“Hey thatha, you are missing something.” My grandson standing on the balcony said and pointed to the beach. I quickly armed myself with the necessary ‘stuff’ and ran to the scene. I found a section of the beach under flood lights clearly marked with lines and two contestants, who looked like   champions, ready to start a slanging match. They both seemed to have done their workouts for long with keyboards and displayed six pack phrases.

As I took a ringside seat the contestant in the South corner, under some delusion that he had my blessings, started the proceedings. First he changed his form and shape from a nut brown chocolate to a rat with thorns and finally to an apparition. He took a long breath and as he let it out, ‘his paunch ballooned out of proportion and his head kept pace with it’. He called his opponent not names but a formula, which I would have been proud of. This surprisingly annoyed the chap in the North corner and he waved a magic wand that he produced from nowhere.

His magic wand worked and a gaggle of ‘hot and happening femmes’ of Sulekha appeared suddenly on the side lines. They started cheering both the contestants and shouted. “Come on HH, go at him.” Meanwhile the contestant in the South found himself splitting into two.

I asked the lady closest to me why they were hailing the participants as royalty. “You are always conflused. HH stands for handsome hunk.” She put me wise.

Both the three contestants warmed up to the word HH, put the match to ‘pause’ and looked very pleased. They smiled like Cheshire cats and distributed ‘faludas’ to all the ladies; each claiming his faludas to be the best. The more faludas they dished out, more the cheering they got. One lady who might have got more than her share shouted with rare verve “butcher the butter,” at a chap whom I called nutter once, and faced his ire. I wondered what was in store for her.

The gender bias in distributing “faludas” annoyed me and I took a slug of the ‘stuff’ that I carried with me. The contestants also joined me for a round.

When the match resumed, the chap with the magic wand found to his horror that he had not one but two opponents, but without a definite form and shape. Fortunately for him the two opponents or apparitions seemed to be fighting amongst themselves to decide as to who was the real amongst them. The one with a keyboard and ‘a paunch ballooning out of proportion’ tried to back out and admit that he was the clone, but didn’t want to ‘miss out the babes’. As the fight of identity crisis continued in the enemy camp, the one with the magic wand called a bunch of rats from his lab in a wild and dark forest nearby, selected two special specimens and gave a form to the two apparitions on the other side of the line. Then they started the game in earnest with volleys of humour, which kept the ladies in stitches. One kept count of the volleys and the score. The magician at the opportune moment played a drop shot in that he had split, mutilated and combined the genes of the rats on the other side to produce two different specimens, which looked good individually but horrible when combined. One lady infuriated at this took out a litre of mustard oil, boiled it to 360 degrees Celsius and kept it ready to vent her ire in ways best known to her.

I called the contestants, gave them another swig and asked them what their main bone of contention was. Each of the three complained that the other was getting all the ‘babes’ leaving him forlorn and lovesick.

When the match restarted with the ‘anguished cries of a constipated tiger’ by the contestants in the South corner, everybody cried foul. No one knew how a constipated tiger would roar leave alone cry as the expert on constipation was nowhere to be seen. I in my capacity as OBTS (old man by the sea) granted the contestants a break, which they utilised to fortify themselves further with the ‘stuff’ with me.

When I rang the bell, they returned to their perches and resumed the match.  The man with the magic wand started mutilating and combining the genes of his opponents and finally produced two forms to the satisfaction of everyone, almost everyone. The lady with the couch wanted to keep the clone as she preferred the younger specimens.

As the magician started to explain how and why he owned the original and the clone to all those present, a domestic engineer took umbrage at her being left out in the addressees. She brought out preservatives to prepare preserves of the left out genes split, mutilated and combined. Seeing so many rats on the site one lady called the magic wand chap as the “ultimate rat maker.”

The faludas had some unexpected side effects. One lady got ‘bumfuzzled’ and foxed most of us. Not knowing whether to give her CPR or oral first aid   we called the ambulance and rushed her to the hospital.  Another lady decorated the gene man with stars of disputable repute and changed him to ‘it’.

The contestants took advantage of this short break. The cloning expert immediately applied for the patent of the clones that he created. The ever obliging and friendly Kamalji mistaking the influence of his RC and my B/L as powers vested on him by the Supreme Court granted it immediately. A lawyer immediately got a print out of a legal notice claiming all IPRs for all the work of the clones in any form. By then the site was filled with capacity crowd.

The South contestant meanwhile changed into a XXL size cloak and slipped effortlessly into the role of Mark Antony. He gave a passionate speech in staccato voice with each word coming out like a bullet from a machine gun provided by his secret agent friend and wanted to bury his clone. His speech must have made Shakespeare turn in his grave. The bard must have also taken great offence as he, an Andhra, a sixteen ‘annas’ Telugu fellow, was called of all things, a Tamilian by one gentleman suffering from Multiple Talent Disorder. Unfazed by this controversy on the sidelines, the   Brutus of the piece claimed the IPRs for the speech and for all speeches and writings that come from the clones he created with retrospective effect from the date he got the patent. One lady mad on hearing this, presented to the fellow in the guise of Antony, a lion tamer’s whip and chair. Another expressed her puppy love for him. A third kept complaining that she didn’t get her faluda. But one lady took the cake as she multitasked by eating faluda, munching samosas and crunching batata vadas simultaneously without batting an eyelid or asking for water.

Stay tuned as the contestants and I will be back after the drinks break.