Company in Hell

Kittu 

Sardines were hardly my choice at any time in my life. When Maggie suggested yesterday to buy sardines, I was a little taken aback.

“The price has gone up to Rs200 a kg,” she said.

“That’s a record price for sardines,” I said with genuine surprise. Sardines were considered the poor man’s fish because they were the cheapest in the market usually. Prices of anything hitting the ceiling is not news in contemporary India. Except human beings, everything seems to have become very dear. This is the achhe din promised by our Prime Minister who asked us to eat pakodas as Marie-Antoinette asked the French people to eat cake when they cried that they had no bread.

Pakodas are okay for snacks. You can’t eat them all the time even if you can afford to have the best chefs from the Taj Group to cook for you like our Prime Minister has when he goes abroad. So I decided to play along and make my wife happy. When sardines cost as much as what you used to pay for pomfret until recently, they become particularly savoury.

As soon as we reached home Kittu, our cat, started licking Maggie’s feet because he smelled something fishy. Ever since Kittu entered our life three months ago, our diet had undergone a revolutionary change with chicken usurping the erstwhile vegetarian predominance. Kittu ended up eating most of the chicken, however. I delivered a number of sermons to him on the merits and superiority of vegetarianism, even going to the extent of suggesting that a vegetarian diet would give him certain cultural hegemony in the present political dispensation. He said “meow” with utmost contempt. I pitied him for his political incorrectness.

It was the first time that Kittu smelled sardines in our house. He refused to leave Maggie until she gave him one of them raw. He devoured it greedily as if he had been starving all his life. He ate more sardines as soon as they were cooked. In fact, some parts of the sardines were cooked specially for him and he relished them. His greed scandalised me.

“This fellow is hell-bent on joining me in Hell,” I mumbled before delivering another sermon to him. “Do you know that gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins? Unless you control your greed for sardines, your soul will be condemned to eternal perdition. When your creator comes in his glory on the day of the ultimate judgment, you will be on his left side. And he will tell you, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’”

Kittu stared at me and uttered “meow” whose contempt was all too obvious. “Okay, I don’t mind company in Hell,” I said as I gave him another sardine.