The Gourmand

Ragging phase was over and every one of us already connected pretty well with the seniors. By that time, we accustomed to the hostel environment and particularly the hostel food, in fact we raised ourselves up to the level where we could easily tighten our tummy with hell lot of rice, that too merely with some boiled potato and dal. Well, that was our usual kind of hostel mess condition during the last week of every month. We noticed that some of the seniors quite often used to enjoy some extra delicacies, like for instance some of them used to ask the hostel cooks to fry their share of boiled potato with some onion and green chili. Wow! My mouth is already filled with water, that thing was so damn tasty. Few of the seniors used to keep egg in their rooms and sometimes used to ask the cook to make omelet for them. Sometimes the seniors used to contribute few bucks in a group to buy chicken from outside. They used to ask the cook to prepare something really out of the world for them. As expected, such groups usually used to have late lunch/dinner on that particular day/night. First semester guys usually didn’t dare to demand special delicacies and satisfied themselves with the regular meal. But whenever the dining hall was free of seniors, even the first semester guys also used to shout “boil alu fry, boil alu fry, I want boil alu fry”

We used to have one senior Shashank Da, in our corridor and pretty close to our room. He was quite huge and used to enjoy most of his time with himself. We didn’t see him partying interacting much with the other hostel guys. He was the kind of character with whom neither his batch mates, nor even his seniors dared to take unnecessary panga, kind of argument. I still remember his laugh, as whenever he used to laugh the ceiling and the walls of the room seemed to shake a bit. By that time we didn’t know much about him and the only thing we knew is that he had an ultimate passion for food. One morning after jogging, please don’t misunderstand us to be that active, jogging was mandatory for the entire fresher’s during the ragging period. After jogging the dining hall was filled with the fresher’s and special puri sabji was served in breakfast during the entire ragging days and everyone used to have a good "eat count" of puri’s. 

One fine morning Shashank Da was also having breakfast with us and we’re not at all surprised to see his consumption rate. Shashank da encouraged all the fresher’s to eat more puri’s and then all of a sudden, one of us dared to ask him how much puri he usually used to consume. He became quite shy that moment and replied "Now a days I can’t eat much, my tummy becomes completely full with just 30-35 puri’s. When I was a fresher, I used to eat 60-65 puri’s"

One afternoon, I and Nair were just about to go for lunch and Shashank Da called from behind "Hey! Are you guys going for lunch?" We replied yes and he asked us to wait for a while, as he also wanted to go with us. We saw Shashank Da was holding 6 eggs in his hand and we were quite happy and expected a delicious lunch that day. I was very much delighted and thought "Wow! each of us would have double omelet today" We all sat in the same table and the hostel boy already served us the regular meal. Shashank Da asked the guy to prepare omelet out of the 6 eggs. I was eating little slowly and was about to shift gears once the omelet was prepared. A little later we saw that the hostel boy arrived with an extremely huge single piece omelet and kept it beside Shashank Da. The smell was mesmerizing and within a short while 50% of the omelet was already disappeared from there. After some more time Shashank Da asked us "Would you guys like to taste it?"

Nair replied "It's OK. It’s fine, we're almost done with our meal"

Later we got to know Shashank Da little more closely. Besides being a foodie, he was also a remarkable cook. He was an extreme kind of non-veg fan and experimented with every possible flesh. Whenever he wanted to have meat, most of the time he used to cook by himself and never got satisfied with anything below 1 KG. His daily requirement was much different from the other guys and everyday he used to have some special food, along with the usual hostel stuffs. It didn’t took us longer to realize that in order to maintain such kind of a lifestyle, that too in a hostel with abundant number of food desperado’s all around, Shashank Da must had to be little shameful and there was no other alternative for him. But sometimes even he was quite generous enough.