Last week my mother was doing her monthly clean up and
restacks of freezer space. She generally inspects her collection of pickle,
chutney pastes, if required transfers them to the lower compartments for daily
use. If she finds anything stale she throws it away. This time she found a
packet of what she called chutney powder. Now she has the habit of making loads
of chutney powder sufficient for a year’s supply and storing them in the deep
freezer. This packet was rather small, she opened it, it was not exactly of the
same colour, little blurred red/maroon colour. She tasted it and found it
tasteless and threw it away and continued with her task.
Next day my brother who was away returned. My mother found
my brother desperately looking for something in the deep freezer. On quizzing
he said, he is looking for his fish feed. My mother said she cleaned the
freezer and did not find any fish feed in there. He said it was small packet
with DRY WORMS!!!. It still did not ring a bell..and my mother asked him to
describe it. It slowly dawned on my mother that it was exactly that she
delightfully devoured the other day!!!.She was in denial for two reasons, she
is a pure vegetarian and second, she could not imagine she ate worms. My
brother was hopping mad, as the dry worms that he got for his dear fishes are
rare and apparently the supply of these worms are once in six months. My mother
told him how she confused his worms for chutney powder, tasted it and then
threw it.
It was almost a day since she had the worms and till then
she had no issues. On learning what she ate, she immediately started vomiting. She called me to say what happened, I could
not control my laughter. I asked her how on earth could you not distinguish
chutney powder from worms! She said her taste buds did not alert her. How about
your eyes I asked, could you not see worms; she said it looked like shredded coconut!
My mother spent that night vomiting every morsel of what she had in her stomach
and the poor fishes starved.
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