October Chutney

October 9, 2007

Hi Khushies,

Having bored you all by posting never-ending reminders about last Saturday’s Chutney event, I feel obligated to inflict upon you another Chutney post, this time a diarrheal description of the event.

Harish the younger: Thank you for thanking me. Also thank you for helping with the billing and for arranging the restaurant reservations. Please don’t thank me for thanking you. Also, please don’t thank me for thanking you for thanking me.

Exactly 20 people – not one less, not one more – attended the Chutney dinner, although only 18 dined and a lot fewer wined. But many of us winked and we all made merry.

Success: The number of women attending the event increased by 100% compared with the September Chutney. Failures: 1 woman attended the September Chutney, and 2 attended the most recent one. Sparse attendance by women twice in a row amounts to an abject failure, and those of us on the Board need to find out why that happened and we need to fix it.

Success: One person from AQUA (the Asian gay group) attended, compared with zero in August and September.

Sound...

Only four people managed to come on time at 8 pm, so the restaurant manager – a cute young Cambodian dude – decided to seat us at 8.15. By the time we got seated at 8.25, there were more than a dozen of us, and the others soon joined in. We were seated at a long table (one of those that’s a mile long but only six inches wide), and there was a similar large group seated at a similarly long table adjacent to ours. Result: the din and the bedlam were so deafening that I felt like I was in the Indian Parliament’s Lower House.

We ordered our food and drinks and the first dishes came our way a little before 9 pm. Some liked their food; others didn’t. I liked the vegetarian entree that I ordered, but its quantity was so small that it felt like an appetizer. So I ate my neighbor’s leftovers and got full. “It’s time you learned table manners, Ninny”, whispered someone in my ear. (I think it was my alter ego.)

This time we again followed the un-classy practice of making everyone write down what they ordered on chits of paper. The chits helped while squaring up the bill at the end: the shortfall was just $15 so we collected $1 from each person to make the total.

...and Fury

Weren’t all the above happenings quite dramatic? Be honest. You bet they weren’t! Drama, as it turns out, lay in wait right outside the restaurant.

When we left the restaurant, we stood on the sidewalk outside, chatting. Two tall, thin men passed by, and one of them took umbrage at one of the Khushies. Drunk as he was, he started cursing, gesticulating wildly and flailing his arms. When the Khushie met the man’s stare, the drunk got angrier and tried to grab a long metal stick that his partner was carrying, so he could switch to violent mode. His partner kept trying to block him, but the drunk would not relent.

As this was happening right outside the restaurant, the restaurant manager came out and tried to shoo the angry person away, but he had no luck. A stalemate ensued. I then suggested to the Khushies that we start walking north along Connecticut Avenue, even though it meant walking away from the dance clubs, just so that we would leave the drunk’s presence. That strategy worked: our departure caused the angry man to melt away, and the drama ended.

Say Halo To Cobalt

Most of us then repaired to Teaism – which I came to know is a restaurant that sells tea rather than ism. We sat outside the restaurant on benches and on the lawn and gossiped about all and sundry, until it was time to head to the Dance clubs. Thither did we repair. We walked to Cobalt, but then the group split and some went to Halo though most went to Cobalt. A few of us simply headed home.

All of us who attended the Chutney were eminent in our own way, but one of the attendees was a Khushie who I think of as a first among Eminents. He is a nephew of V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Literature Nobel Laureate. A couple of us talked with him about Naipaul’s works. What better time to do geeky literature talk than a Saturday night, right?

--Ninny