Curry, how bad can it be?
I like curry, no......I love curry. So travelling to India with my job is a culinary delight for me. I can eat curry morning, noon and night. Don't misunderstand me, I don't like hot curries. I love the mild ones which explode with flavour in your mouth, as opposed to the hot ones, which explode in your bowels.
Since I was in India, my Indian colleague insisted on ordering the curries for me. So, the curry this morning was warm enough to give me a top head sweat but the yoghurt side order kept it cool enough to eat. Very tasty indeed.
The curry for lunch was a lot hotter and could strip the paint off your car. The cooling yoghurt had no effect at all. Only buckets of ice and water could dampen the burning in my mouth.
However, the curry tonight was the hottest thing I have ever put in my mouth and I don't think my mouth will ever forgive me. I feel confident, very confident, in stating that this curry sauce was last used to cool the atomic reactor in Tarapur. I developed blisters in my mouth and the heat melted my fillings. "So, this is how it feels to swallow lava," my mind screamed.
The waiter kept asking why I was crying but I couldn’t talk......or see properly. ...I tried sucking on ice cubes but the steam was triggering the fire alarm. I looked, at times, as though I was having an astma attack because the fumes were literally taking my breath away.
The suffering became worse as my bowels reacted swiftly.........and badly, leaving me with a colon resembling a large Zepplin airship, filled with dangerous and highly flammable gases. The discomfort of trying to hold in the volatile gases was just too much. My pressure release valve just was not strong enough. I had to use three taxis to get back to the hotel. The poor taxi drivers were nearly passing out from holding their breath as the rancid gasses escaped me uncontrollably. All of us had tears in our eyes and no one dared to talk. One driver even tried to use a can of air freshener but the scent refused to come out of the can. Thanksfully, no one tried to light a cigarette near me.
As a precaution.....because I knew this molten lava would burn on the way out, and it did, I kept some yoghurt handy to cool my sphincter down. As I applied the yogurt.......... and whilst it hissed and fizzed away on my "chocolate starfish".......... I just knew, even then, in my delirious state, that if I survived this long agonizing night, that the smell........... oh-my-god the smell.........of burnt yoghurt, curried napalm and death could never be washed off these hotel walls. For the moment though, at least the smell was keeping the insects away.
