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Kitchenmate


Save for the acne covered cheeks, he was a fairly good-looking guy. Fair with think jet black hair, he exuded a certain charm that his compatriots did not possess. This was the third time I was seeing him and the second time I would utter something to him.

“Are you making pancakes?”, he inquired in an accent that was manifestly not natural to him. It was reminiscent of my own efforts to sound American by tonguing the words. What resulted were words that sounded like they required great, deliberate effort.

“I first made pancakes when I was four”, he carried on when I nodded in agreement.

The accent had already made the alarm bells in me ring. This made the wail a little louder. I laughed, faking surprise. He returned to conversing with his friends in Hindi. I caught a few words here and there. It appeared to revolve around lesbians, nudity and some indecent acts.

“Sex in public. Is that common?”, he exclaimed.

There was silence. The sudden turn from Hindi to English and the raised voice convinced me the question was directed at me.

“Sorry. What?”

“My friend here said he saw a gay couple have sex in a park in Berlin. I was wondering if you have heard of that here”.

“And why would I have heard of that?”

“Because you know, you have been hear longer than us”.

Of course, creeping on gays having sex was my past time. I made a somewhat indifferent reply. The scene repeated itself again and again. He would resume a conversation with his friends in Hindi and then suddenly break it to direct inconsequential questions to me.

“In Singapore, you had that man. Lee Kuan something. I am huge fan of him” (of course his chip sized memory did not permit him to remember the names of people he adored).

“You people in Singapore have very good universities. That is why Singapore makes so many intelligent people”. (“And this is what Pakistan makes”, his friend pointed out).

“I have my own business call Med-Me. You know it makes software all. I am in Berlin to expand”(Some research later showed that while the company did exist, it was founded in Russia, by some Russians)

After his friends left, I probed him further and he was happy to oblige, spinning stories out of thin air, one after the other. While I found it hard to believe a single word that came out of his mouth, he was entertaining, like every other charmer.

Then all of a sudden, I noticed it. It has been there, right in front of me all this while and yet somehow I had missed it. Knowingly or unknowingly, it gave his game away and I wonder if he was aware of the irony of it. I laughed, for there in big, bold, white letters on his black shirt were the words.

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