 8pm. He’d usually cook dinner. He had three other grad students staying with him, all Indian Engineers and all from BITS Pilani. They were, well, different from he and I. One of them had a very slutty white girl-friend. More on them later. Returning to the dinner he cooked, it was, let’s say, an honest meal. He’d cook up a curry with the whole onion, garlic motif and then in a spate of ennui, he’d start flinging everything within his sight into this steaming liquid. There would be chicken, shrimp, eggs, lentils, potatoes, carrots and even occasionally minced beef, in this hell-broth. While this was simmering, there was beer, lots of beer everywhere. We’d down a few and then a couple of scotches before we ate. All this time speaking about old times and new. Then when it came to consuming some food, the hell-broth with white rice didn’t taste bad. In fact it tasted magnificent.