De-shelling

crab-in-shell

Her eyes had turned dark brown at a mere mention of my “I will be leaving in an hour’s time for my flight.” This was not the first time that I was leaving her after spending a joyful weekend with her. But it was indeed true, that it was after the longest time gap that I had come to visit Pera, my best friend. Her calls had been coming almost daily since past two weeks, which made me leave my dissertation on “Changing patterns of migratory birds” for a while.

I was used to the fact of hearing from my friends and colleagues that I was by far the most genuine, warm and transparent person that they all met in their life-times, individually. I wonder in what scale Pera would fit into, since for me she was by far the best human being I had ever met. No wonder, I made her my best friend and she allowed me to have that privilege.

That night, we both ended up having dinner at my most favourite restaurant. The familiar waiter at the dining place of “Garcon” smiled as brought the menu with him. He uttered the name of the favorite dish of ours in the similar rhetoric of a kindergarten kid’s nursery rhymes. Though he intended to offer us the menu as his official duty, but his body mannerisms were more reluctant in doing so. Only when we both smiled, he took that as a go-ahead to drop the menu on the table. I leaned on my left to see him smiling to his colleagues, after he left our table and was walking towards the kitchen. The smile must have been to flaunt his over-confidence in knowing his customers well. I turned back to look at Perla, we both burst into our girly laughter for a full half-minute.

The sense of achievement was on his face at a mere nod of ours was clearly evident on his face. Had there been any other person working, he too would have got accustomed to our consistent choice of ordering Tandoori crabs with clams-rice.

As I kept on struggling with the scrapping of sweet and tender flesh from the limbs of the mollusk, Pera kept me abreast on the indignation of her boss on her.

I was astonished on her capacity to survive all the humiliation which had become quite frequent since the recent times. With my every little pressure on the crab’s body parts, I could discover a new update from Pera on her stressful sojourn at workplace. Within an hour, all that I could witness was two sets of de-shelled, scraped, open and tender flesh. Luckily, one was still breathing.

Pera and I had our own style of enjoying the crab. Since, I was the one more stoic; I would de-shell the crab in small parts with the set of armed cutlery. Then, we would mix the entire chunk of soft flesh with an appropriate amount of rice to enjoy. Since, we both hated to scrap of the entire shell of the crab in one go, we both would repeat the entire exercise many times till we would scrape off the poor mollusk of its flesh from its entire body. The left over rice if any would then be eaten with the clams, provided if any one of us would still be hungry. Normally we never bothered to finish off the rice, since we were more content in having the crab.

The moment she started off with her twisted updates on her work life, I realized the similarity between her work life and the bowl of clam rice. In the advent of the happening job of a senior PR executive in a renowned industry name, I never bothered to think about the accompaniments that came with it. The appealing glamorous life had shadowed the stress and indignation that came along with it.