Is That Why They Call It A “Mess”?

A friend who studied at IIT-Kharagpur used to narrate an interesting anecdote. One night at dinner in their hostel mess, they came face to face with a dark, gooey substance masquerading as the sabzi for the day. It was as foul-looking as it smelt. None of them had a clue as to what vegetable had been mutilated thus. They came out of the mess, read the dinner menu on the notice board, only to discover that the near-toxic substance was meant to be baigan ka bharta.
Almost everyone who has lived in a hostel will have these messy tales to narrate: of how their tastebuds were held hostage for three or four years by people resembling the cook character in Beau Peep comics.
My experience is much better than my friend’s and as such I don’t have any horror tales to narrate. If you were willing to put up with the rubbery rotis and the unimaginative and oily curries, or, alternately, if you were willing to survive three years solely on the strength of thayir-sadam and avakai, you would do just fine. That is what I used to do on most of the days, just eat the chawal with dahi embellished with Amma’s endless supply of yummy pickle. Sundays were special with thick, fat aaloo parathas and mixed veg pickle and lots of creamy dahi: more than adequate compensation for the rest of the week.
Of course, for the 300-hungry denizens of the ‘residence hall’, the most important meal of the day was tea. Never mind that the bread pakodas came swimming with their very own oil slicks, or that the puffs were as dry as ‘Jaani’ Rajkumar’s dialogue delivery, ignore the fact that the servings of pizza were measly. Forget nutritional value, forget everything else, the fun lay in the anticipation with which we would all troop down to the mess to see was on offer: poha, puffs, pastry, pakoda, (heck! Never noticed the p-fixation of the menu earlier). All this downed with several cupfuls of good, strong chai.
But the meal that I personally looked forward to the most was breakfast. And to their credit, the mess guys at my hostel did manage to make it a gala affair. There was plain bread, toast (buttered and unbuttered), jam, cheese spread, baked beans, eggs (boiled, poached and omlettes), corn flakes, milk, fruit and coffee and tea.
I remembered all this as today I had this irresistible craving for toast-butter: the crisp and crunchy on the outside but slightly soft inside, oozing golden maska variety of toast-butter that the bhaiyyajis at my mess turned out by the shovelfuls each morning.
The health-conscious lot would veer towards the crisp, dry, unbuttered variety while the gluttons would make a dash for the buttered toast racks. Move on further down, hand a spoon to the miserly assistant warden and watch her slightly dip it into a cheese spread jar and shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it till a very thin film of the creamish condiment apologetically clung to the spoon. Pick up a bowl, fill it with cornflakes, pick up a glass of milk, pick up a fruit, greedily eye the fruit on friend’s plate and pointedly ask, ‘You sure you want to eat that’, suppress a satisfied smirk as friend unceremoniously dumps aforementioned fruit into your plate, cautiously balance the piled-up place while staving off the hungry masses who trooped in bleary-eyed. Go to your customary table plonk down next to the window and dig in. Sheer bliss. Soon enough, the sun would seem brighter and cheerier and if you strained your ears, through the din of all that morning traffic you could even hear the birds chirp. Grrrraaahh!! Now I am hungry.