How I ate my ‘malai’
Everyone has a fall back option.
A person, A dog, A café, A book, A song, A lot of things.
And on this option, they believe, that they can revert back to, exhale their frustration on, scream at, punch in the gut, cry with or do a lot of things to.
I am known to have a habit of not sleeping early and that doesn’t seem to harm me in anyway because my option, my best friend, seems to answer me only in the night. Perhaps he’s a bit busy hiding in the mornings.
And as that night, 14th November ’16, is the nearest I would get to him, I could hear him talking to me about something I was doing wrong in my life.
Oh by the way,I happen to HATE “malai” and I can not bare the sight of it. It makes me nauseous, like seriously.
Anyway, getting back to the tale of teaching, I was sitting at the edge of my favourite window with a mug full of warm coffee on the night of 14th November ’16, talking to my option like every other night and, as I said, he was the closest to me that day.
My darling and I don’t seem to have a common language to communicate in so we mostly talk to each other telepathically.
So, with the coffee in my hand and our thoughts transferring, I saw a thick layer of malai in my coffee! The first glance of it gave me a disgusting feeling and just as I was turning around to enter my house and get that thing out of my coffee, my friend screamed to me and asked me to stop.
Our conversation (telepathically) went this way:
Moon: leaving already?
Me: no way hon, today is when I stay the longest!
Moon: then where’re you going?
Me: don’t you see this layer of malai, man? Getting rid of it.
Moon: you know what? That’s what your problem is!
Me: wha?
Moon: you know the fact that you can never get rid of it don’t you?
Me: what’d you mean man!
Moon: all I am saying is, think of the malai as all of your problems. Think of yourself as the person you are and think of the coffee as your “lala-land” life, your goal.
Me: uhu. Still not getting the point.
Moon: okay, so what will you do to reach the coffee?
Me: get rid of the malai.?
Moon: no you moron! You eat the malai!
Me: you know I would never do that! Stop already!
Moon: then you’ll never reach the coffee, bro
Me: I can remove it with a stainer
Moon: so you say that you’ll wait for the stainer all your life? Wow. And what guarantee does it offer to permanently remove the problem?
Me: none
Moon: so you’ll wait for a stainer to temporarily remove your problems. Good going. Me: so you say that I should handle it myself? And not runaway to finf temporary solutions?
Moon: that’s it.
This might seem lame but trust me, the moonlight that reflected in my layer of problems made me realise that this is not how it’s supposed to be. After thinking about it all night I realised that we really do try to find an alternative all our lives!
We never really want to face the problems. Eating the malai might seem disgusting for the time being but then it’ll be completely gone.
You can easily reach your goal without the fear of any malai.
So why not try it once?
And that, my friends, is the night I had the first layer of malai in my life. Thanks to my mate up there, I am probably going to face my problems from now on and I hope that you do too!
Keep eating the malai
~Manasvi N.
Featured image credits – Anumodita Patel (instagram : @anumodita)