Ande ka funda?

I had a very strange colleague. Too bad that she stopped coming a few days after I joined!

She looked every bit a foreigner, but had an Indian name. At first glance, I decided that she was some tourist who had dropped in to say hello to our boss. However, it didn’t take me much time to realize that she was more Indian than me! but that’s another story.

In the six years that she had been in the country, she had mastered the Hindi language to the extent that she could grab even the crudest of ‘Bambaiya’ slang. She admitted that even Marathi was comprehensible to her now.

Shantaram’s feat no longer amazes me.

Something that she told me before the day she stopped coming has left a bookmark in my head and I find myself going back to it, every now and then.

I have been brought up in a vegetarian family, which considers consumption of meat, eggs and alcohol a taboo. However, having studied in a school run by Goan Catholic priests, my palate has grown used to having slice cakes and doughnuts (obviously not egg-less), distributed on special days. Now, I do not miss chances to gorge on cakes, egg or no egg.

Recently, at a do in office, there was a huge cake with oodles of chocolate cream on it. I waited for my chance (acting patient) but didn’t think twice before helping myself to a second helping.

Soon after, my colleague, herself a vegetarian, asked me:

That cake had eggs in it right?

Yes, I said, knowing what she was driving at.

But you are a vegetarian.

Yes.

But you had it anyways?

Yes.

But that’s cheating!

I caught her stare. They were hazel-green/gray in colour and crystal clear, making the stare look ominous and stark naked. A split second later, I feigned being busy with something and let her exclamation fade out in the air-conditioner’s humming drone.

Now I ponder, if I am a vegetarian, I shouldn’t be eating cakes fortified with eggs. I am cheating indeed! If I’m an ‘eggetarian’, I should be eating other egg products too, which I don’t. and I’m definitely not ‘non-vegetarian’ since I do not eat meat or fishes.

Isn’t it only human to indulge in a craving? (Do we really need a foodie to understand that?)