The Horrible Night of Hunger

If any of you may have had the opportunity to live in a hostel and that too of a government educational institute, you might understand the plight of the food they serve. Their chapattis would be so elastic that one could tie one’s luggage behind car with it. Their daal would be a sort of yellow water of doubtful origin. One could never make out the identity of the vegetables they make and their rice would look like a cat’s vomit dried in sun and fried with rabbit droppings. It was due to this that the apatite was low but hunger was predominant. And at midnight after the seniors were done making a pig’s breakfast of our lives, the only sensation that remained was hunger. A few rooms were treated as repositories for biscuits and that would be our midnight meal. One such night, when the dinner was superlatively shit, nobody ate anything and after the seniors had gone, the hunger struck back. After much exploration it was found that the biscuit supply was finished. We sat and brooded, for very long. By this time another disaster was taking shape amidst the evil neurons in the brain that belonged to a pineapple. He rose like Gandhi preparing for Namak Satyagrah and poured out his brilliant plan. An idle mind may be the devil’s workshop as they say, but an empty stomach is the devil himself. We followed him to the mess store house that was filled with bread, butter and jam. Then and there I could imagine the elation of a western cowboy in times of gold rush, who had finally succeeded in finding gold. The plan was to take two packets each and leave promptly. But the magnitude of hunger didn’t permit this, so we plundered like a pack of lions attacking a buffalo, entirely unaware of the presence of the man who was guarding the store room. Half an hour later when we stopped to breath we were facing the hostel warden. The man was reasonable a little thrashing and he was done, about to leave when he spotted a boy still chewing over the left over bread, his hands bathing in jam and butter and his stance was to find more of it, needless to say it was Roy. This was enough to make the most reasonable men furious. An otherwise amicable old fellow, our supposedly protector from ragging broke all the rules and asked the seniors to fill in some manners in us. That night they came in like a blitzkrieg and we fell like the London Bridge.