Thaali!

It was the final year of college and we were staying back on campus through our winter holidays. The hostel mess was closed and we needed to take our daily nourishment from the three or four cheap eateries in and around campus. This is the story about the Thaali that we used to eat at least once a day at this restaurant called 'Nairs'.  Why this Mallu Nair had transplanted himself and his family from Kerala and settled down in a small town in Bengal, was a mystery that we never tried to solve. We were busy figuring out how to get the most out of the Nair's Thaali.

Let me introduce you to the villain of this story. This is a friend called Narayanan Krishnamurthy who, as was the custom of those days, had become 'Nari' to all his friends and fans. He was good at studies and every type of sport, captained the basketball team, played the guitar and was probably (although the rest of us didn't like to think about that) the heartthrob of the girl's hostel. However, in the eyes of Nair, Nari was the villain who was driving him out of business.
 

Nari was a six-footer with an appetite that we thought was Nair's worst nightmare. In a roti eating competition, Nari had once legendarily eaten 28 chappattis with lots of sabzi and had come for his tea and snacks two hours later. The boy who came second had used his considerable will power to eat 27 chappattis with plain water before giving up. He was not seen in the mess for many days and came down with a raging fever that lasted a whole week.
 

So we would walk into Nair's under the owner's angry gaze, sit at the farthest table and order Thaalis. Nair would be watching us with sick horror as Nari demolished more and more rice and sabzi (even in those days Nari intuitively knew that sabzi was more important than rice). Nari tried to be gentle by calling different waiters and by trying to do it when Nair's back was turned to us. But Nair knew every grain of rice, every bit of sabzi and every drop of watery sambaar that went into Nari's bottomless stomach.

 

We were there for the month long holidays and when our college reopened, Nair took the Thaali off his menu. We heard later that he closed shop and left in a hurry. All our friends think Nari was to blame!

(Illustrated by Dinkar)