“You’re not treating your guest well,” says Rocky, my raccoon buddy. “D’you mean Kitty?” I ask, feeling surprised. She’d not said anything to me. Rocky twiddles his whiskers in disapproval. “Well! She’s certainly complained to ME! About the lack of good food in this house. In particular.” He concentrates, trying to remember the unfamiliar name, “...she’s interested in an egg dish. It’s called Krockery, I think. Or Rookery. Something starting with K and R.”

It turns out to be “Akoori”, the delicious spicy scrambled eggs made in Parsi homes. Kitty swears that she did NOT complain to Rocky, but by then Rocky and Bins are determined to restore the honour of the house, by making it themselves. They banish me from the kitchen, which is fine, because I have to go out anyway. I hear all about it later on, from Kitty.

“They started with eight eggs,” she tells me. Rocky dropped two of them on the floor, which left six. “Rocky gobbled up the dropped eggs,” says Kitty. “According to him, they taste much better raw. But he doesn’t mind them cooked either! Especially in the form of cookies...” Bins said there was a proper egg-whisk in the house but no one could find it. So they poured the eggs into a glass bottle and shook it hard.

“Rocky was sitting on the counter reading instructions from the paper on which Bins had copied them from the Internet. ‘Your hand-writing is terrible,’ he said to Bins. ‘You’ve written: add four tablespoons of MICE to the eggs. Then a half teaspoon of SILK and quarter teaspoon of PAPER. I can understand eating mice, but silk and paper? Weird!’” Kitty was laughing so hard she could barely talk. “When they got it sorted out — milk, salt, pepper — it was time to chop the onions, tomatoes, coriander and chillies.”

Bins did the chopping, while Rocky ran around with his eyes streaming from the onions. When it came to the chillies, he offered to wash the seeds out. “We raccoons are famous for washing our food,” he said proudly. But he made the mistake of rubbing his eyes after cleaning the chillies. Ouch! Bad idea! “I had to carry him out and hold him under a tap!” says Kitty. That was the end of his help with the Akoori. “Bins did a great job of finishing up after that,” Kitty tells me. “I made a stack of toasts. The eggs were pretty good too.”

I’d gone to the India Habitat Centre, where a friend, Anita Anand, is exhibiting her charming watercolours from her years in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But she couldn’t be present because she was laid up with a broken leg. Then at lunch, one of the friends I had hoped to meet messaged to say that she had fractured her shin. The late-monsoon is a dangerous time for walking around Delhi’s slippery pavements. “Stay home and avoid chillies,” says Rocky. “And get Bins to make Krockery.”

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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