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Tales from the Locker Room

I’ve always been allergic to birthday parties. This is primarily because, for some inexplicable reason, you are supposed to dress up in layers of clothing.

This means if you have a certain kind of figure, your chances of being mistaken for a pudding are extremely strong. I personally yearn for the halcyon days of the one-piece utility Roman Toga. Once you put that on, you remained in it all year round.

Also with the weather being good, (ancient Romans didn’t use plastic or waste electricity), one didn’t have to wash the Toga at all except of course in the extreme case of dropping a glass of Sula wine on it or getting assassinated. However, these events were unlikely to occur more than once or twice a year.

Now coming back to birthday parties, I couldn’t escape one particular such celebration last Sunday. Arguably, India’s most versatile and definitely most polite actor Boman Irani turned a year older. Actually, after watching Misbah-ul-Haq and Kamran Akmal bat all day, make that a few years older. So on Sunday I slipped out of the Toga and into the pudding and landed at Boman’s house.

I got the customary greeting. Laila the Retriever, as usual tore me into shreds. Pedrine the cook led me to a cabinet and placed me under a label that said ‘perishable goods’.Mohan, Boman’s spot boy, in true Christmas spirit, polished me thoroughly with a black cloth that was either a table napkin or a halter top from last year’s party. With fashion coming full circle, it’s difficult to separate the two. Kayozeh, Boman’s son, continued with his time-honoured welcome of completely ignoring me and it was left to Zenobia, Boman’s wife, to remove me from the ‘perishable goods’ and onto a sofa next to what I thought was a bovine. But later after plenty of clinical testing turned out to be a human being of ambiguous form, who moved at the slow pace of twice a week.

As I looked at this large human form who introduced himself as Shree KunalVijayakar, I longed to be transferred back to the perishable goods section.