Hyderabad boy rescues Bombay girl

PU raises a cup to Harsha's support. (Image: PU Selfie2014)

Virtual friendship redefined with friends exchanging banal recipes from YouTube in aid of insomnia & other such nocturnal mental disorders

14th May, 2014, Bombay: In a bizarre turn of events last night, in a crumbling apartment of a housing society in the western suburbs, a girl finally learned how to make decent, edible tea after nearly three decades of ignorant existence.
And loved it.

The girl, one PU, 29, was online and as per addiction, chatting with her friend, one Harsha, resident of the Himayatnagar locality in Hyderabad, post-dinnertime on Tuesday evening at her Khar residence. With supper put behind a good three hours early, in a vain attempt to regularise her recently disturbed sleep cycle, the extended wakefulness yielded acute hunger pangs in the said girl, originally hailing from Vadodara, Gujarat. Marking a year in the city on the day, she was keen not to celebrate in any significant way.

On revealing the intensity of her atrocity, the friend of nearly a decade suggested she have some tea. We enquired further about Priyanca’s acumen in tea-making and she revealed, "I can't make tea to save a finger, leave alone my life! In the decade that my nanaji stayed with us back in Baroda, he asked me to make tea twice and regretted it on both occasions."

The tutorial was administered via a YouTube video, the link to which, Harsha sent on the chat applet to PU. So easy did the video make the process seem, that she was inspired to refresh her culinary talent in the hot-beverage-making department! The girl entered the kitchen at approximately three minutes past midnight and put some water to boil in a saucepan. At the serendipitous discovery of lemongrass in the deep recesses of her refrigerator and finding all the other ingredients (ginger, pepper, clove, cinnamon and cardamom) by the time the water started to boil, she was encouraged to administer them into the saucepan and claims to "have enjoyed overseeing the recipe first hand, for the first time."

On further probing about how the tutorial came about, PU said, "My friend Harsha is a photo-journalist who keeps late hours on account of his own assignments as well as gatekeeping his photo-journalism magazine, Galli. I figured cribbing to him might be of some use. After coming up with outrageous suggestions such as ice cream at 11:40 pm (why not, you argue? With the spate of attacks on daft women travelling in autos late at night without a care for their blingy handbags that get stolen in a split second without the thief having to put up much of a struggle, the notion of stepping out alone at the hour was insane), he finally said 'चाय बना ले (make some tea)'. First I thought he'll tell me how. After patiently waiting a few sentences, when I had to finally ask for the recipe, he said his is an 'annual event' because his amma makes chai  for him. All these spoiled boys living in their parents' house!  The mention of his amma made me miss mine. But instead of moping about missing home, I decided to explore the YouTube link he had sent in the interim, and get to work."

PU's newly acquired talent comes at a time when her existentialist angst had begun to peak, she rues. In the wake of several extreme epithets being bestowed upon the corporate writer, from 'multi-talented in the singles domain' to 'over-qualified in the eligible bride market', her epiphany has led her to vow she 'will make masala chai every night!'

In refusal of any special commemoration however, PU has declined any direct or indirect self-invites to tea, even at honourable hours, as a clear sign of selfish demeanour. A trait, she declares, Bombay has instilled in her in the year gone by. Ironically, the achiever reveals that she has accomplished the feat of surviving a whole year in Bombay once before, at the start of her career four years ago. Her anguish in the back-linked blog post about Salman Khan not being punished for murder seems to have ominously been answered. Everything else, she says, remains much the same...