from The Food Finagle: A Culinary Caper Idli-Pom
Idli lost its fiddli
Dosa lost its crown
Wada lost its wiolin
And let the whole band down.
There was a fish who called himself THANKYOUBHERYMAACH . 32 Till the fishermen caught and salted him And ate him with boiled starch.
Idiyappam keeps yapping Puttu plays golf Utthapam’s my girlfriend Mutthu’s real name is Rolf.
How can you make an omelette without breaking any eggs?
Easy, fry tomatoes in yellow flour and eat it standing on your legs ! 34
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Frankie oozes meaty juices But he’s not a boy
32 bherymaach: Since the Bengali alphabet does not have a ‘v’, v-sounds in English and other languages get softened into a ‘bh’. Hence ‘very’ becomes ‘bhery’. In addition, Bengalis have a habit of prolonging vowel sounds which turns English words like ‘much’ into l maach\ Significant to the wordplay here, ‘ maach ’ in Bengali means ‘fish’.
33 Menus in South Indian restaurants detail their selections in roman script, and the lurking presence of English words within those essentially South Indian words was really the starting point of this verse.
34 omelette: For vegans, eateries in Bombay offer an inventive option—the tomato omelette made of chick-pea flour, fried into a round thick pancake.
35 Title: One of Bombay’s favourite fast food options, a ‘Frankie’ is a fried roti roll with meat, egg or vegetarian fillings. It was started by Amarjit Tibbs in the late sixties, who also coined the advertising slogan ‘Tibbs, I love Frankie, so will you’. The name ‘Frankie’
You can get him anywhere So stop being so coy.
•» n
I love Frankie you love Frankie Obviously there’s some hanky-panky.
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in
Frankie’s not a little boy who lives down the lane. He’s a fat and juicy roll with a kebab for a brain!
There once was a boy who had never seen a town. A clown a frown he had seen. But not a town. Now that may seem strange to you but to him it was perfectly normal. That is, until he saw one and then . . . This is what happened.
(Of course it may have been a city but to a boy who has never seen a town but who has seen a frown and a clown, it really doesn’t matter which is what, and so . . .)
This is what happened.
Our boy burst out laughing.
His eyes laughed.
His toes laughed.
His ears laughed.
His nose laughed.
His legs hands shins laughed.
His hips elbows chins laughed.
is said to have been inspired by the then West Indies cricket captain, Frank Worrell, whose team was apparently pulverizing the Indian team in an ongoing series. While Tibbs continues to be the ‘authorized’ version, me-too ‘frankie’ stalls are found at every other street corner.
Had Never Seen a Town
In other words, a town to him was better than a sad joke, or a clown falling up, better than funny faces and better than being tickled with an enormous tickly leather-feather in funny places. It made you laugh and that too simply by sitting there.
Where?
Anywhere? Somewhere? Somewhere else? Or nowhere?
(For a boy who had never been anywhere in his life, somewhere was better than somewhere else and nowhere was funnier than the town. And so ...)
He laughed till he cried.
Till his laughing tears dried.
And then he blinked his eyes and said:
Ha! If only I had brought my book!
Then of this town I could’ve pictures took!
(That’s how it was in the boy’s country or village or planet or cowshed or galaxy or wherever it was that he came from. You took pictures with a book. It was perfectly normal so there’s really no need to laugh. You held up a blank and empty book full of blank and empty pages and aimed it at what you wanted taken, then you shut the book with a snap and, believe it or not, next time you opened the book at that page—there was the picture sitting pretty, like it had been there all the time! Nobody read hooks in the boy’s country or village or planet or cowshed or galaxy, no, when they wanted to read they just shut their eyes and did it without any help. Everything, you see, was already written down inside their eyelids, and all they had to do was look at it with their eyes closed. Simple. Which is why . . .)
Our boy now wished he had brought his book. How else would anyone believe he had actually seen something this funny? No one, not even Gullible Go-Away, would believe it. Unless he showed them. So now what? He would have to write it all down, loud and clear, and save it inside his eyelids so when he went back he could ask for a telepathic conference and everyone could read what he had written. And so . . .
He began.
(You see where he came from they didn’t need pen and paper to write. They wrote by speaking. Don’t ask me how it works because 1 don’t know. If I did, would I be writing this down the old-fashioned way
for you to read out of an old-fashioned book? No, this book would be blank and then, since it’s looking at you —you would be inside this book the moment you snapped it shut and the next thing you know . . .)
But then that’s not this story is it? No. And so . . .
He began.