Caferati's Fourth Anniversary Meet

Caferati, which started with me reading to an audience of around ten people facing the sea at Bandra Bandstand, is now four years old. To celebrate moderators Peter Griffin, Manisha Lakhe and co-ordinator Suniti decided to meet for an entire day, in an ancient farm house in karjat. So Shishir picked me up from Belapur when it was drizzling, the kind of drizzle that doesn’t stop soon.

Anxious moments pass as I spend more than half an hour under the bridge where we were supposed to meet, the rain forming complexes rhythms over my umbrella. Then, after giving enough time for all contingencies, I give Shishir a call.

“They have taken a detour, and I am just getting in,” Shishir informed. Me. So I imagine myself in a massive cloud wafting towards the vehicle that would pick me up and transport me to that magic farm house.

So when the Toyota Innova siddles towards me, my heart gives a leap. Inside are two of the most beautiful women I have seen in the past week (during which time I have only seen world-weary IT girls with pasty complexions, and hair like coir). Rasika and Kavitha this is meant to be compliments. So don’t get angry with me. And beside them is a man with a crazy, absolutely zany, sense of humour, who goes by the name of Cyrus, my friend Shishir, and Asif, actor and model.

That would make for a perfect bunch of interesting people. And every observation is tinged with the varnish of genuine genius. Wonder why such colourful people don’t come into my life during the working week. Wonder where they go during the day to be resurrected only in Caferati meets.

Well, the journey is full of witticisms from Cyrus, who warn the girls well in advance to be forewarned. As if they need to be warned! And when we get lost and wait for the others to bail us out, the girls go off into the woods to commune with nature, a peacock’s call sounds, and out comes this observation from Cyrus:

“The girls went for a pee, and the peacocks screamed.”

Man I can’t, I just can’t beat that in originality. Say what, this guy is a friggin Einstein.

A man with muscles like monsoon cloud formations walk into the Macdonalds in Panvel and Cyrus says, “That guy has been bitten by a snake, look how his hands are swollen and blue.”

This guy is sure talented, and I sort of feel inferior already, and I am supposed to conduct a workshop for geniuses like him. What if he makes a fool of me before all those girls whom I want to impress?

(To be continued…)