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Fly impatient!



“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky”

So proposed T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; the poetic extravaganza of the two lines have not yet suffused me with a momentous entrancement that I found two files merrily dancing about in my plate. I certainly do not recall making a glorious proposition like Eliot.

Apparently, the flies thought otherwise, in their perpetual quest for food, they chanced upon me, and were presently eating out of my plate. I don’t have a healthier relationship with the files; I find their enthusiasm repulsive, their hopping around from one plate to another injects a certain hormone that contorts my face as if in agony.

These are testing times, of survival feeding on what is dished in the name of food in the company of the most unpleasant species on planet earth. We were only 260, a numerically negligible number; they were in thousands, They did not seem too keen to appreciate my offering (apparently, I figured the best way to tackle the situation was to offer these guys half of my plate), for they got in the way of my lifting the spoon to my mouth, obfuscated my view of plate when they sat on my eye lids, made it almost impossible to mix rice with dal when they looked indecisive as to whether or not they liked the prospect of mixing. It was only in the eleventh hour that I noticed and I was tired of my own indulgence. So, I began fanning with my left hand, this seemed to work, the flies bounced off my hands.

But the calorific value I accrued out of the protein and vitamin ridden, badly cooked, horribly tasted, unappetizing food did not break even with the energy required (time spent in fanning * number of hands in fanning * sin (angle of fanning) * (negative energy of bouncing of flies of the hand)^-1).

The demand for fanning dipped a little as I walked out of the execrable hall of fly fame towards the class room. Here again, the demand showed an inclination to elastically shoot up. As the lecture on macro economy began, I apprehended the beauty of the logic and applied it to the demand of energy required in fanning.

The flies were now all over the place, on my nose, I brush it off and it sits itself neatly on my eye brows. Brush it off and now it sits on my lips, smite it and this time there is respite for a while until I realize that the fly has come back with its battalion. Now there are more files than the number of senses I had on offer. I gave in to the flies demand and soon the macro economy settled in for a break even point much below the inflation rate and the marching army retreated to unsettle the concentration of the young lady sitting before me.

With the flies abandoned me, I now looked around and to my horror I noticed that they were everywhere, they were on the professor’s bald head, on his mike, on his capacious paunch. The files appeared to have grown bigger and bigger. Apparently they were gorging on the execrable food offered to us in the canteen.

The worst has now happened; the unhygienic and egregious atmosphere of the canteen has made me impervious, nothing mattered. Now, I carefully scoop out the dead flies out of the curd, slowly as if in a hypnotic trance, brush off the flies of my papad (more like petting them actually, neatly stroking their heads), look away from the door that reads “entry only for authorized personnel”, for, if the outsides of the canteen are anything to go by, the insides would only fail my imagination, sort of something I would not contemplate entering even in my dreams of displeasure.

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