vindaloo

Woke up next morning with a headache after 3.5 hours of sleep and left for NJ to my cousins place. I hate myself sometimes for wanting to give everyone a piece of me and trying to make everyone happy. I made it there by 10 and we departed for New York right away. But the worst part was my cousin C had manged to twist his ankle and get it into a plaster. My cousin has a Honda Odyssey so I was expecting to catch a few winks in the third row seat, but then wouldnt that have made life easy. Now I had to drive to NY, not that I didnt like driving it was just that the alcohol level had not receded, to make things worse we caught a big chunk of the traffic on their way back into NY. Made it to queens by 2:30 in the afternoon, and voila first good news for the day, there was food waiting to be devoured by us. Fish curry and rice, actually I soaked up the curry with huge loaves of home made bread or as we Goans call it Paõ (Goanpaõ).

Our hosts had a lot planned for the evening...so I gave them the slip and quietly snuck into the kids bedroom and napped for about 4 hours. Got up fresh and was informed that we were supposed to go for a Bday party. Well I was all in the mood for a party now that I had my quota of sleep.

The party atmosphere was amazing, it was in a condo in NY. (Man these condos remind me of home back in Bbay), the best part of the party was it was an all Goan party, listening to people converse and curse in Konkani was music to my ears. The crowd walloped appetizers and gulped their alcohol like only goans can. And then they started the dancing first the jive and then the masala. The jive is for us Goans who can dance, and the few cursed souls that cannot get involved in the melle called the masala. This is a dance that you will only see at Goan weddings and parties, it proves to us Goans that with the right amount of alcohol we can contort our bodies to any shape or form. To an outsider it looks like the dancer is having convulsions, well sometimes they are but nobody gives a damn, the remedy to cure the convulsions is shove a peg or two of feni down their throat. I don't believe, I had so much fun inspite of not knowing a single person at the party, guess it was the language that tied us close together, and ofcourse the feni.

For all of you who think my weekend ended here You are wrong, but I would like to spare the few people who read this the trouble of reading the vagaries of my bouts with alcohol.