The clash of the titans

My brother was packing to leave for Germany, his check-in baggage stuffed with packets of coffee powder and zip-lock pouches of rasam powder. In fact, there was an age of innocence when he packed all this stuff in his overnight bag. Food items were banned on the aircraft in those days, and his grocery bags were unceremoniously confiscated by the airport authorities. Rules now allow food items to be hidden in check-in suitcases, which is so accommodating to Indian families flying to America and Europe. My brother is a regular traveller between Germany and Bengaluru, and he straddles both cultures with aplomb. He sings in the church choir in the daytime and, returning home in the evenings, cooks his own spicy hot rasam. An NRI.

I recalled my own journeys between Delhi and Bengaluru during my working career. Every summer, I was happy to escape the North Indian heat (which seems to have invaded even the south lately) for three months to cool off in the green breeze from the cassia and gulmohur trees lining our street. The respite regretfully came to an end when I had to pack up for the return journey to Delhi for the college reopening.

An AC sleeper coach on the Karnataka Express would chug me along for two nights and half a day to the capital. The basket with the two powders would be pushed under the seat. Throughout the night, my nose was bombarded by the clash of the coffee blend and the rasam masala, a veritable squabble of the rabble. However, I called it the clash of the titans. 

My night journey would be a sleepless one while my fellow travellers snored sonorously, synchronising with the rise and fall of the warring aromas. It was a family tradition to carry these two items from Bengaluru to our chosen work places. It was like carrying a piece of home to your distant destinations; it kept us from getting homesick for a while. Of course, it had to be Srinivasa Coffee from Gandhi Bazaar and fine homemade rasam powder with red hot menesinakayi from Bagalkot.

‘How the clashing aromas filled the cabin,’ I squealed. ‘I called it the clash of the titans, though the two items were more rabble than heroes.’ 

‘Why don’t you write a ‘middle’ about it?’ my brother murmured with a chuckle. He had read a few of my ‘middles’  in the past and pronounced them ‘frivolous.’ Even a middle should have an idea; a concept was his measured opinion. Like a lyric, a middle should carry a mood — not necessarily a moral or a lesson but a sense of the ephemeral, the transience of time, beauty, and youth. ‘Ugh, ugh’

‘What?’ he queried.

‘I shall write my middle the way I want to and call it The Clash of the Titans, brother. So there.’

Every morning I open the middle page for the ‘middle’, curious to catch a new title.