Surprisingly, I woke up at 7 00 hrs this morning and decided I wanted to have a doughnut, because there were plenty in the refrigerator; more than a dozen. In the kitchen, I decided to prepare a few things for later while pampering my sweet tooth. My pet, who woke up early too, followed me around the house in anticipation. When he did not get what I swallowed too fast, he went back to sleep. For your information, sweets are not good for dogs.
The weather was beautiful so I took my laptop and sat in the veranda, thinking about the topic of the day. Just then I saw something in a distance, which reminded me of a restaurant incident last year, when my friends took me to a Japanese café. Yes, I love the rawness of the maki rolls and sashimi salads. It wasn’t my favourite until five years ago but when I was taught to have it the right way, it was suddenly the only cuisine I loved and had no intention of learning how to prepare myself.
One fine rainy evening, Doris and her partner took me to wolf down some sushi. Drooling like my pet dog, I swallowed extra saliva on the way there. To my bitter luck, it took us a while to find the place as it had moved to a few blocks from the address mentioned on the internet and was not visible from the main roads. When we almost drove back, assuming it had shut down for some odd reason, we found it. ‘Spooky’ and ‘shady’ were the words that came to my mind when we entered the place.
We took a few minutes to settle down in an area with the most lighting, which wasn’t too bright either. Doris was hesitant but the thought of watching me devour the maki rolls changed her mind. She joked that maybe the management did not want their customers to see what they were actually serving. Maybe they were serving live rats instead of raw fish. Or maybe they were serving insects on a platter. Putting a pause to her wild imagination, we asked the Asian attendant to serve us some sashimi. I was swallowing additional saliva at a faster speed.
The appealing dishes were placed in front of me and I ate with utmost gluttony. Back where I lived, fish was expensive and sashimi was even more costly. My friends looked at me with astonishment as they had never seen me consume raw meat and neither had they tried it themselves. After their first bite, they were thoughtful. After the second, they wondered why I had such weird taste. After the third, they stopped eating and I continued.
While adjusting my napkin, my eyes fell on something moving behind me. When I looked, I lost my tongue, so weird and frightened sounds came out of me. My reaction made Doris look towards the wall and that is when we saw him; the little black ugly guy who was too big for anything. We saw his wings with which he leaped a few inches. She screamed and everyone looked at her with detestation until they saw what she was looking at. The attendants immediately carried our dishes and placed them away from our current table. After they drove him away, not killed or smashed as they did not believe in killing anything, we sat down at another table.
Doris lost her appetite, not that she had much left after tasting the sashimi, and I drooled less but greed overtook my fear and I finished the rest of the food as wasting sushi is a sin. We were aware that the little black ugly guy was still alive so we kept our feet off the floor just in case he flew down there. Then we began jumping at every slight movement beside us. As soon as I was done, we asked for the bill and fled.
Little black ugly guys scare most of the women in the world but flying ones almost give us a mild cardiac arrest. While chilling in the balcony, I had seen a bird flying high in the sky so what I saw wasn’t at all related to my memory in anyway. It’s like you remember some random person when you inhale a lovely fragrance even though that person wasn’t even in your wildest imaginations before this. Does it happen to you?
Note: Just because I did not want to mention the word in my article or feel icky reading it, I called the cockroach a ‘little black ugly guy’.
