Sunday Spill-a-thon!!!

Sunday saw a spill-a-thon at our home. It started with me spilling half a bottle of water on the floor while I was getting up to attend a call. (Sundays around my place are spent on a horizontal position mostly and getting up itself deserves special mentioning. You bet it was an important call. Vigneshwara liquor boutique just down the street just reported dangerously low stocks of Carlsberg beer.) Then Bhatia spilled an entire regular size glass of coke from the McDonald’s McChicken meal. He was balancing a coke, two burgers and two fries and managing just about fine when a divine revelation forewarned him that he better get a plate to keep the stuff before attempting to climb the four flights of stairs to his upstairs room. He did heed to it and got a big steel plate and neatly arranged everything, burgers, fries and coke into it and was climbing up the stairs when a never seen before floor mat decided to play the slippery truant under his feet and send him crashing down. The coke flavored chicken burger was a delight said Bhatia, later. The coke stains on the marble floor made the maid go crazy in the morning today and I tried explaining to her in my broken Mumbaiyya (that’s hindi with lots of ‘Re’s and ‘Le’s at the end of every sentence. But you got to know where to put the ‘Re’s and where the ‘Le’s, coz if you get it wrong they’ll think that you are a Bihari and there’s nothing worse than that in these parts) that if she doesn’t clean the bathroom even today she’s gonna see coke spills a lot more around the house from now on. But the worst of all the ghastly mishaps came towards the end of the day when we were sitting down to watch Kolkata Knight riders play the Deccan Chargers. A VVS Laxman sixer and a jumping Krishna sent a full bottle of “Black Dog” Scotch crashing to the floor. Five synchronized hearts skipped several beats together. Time stood still but the bottle came down as if in slow motion and smashed into a hundred pieces. I hadn’t seen a grown man cry in such a long time. Bhatia swore this was the worst day of his life.

We were praying that this was just a glitch in the Matrix. O puppet masters up above, just reverse the clock a little bit and we’d take better care of all our bottles henceforth. None of us in the house were really religious. We had more faith in the logic of the Wachowski Brothers than that of the Bible, Gita or Quran. If you need any proof – haven’t you seen the second hand of the clock go backwards a tick or two but then when you keep looking at it, it pretends as if nothing’s wrong and just keeps ticking forward. We could see a pattern here. The masters were just in the mood for some spill-a-thon fun on Sunday. Because never in the history of Vigneshwara liquor boutique has it ever ran out of the official drink of BhootBunglaw, their biggest single customer (that’s what they call house no. 74, Navi Mumbai) in all the time that we have lived there. Bhatia had never before needed a plate to carry his burger meals and worst of all when was the last time that Laxman ever hit a six?