Cousin Tuk in
Durban 4
by Albert Russo
When I think of it, my lil mansardé
room in Paris looks like a Monet painting, mixed
with Matisse and Rubens, shoved in between, after
the worst hurricane of the century has swept by,
and this gives my mum, every time she pushes the
door open, tummy aches like when she was pregnant
with lil me - apparently I was kicking real hard
at her sides. Then, looking down and under, she
exclaims:
“What a mess! How many
times have I told you to put some order in here!
Do you really need all that stuff? One day we’ll
get rid of at least half of that bric-à-brac
which is useless and only gathers dust.” She
then goes away, sighing heavily, while I pull at
her a virtual tongue.
But now that I’ve
become a bit of an Indian myself, thanks to Kif
and Panty and also to Mrs. Chatterjee, I’ll
counter her remarks, telling her that Shiva,
Ganesh, Krishna and Hanuman, among the dozens of
Indian gods, are protecting me, and whispering to
my ear that I can go kitschy all the way.
I won’t scare her with snake charmers and
such - neither do I like them, specially Miss
Cobra and her shifty pal, Miss Naja. Yuk! Hey, my
dear lil Hindus, did you have to adore them too?
At ‘Balls’n Stuff’,
we had a delicious, never-ending, meal, with
regular servings of warmed-up chappati loaves,
Bengali eggplant, Chana Masala, Samosas, Dal
Kofta - when Panty told me it was balls steamed
in buttermilk, I froze, in spite of all the
spices that kept prickling the back of my mouth
and my nostrils, and spat it out into the palm of
my hand, then I ran to the restroom, to wipe and
wash the whole mess.
But thank goddess - from
now on I will say ‘thank Shiva’ - the
next dish was a scrumptious Tandoori chicken. For
dessert, we were presented with a huge round
plate containing: Gajar ka Halwa, Rasgulla, Ras
Malai, Kheer and rice pudding. All of it, very
very lekker. How I loved the way my
mouth smelled after that meal, so much so that I
wanted to lick myself from head to toe - now, if
you think I’m going crazy, let me tell you
that only ignoramisses of your ilk think
that way. Jokes aside, don’t you sometimes
fall in love with yourself? If you haven’t,
try it sometimes in front of your mirror, when no
one is looking.
My poor uncle’s face
looked like an emergency flashing light gyrating
on top of an ambulance. At a certain point I
feared his nose was going to pop out like the
cork of a champagne bottle and blind somebody. My
own vision was getting so fuzzy that I believed
Panty was blowing kisses at me, instead of at Tuk,
his live-in lover - hey, I’ve just coined a
new word: ‘my Loiver’, with a capital L
means ‘my live-in lover’, and washmore
it sound Brooklynese.
From
the GOSH ZAPINETTE! series (15 episodes in all)
9//21 Excerpted from Zulu Zapy wins the Rainbow
Nation, by Albert Russo.
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