BomBAY JOURNAL (MG Sanchez vs the bombay Mafia)

Day 421 M. G. Sanchez vs. the Bombay Mafia? You’d have never thought it, would you? Well, it did happen ... and it happened less than ten hours ago. The venue: G-----’s in South Mumbai. The time: nine‑thirty in the evening. Natalie had decided that we should take our guests – Jayne, Debbie and Graham – to this famous Mumbai eatery after having read a glowing article about it in the Mumbai Time Out magazine. Great food, elegant ambience, a veritable Mumbai institution: that’s how Natalie had sold the place to the rest of us. When we got there, however, we were greeted by the sight of a depressingly rundown restaurant, with mouldy decor, tables packed on top of each other and the inevitable curry-stained tablecloths. Its saving grace was that the food was very tasty and filling and would have probably obtained top marks had not the waiter serving us kept dragging his currified jacket sleeve into our plates. Somewhere between the entrée and main course, I noticed that the middle-aged guy at the table beside us was staring fixedly at Natalie. Actually, staring is not the word; he was most unashamedly and lasciviously eyeballing her. Now, let me explain: some Indians like to stare at Europeans. It is a well-known fact. It really used to hack me off when we first arrived here, but after thirteen or fourteen months in Mumbai I have more or less come to accept that there’s a percentage of folk in this city who can’t stop themselves from staring at those remarkable objects of fascination known as white-skinned Westerners. Nevertheless, it is one thing to have someone gaping at you as you walk past them in the street, and another to have some guy gawking at your partner from all of one and a half yards away. To add fuel to the flames, the fellow in question looked like an Indian version of the character Jimmy ‘Two Times’ in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Dressed in a shiny black suit and with eyebrows only marginally less bushy than his bouffant, he had several gold teeth and two or three chunky sovereign rings and looked a little like a cross between Frank Sinatra and Sathya Sai Baba, if you can imagine such a hybrid creation. Okay, you big fat knucklehead, I thought. If you’re going to stare at my partner, then I’m going to stare at you, too. See how you like it, fella. So I train my eyes on old Jimmy. Try my best to telepathically transfer a few poisonous thoughts. Meanwhile, Jimmy is so entranced by my fair‑skinned companion that he doesn’t clock that I am throwing ‘eye‑daggers’ at him; he is simply not registering anything. At last, however, he stops staring at Natalie and notices that he’s getting stared at in turn. A kind of Indo‑Gibraltarian stand-off ensues (while Natalie and the others blissfully carry on discussing the price of pashminas in Colaba). He glares at me; I glare back at him. He bares his half-rotted teeth; I bare my own slightly less decayed molars. Presently, I notice that he is beginning to play with his table knife … so I pick up my fork and start twirling it about. Finally, just as things are about to explode in a blood-splattered crescendo, the waiter arrives with a silver-coloured rocket-shaped cake for Jimmy’s table. In fact, the dessert is so overtly and so unimaginatively phallic that I cannot help breaking into a smile. Which, in retrospect, is no bad thing. For at that moment my Indian antagonist thinks that I am smiling at him and throws me a conciliatory head bobble, the usual Indian ice‑breaker. And so, hey presto, the situation is defused: Jimmy ‘Two Times’ focuses on his phallic spaceship cake and Natalie, Jayne, Debbie, Graham and I continue discussing India at our table and what an endless source of fascination it is to us foreigners, et cetera, et cetera.... Except that this colourful yarn doesn’t quite end there. Because, shortly after Jimmy and his entourage have gobbled up the rocket-shaped cake and left the restaurant, Natalie calmly turns around and says to me, ‘That Indian guy with the funny hair who was sitting at the table next to us – did you notice that he had a gun in a shoulder holster under his jacket? I only realised when he walked past us on the way out....’ Jesus Christ, I thought to myself. Thank God for dick-shaped Indian desserts....

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