Jungtina Jamir
It all started on a foggy Saturday evening. Not foggy in the conventional sense. An ominous black haze crept straight out of the ether to envelop our house. And suddenly, out of the haze appeared a pack, a roving mob, of women. The cake demons have come to devour me!!! By the gods, I muttered; “curse this day for bringing such a plague upon my home”. I began to pronounce something viler and decidedly less civil as the mob came to a halt and hailed my mom. “Oh”, I thought, “friends of hers”. Like as if there is anything even such as cake demons!!
A chocolate cake, blackened and ugly laid upon the oven. ‘goodness’, I said. I could have burned down the house. I hurriedly put on the exhaust fan to clear out the fog. I could see the roving mob of women looking at me. Mom must have felt uncomfortable, after all, it’s not everyday that your friends come to your house in the middle of a burning-session. But I assure you, it didn’t smell that bad. Infact, I am used to the smell. I have been trying to bake cakes since 7th grade.
Ahh! Women! These women will tell the whole world that mom’s daughter nearly burned down the house baking a cake. (That’s why I am telling you first-hand before you hear it from anyone of them). Politeness and gentle charm have served me well in the past, but even a fusion of these two potent forces could not generate the correct energies in me to tell these women to pretend as if they saw, no, make that smelt nothing. I braced myself in preparation to release my most powerful weapon, the “Please” but it, too, was deflected with no signs of moral strain. For goodness, it’s only a cake!!
The next day, I took the burned chocolate cake to my work place. My colleagues, Sorei and Sonu, arrived at the office doorstep seeking my cake. I perceive them as…er…. let us say “interesting” fellows. Sonu is a like a small brother to me; a hopeless romantic who desires—and often pursues—a relationship with anything that is computer and software. Sorei has a tendency to become a kleptomaniac at times; there is no official data towards it, but I think it might be dictated by phases of the moon, like a werewolf; as a defense mechanism to hide his propensity for playing too much fifa on the computer. He drools, does not blink, and shouts to every goal he scores.
Anyway, the reason why they came seeking my cake was because I had told them the day before that I would be bringing an ‘eatable-cake’ made by my own hands. Of course, I was still hoping that my cake was not as bad as it looked. I told them, “hey guys, I baked a chocolate cake just for the two of you. You have to eat it because I almost burned down our house baking it. That much I did!”.
After they took a look at the cake that was on the table they both became deeply entranced; the cake emanated its aura of sugary burned demise, predicting an end by stomach upset or worse - heart attack.
“We are going to work and, shortly thereafter, eat that cake,” said Sorei. Sonu was staring dreamily at the computer. I noted his disinterest. So I nudged hard on his ribcage with my elbow to snap him out of it. The two of them walked down the stairs to the working room.
Much later, I somehow realized that they were not coming up to eat the cake. “This is not done”, I thought. So I went down to the work place to call them. After much excuse about too-much-work-to-do, the three of us got upstairs.
We surrounded the cake, moving into formation with an ease that comes only from years of intense practice of making layouts on the computer. With an arcane power possessed only by the three of us, we attempted to eat the cake, locking it safely in our jaws. Sensing their misery, I broke the intense silence with the only question, “Guys… why don’t we throw the cake into the dustbin?”
What really happened to the three of us is a very gassy, stomach upsetting, and teeth aching tale. Some things are better left unsaid because of yuck reasons. We threw the cake into the dustbin. That’s where it belonged!
The next day I was informed by our beautiful office manager that in the morning there were about a dozen dead mice in and around the office. One of our reporters did an investigation on the weird-mousy phenomenon. It’s true that local Naga mice don’t just die like that. Generations of mice, after years of nibbling on axuni, anishi and bastenga have become immune to anything toxic. Rat killers in the market won’t work on them. It was learned that the mice had attacked my cake in the bin.
There! What do you know? I never knew that I would accidentally invent a perfect recipe for controlling plague. I am going to Kohima next week to receive the Special-Governor’s-award for giving humanity plague-control-cake. You can get a packet of this killer-cake at the Morung Office.
By the way, Sorei and Sonu are my special guests to the award ceremony!
Bon-voyage!!
