A mean mean man

You must be wondering, dear reader, that I love alliterations. That I used the extra ‘mean’ in the title, despite it not adding any value to the meaning, because of its alliterative beauty. This is not true. There are some people who deserve to be called ‘mean’ twice to do justice to their meanness. I encountered one such person while having lunch at my regular Udupi restaurant with my friends. 

It was a regular day. So regular that I found myself standing, for the millionth time, at the edge of a traffic signal trying to find a window to cross the road. If I were a chicken, the expression ‘why did the chicken cross the road’ would have never made it to the list of unresolved mysteries that bring food on philosophers’ plates, because the answer every time would have been clear - ‘to eat something or drink filter coffee at the Udupi restaurant’. 

The Udupi restaurant I am talking about has self-service. It’s so crowded during lunch hours that it’s impossible for a single person to take the token from the bill counter, get his food from the food counter, and then find a place to sit and enjoy his meal. By the time he gets a place to sit, the rotis become rubbery or the dosas become mushy like fruit-pulp. Not to mention the risk of colliding with someone in the crowd and spilling the contents of their plates on yourself. Any fool would know that it’s no fun going around smelling like sweet sambar, so during lunch hours I go there with my friends. We then divide responsibilities to operationally optimise this seemingly simple process of having lunch. 

That day, my friends were waiting at the food counter and I was given the responsibility of looking for a place to sit for the four of us. It’s difficult to hold four chairs when there are people roaming around with plates of hot food in their hands but I managed to find a table with four empty chairs and pounced upon it like a cheetah. Everything is fair in love and war, and if struggling for territory is not war then I don’t know what is. I leaned on the chair to my right by my elbow and started keeping a close watch on the two chairs opposite to me. 

I suddenly felt that I was in the middle of a fall to my right. Close inspection revealed that the chair I had kept my elbow on had been snatched away by an old man in a hat with a cup of coffee in his hand. He sat on the snatched chair and gave me a look that suggested that I was the one responsible for his ailment that is old age. 

I gave him a questioning look. He kept his gaze fixed on me without blinking and kept sipping his coffee. I returned his cold stares with what I think is my ‘angry look’. ‘I think’ is the key here because I am told that my angry look is not very different from my look of constipation. I don’t know what he thought about it because nothing I did changed what seemed like a practised routine for him. Now I started waiting for his coffee to get over, hoping that he had not ordered anything else. I didn’t have the balls to ask for the chair back as I hadn’t a morsel of food on my table. 

Five straight minutes passed and he hadn’t stopped staring at me. I had never considered myself a specimen to be stared at unblinkingly so the fact that it was actually happening made me uncomfortable. Before I could express my discomfort, his expression changed for a moment. He raised his eyebrows to indicate that I need to look behind my back. My three friends were standing there holding four plates. Out of courtesy I stood up to take my plate and in the process, lost my seat to one of my friends. The others had already settled in their chairs. I ended up standing there with a dosa plate in my hand, not knowing what to do and waiting for the mean man to finish his coffee. It looked like he was half way through. 

The man would bring the cup to his mouth and without sipping, keep it back again. He kept doing this with a smug smile on his face. I felt like pouring the bowl of sambar on his head but resisted the temptation because, though his coffee would have gotten cold by now, he could’ve easily picked the bowl of hot sambar from my friend’s plate who was shamelessly munching on his dosa oblivious of the atrocities being committed by the man sitting right beside him. At this rate my friend would be done with his dosa first. 

The mean man was done before my friend but while getting up he spilled the remaining coffee on the table and shoved me mildly enough to not cross the line that separates intentional violence from an honest mistake. This had spilled the sambar all over my dosa. I had to wait for a couple of minutes more to get the table cleaned. By the time I got to sit down and eat, my dosa had become a mushy mass of pulp.