MUAH...

 There are only two kinds of people in this world: the ones who can eat spaghetti and the ones who try.. 

At work, I am blessed with free lunch 4 days a week. There are a few colleagues who, however, feel that food in any form or quantity is a wasted effort on me. Regardless, I look forward to it. By around noon time, my stomach would have already spoken to me that it is time, sometimes audible enough for the co-worker sitting opposite to my desk. 

The days when there is spaghetti in the menu, I am nervous. And curious. I consider myself still a student of the art of consuming this culinary dilemma. From the days I have poked various parts of my face with a fork to successfully loading pasta into where it is supposed to go, I have barely grown, skill wise. At the hospitality institute where I spent 3 years, our F&B instructor had shown us how to hold a spoon and fork to tame pasta. Like a magician, I have watched him twirl the red coils of Spaghetti Bolognaise with a vertically held fork, into pliant, submissive strings of obedience. 

In my hands, they always turned into the hair of Medusa.

I thought inverting the fork would the trick but it got ahead of me. Or it stayed behind. I turned again, but it adjusted. Over and over we play this out like some ominous dance with destiny just before I give up.

While engaged in this act one day at work, I learned an important lesson. I wasn't alone. 
I saw A.N, the guy from HR who usually consumes double his body weight in food, doing things to pasta no one has ever seen. He had managed to trap one end of all the spaghetti in his plate in his mouth and was using his mouth like a wet vacuum cleaner to get the rest also inside. His eyes, though challenged by the food, had sworn allegiance to it by assuming the same napoltaine red. I turned away.

S.T, the shortest in the office but the biggest mouth west of the Arabian Gulf, was found using a technique from the Indian kitchen where a "thoran' or "poriyal" is made. He was systematically chopping the spaghetti into 3 mm long little pieces to scoop them later into his mouth. I thought of all the time, energy and technology that had gone into shaping them in some distant factory. For what? But then I remembered that he usually smears mango pickle on his beef steak. Look away, Dev. 

J.W, is an elderly lady who looks at the lunch buffet like a marooned pirate who sees rum after 900 days. Her consumption however doesn't match her gaze. Her plate would weigh approximately 150 grams, crockery included. She deals with Spaghetti in her own way. The old fashioned way. The way that existed before humans thought of un-soiled hands as a sign of civility. J.W had picked up a coiled mass of gluten, red sauce and melted cheese with her nimble fingers. With a pout that would shame Marilyn Munroe, she kissed and devoured the whole thing with a barely audible, inverted "muah". I couldn't look away.

There’s no plan there, no complicated art, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine cooked pasta swirling up into her mouth like a buttered dream. She had decided that she wouldn't go hungry, no matter how sophisticated was the technology that shaped the pasta into such tricky shapes.

From the corner of my eye, I saw S.T who had stopped half way through his pasta-annihilation, with his mouth half open, staring at J.W. I put down the fork and spoon, and scooped up some Spaghetti. It was time to "muah".