Them's Fightin' Words

So as I mentioned in passing last week, J-Rab is currently in the UK visiting her sister who is due to have a baby, so your Tiger pal has been toughing it out alone the past ten days.

In the beginning I was like, “Huh. This is kinda cool – more time to write in the evenings, the car all to myself (we share it normally), life on my own terms fuck yeah!”

But after awhile the evenings really start to stretch out. Not having the other person around starts becoming unnerving and even with music blasting in the background, you can’t escape the eerie silence that settles like a shroud over the space you used to share.

How do single people live like this?! Doesn’t it drive you guys fucking bonkers? I was making meatballs on Monday night and I was lost so deep in my own thoughts that I dredged up a memory I swear I haven’t thought about for about 18 years.

 

 

At my Prep school we had this huge 6ft cook, this gigantic rotund black man called Sakhi. I remember him clear as day – he was a permanently greasy guy who seemed to toil endlessly in the kitchen, banging pots and pans and doing whatever was necessary to make sure we got fed every day at lunchtime.

His hygiene left almost as much to be desired as his cooking, which we all complained about endlessly, but he wasn’t a bad person, he didn’t deliberately try to poison us with aphid-ridden vegetables and gloopy, over-cooked meat, that was just his style of cooking (if you could call it that).

 

 

So I was thinking about ol’ Sakhi on Monday night while I was making spaghetti and meatballs when I suddenly remembered his signature dish – the one kids would whisper about the same way we’d tell each other ghost stories when we went on school camps.

“Sakhi’s Puke.”

To this day, I have no idea what Sakhi’s Puke actually was, but the random way it jumped right out of my brain after 18 years of not thinking about it at all made me instantly crack up laughing and I swear I didn’t stop for a good 20 minutes.

 

 

It wasn’t funny back then though. Back then if they were serving “Sakhi’s Puke” kids would literally hide in the bathrooms during lunch hour to avoid eating whatever that stuff was.

So yeah, if you could have seen me on Monday night, rattling around my flat all alone, laughing like a crazy person and repeating the words “Sakhi’s Puke” over and over, laughing a little harder each time, you’d be forgiven for thinking I had completely lost my mind.

J-Rab’s back on Sunday.

Not a moment too soon

-ST