The One With The Pineapple Wine

"A...."

I woke up groggily and reached out for my cellphone as a reflex reaction. The tiny time stamp at the top right corner blinked at 12:34...so early? Who's waking me up so bloody early on a Sunday? I managed to kick the rajai out of my face and peeped out to see Mai towering over me...

"Hmmm...huh...yaaru...yenu...Mai...how was your class?"

"You haven't cooked yet?!?!?!?!?!?"

This rude question woke me up completely and I realised that we had a pot-luck party for which, of course, I was the one who had to cook. I immediately sat up on my bed, "Aiyyo...haudu kane..."

"What A, I'm so hungry!!!!!"

Well that makes two of us, I thought to myself, as I gingerly groped my way around the room and switched on the light. Next target was to hunt for my clutcher in an attempt to try and clip back my hair that had a tendency to make me look like I was ready to audition for the role of Morticia Addams. I finally managed to find my clutcher lying under the remotest, inaccessible corner of my cot. With this done, I sat down with Mai glowering at me across the room with a puppy-dog face and briefed her on Plan Biryani (veg, of course).

As Mai and Zombie started on the vegetables, I quickly freshened up and washed the cobwebs off my eyes. Breakfast seemed like a good idea, especially considering the fact that I had crashed at 6 AM after a night-out through Saturday. Very soon, I had gobbled down 3 dosas and started getting the rest of the ingredients ready for the Biryani.

After 3 trips by 3 different people to the mulai angadi (to buy a list comprising of 5 ingredients), 2 frantic calls to the main PG for kadai and several trips to Mai's spice shelf; we were finally ready to begin. In between all this commotion, we managed to get our WiFi router installed too...huh, talk about multi-tasking.

Finally, at 3:30 PM we all dug in with relish for a really, really, really late lunch. But then, that's what weekends are about. Breakfast at lunch hours, lunch at the snacks hour, coffee at dinner time, dinner at 10 and soup at 4 AM the next day :D

So in keeping with such a tradition, around 7'ish we were all seated around in my room as usual b****ing about this and that when Mai decided to show RR a sample of the yellow colored concoction that was sitting on our nightstand for the past couple of weeks. She picked up the bottle and started lecturing RR about the weird concoction and its supposed characteristics when all hell broke loose. What happened next was like seeing some scene out of a movie/sitcom in slow-motion mode.

Mai was in the centre of the room with RR close to her left and me on Mai's right. Radz was seated cross-legged on the floor in front of the laptop and typing away furiously in her blog. As Mai started unscrewing the bottle, I warned her that...err...the bottle had a tendency to...ummm...misbehave. But of course, she bore no heed to my warning and with full-on enthu she only concentrated on opening the bottle. A split second later we were all running in different directions from the bitter-sweet concoction that was well behaving like a sprinkler which was turned on.

All that I saw was the fizz building up in the bottle, the cap that flew into Mai's face and knocked her back, the bottle that fell to the ground and the concoction that was spraying its generous self all over me.

Another split second later, the bottle had stopped spinning and all of us were laughing like a pack of hyenas. RR was on Zombie's bed curled up in laughter, I was in the farthest corner of the room still assessing things around me and also laughing hysterically, Radz was literally screaming with laughter (this is the loudest I have heard her laugh) and Mai, well she was a sight to behold: her glasses were off and her eyes wet with one eye twitching like crazy, her face was full PINK and she was drenched in wine that was dripping all over her.

We laughed for a full 10 mins..non-stop. What can I say, we were hysterical and there was no controlling us. And the fact that there was wine splashed on all our walls and the ceiling and the beds and the mirror and the cupboard and Mai and all of us, only made matters worse. Zombie rushed in soon afterwards and looked with dismay at her wine bottle. This only made us howl more.

My room smelled of brandy and pineapple for a full week after this incident. Everytime I walked in, I wrinkled my nose and held my breath for the fraction of the second when the door swung open. No one in our PG believed that we had "accidentally"...err...spilled the wine.

I can't blame them, who will believe a bunch of single gals who were caught drenched in brandy on V Day? It's a cynical world out there, I tell ya!