here, there & elsewhere. Vive La France!

Last week’s burglary had far-reaching effects. Pete, whose two-room unit was the only one affected, claimed that nothing was taken. But the burglar managed to smash a couple of lamps and cracked the front of Pete’s microwave oven before apparently leaping out of a back-window.

“The police say they don’t have any idea who might have done it,” says Pete. As a result he no longer feels safe living in his apartment. His brother and he are moving out, back to the family home in the state capital, north of Elsewhere.

He’s asked us to look around his home of the last 15 years, in case there’s any furniture we might like for ourselves. Bins, who claims that Pete doesn’t like him, is gawking with the curiosity of an art gallery visitor. Pete says, “I probably disturbed the guy! So I guess he just dropped the microwave and jumped out.”

Bins has pale blue eyes with needle-point black pupils. He looks up now with those twin lasers trained on Pete. “And how exactly do you know it was a guy?” he says. His faux-French accent is set at maximum stun. Pete frowns in irritation both at the accent and the question. “Dunno! I mean... who ever heard of a female burglar?” To which Bins, refusing to look my way, says, “Ah! Well! In Pondicherry — you have heard of this tiny Gaulish village in India? Where the French ruled for a thousand years? There, we have any number of burgle-ladies…”

I grab him by the arm and try to haul him out of there before he can tell his favourite whoppers, but he has turned to stone. Pete’s eyebrows have shot up. “Really? The French were in India?” he says. Bins is nodding vigorously. “Oh very yes. We have been there since prehistoric times! Before British, before Portugooses, before Max Mueller Bhavan!” He is standing tall in the way of someone preparing to sing ‘La Marseillaise’. “Wow, no. I never heard that,” says Pete. His eyes have grown round with interest. “I love history. I watch the History Channel all the time. But I never heard about — what’s that place, again?”

“Pond-i-cherrriiii,” says Bins, drowning each syllable in pure béchamel sauce. “It means, the Tiny Lake of the Cherries.” His face is poker-straight. “It is all that remains after the British came. They conquered the whole subcontinent. Everything was destroyed. Just one tiny village remained, loyal to La France...” I know where this is going, so I am forced to scream “Bins!” at top volume. Both men turn their faces towards me with the aggrieved expressions of two little boys who have been told it’s time for their dose of cod-liver oil suppositories.

When I finally drag him back to my apartment, Bins says, “You could at least have waited till I mentioned the cauldron of magic potion!” I say that Pete, like most Americans, probably doesn’t know Asterix comics. Bins taps his head in the universal sign for mental illness, pok-pok-pok. “These Americans are crazy,” he says.

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

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