My HongKong croakery, A Satire(Psatire?)

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My Hong Kong Croakery, A satire (Psatire?)

I call it croakery, because it croaked.

Hong Kong was our first trip together after a long time, and so I suppose, we enjoyed it maximum.

We did the usual touristy things, visited Victoria Peak, Museums, Kowloon Promenade, Chinese temples. The grade at Victoria Peak is so steep that as you are going up, all the buildings look as though they are leaning crazily, worse than the Tower of Pisa. The view from the top is as good as the Mumbai’s view from the Hanging Gardens. One particular building keeps on changing the color of its lights every few minutes. The Kowloon Promenade is like any waterfront of a city that takes pride in its harbor, clean and beautifully decorated. The museums are full of Chinese Art, to which there is no comparison anywhere in the world. (This is, of course, my personal opinion.) Chinese temples are like Chinese temples everywhere.

Three amenities of the city of HongKong are just wonderful, their Hong Kong- Kowloon ferry, their tram, that takes you from one end of the island to the other and the long, long, artificial-flower-bedecked escalator which takes you from sea-level to high up on the hill, because Hong Kong is just one hill jutting out of the sea.

The opening chapter of the novel “The World of Suzie Wong”, which was set on the ferry, was what I kept remembering during that 20-minute trip. Alas! Every beautiful city has a lining of cruelty underneath it.

I am a Sinophile. I like everything about the Chinese, even the Chinese food in Mumbai, but I was not ready to sample their food in Hong Kong. The ingredients were not to my liking. In Hong Kong, we just stuck to the good old McMonald’s.

However, I love Chinese silk, Chinese embroidery, Chinese paintings, Chinese woodwork, Chinese Jade carvings, Chinese cork-carvings and above all, I love Chinese crockery.

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Statutory Warning: The rest of the article has nothing to do with Hong Kong or with travel. Actually, in Avi’s opinion, this is not a travelogue at all, and should be put under
“Fiction”, so that is what I am doing. The readers should read this at their own discretion.
Dear readers, you can also help us in classifying this piece by putting some comments and suggestions.

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And Oh! The crockery! The beautiful, lovely, charming Chinese crockery with scenes of ‘karst’ mountains, and pavilions and bamboo and lake and dragons and kimonoed girls patterned on it! We bought 20 kg. crockery.

We had taken a full, 20 kg. suitcase of goodies for a friend’s daughter, but we asked her to give us the empty suitcase to carry our crockery back to Mumbai.

We brought back these 20 kg of crockery from Hong Kong, but with me around, its days were numbered. The first casualty prompted Avi to comment bitterly, “Why did we bring it here? You could have broken it in Hong Kong itself”, as though I am doing it deliberately and with ‘malice aforethought’.

I have a very queer relationship with crockery. I love it but it just goes to pieces as soon as it sees me. Everybody in my family knows this.

Bunny gave me Hungarian crystal bowls with the admonition, “Mom, don’t try to wash those yourself. Give to the maidservant to wash. She won’t break those.”

Bambi was surprised to see a lone survivor of the Corelle set she had given me, in the showcase.

“What happened to the rest of the set?” She asked, already knowing the answer.

How will I know what the Mumbai Mahanagar Palika (BMC) does to the trash it collects, including the broken crockery? I believe they dump it into sea for some ‘Reclamation Project’. I think all my broken crockery is lying on the seabed somewhere near Mumbai, where fishes, crabs, lobsters and oysters are using it.

I could well picture the scene.

Mrs. Lobster had invited her “friends” from the Sea-dwellers Society for a kitty party. Recently she had acquired a Wedgwood tea-service (broken by me, of course.) and she was eager to show it off. She was a great collector of the crockery. (So was I, Mrs. Lobster, so was I.) Moreover, they had all noticed that Mrs. Bladderfish had become so swollen with NEWS that she could hardly move. Her husband was a yellow journalist and she stored all the ‘scoops’ in her stomach. When she became spherical, all the ladies of the Society knew that it was time for another kitty party and Gossip.

Mrs. Shark dressed with particular care. Her husband was in the money-lending business and like any self-respecting Credit Card company, charged 36% interest. He always wore sharkskin suits, made ‘foreign’ trips to the Spanish Main and shopped at the sunken Spanish Galley. He had brought a gold doubloon for her this time, which she wore on her triangular fin. She looked down on all the other ladies of the society, because they all wore corals and pearls. “Corals are so ‘passe’, and pearls are so ‘common’!” She thought.

The party had hardly begun when Mrs. Bladderfish blurted out “the elder Miss Turtle is getting married”. Oh! What a relief!! She would have burst otherwise.

This was news indeed. Poor Mrs. Turtle, reduced to ‘Genteel poverty’, already had 12 daughters to marry off, and she did not know how many more would be coming out of the batch of eggs that she had lain in the sand. All her eggs seemed to be hatching only girl turtles, never boy turtles. She had no time for kitty parties.

“Who is the groom?” asked crabby Mrs. Crab.

Mrs. Bladderfish sighed with relief and said “Mr. Darcy PTurtle.” and watched the effect of this announcement on the ladies contentedly.

She was rewarded with the sight of Mrs. Octopus putting two of her tentacles in her beak-like mouth in astonishment. Mrs. Jellyfish quivered with excitement. The servant shrimp, carrying a porcelain tray (Mine again) of oyster sandwiches, dropped it and further broke it. The oysters escaped unnoticed. The plankton and the caviar on the Corelle (again Mine) plates got colder. Because, Mr. Darcy PTurtle was the most eligible bachelor, rich, handsome, aristocratic and a wonderful ‘catch’ for the elder, mealy-mouthed, pale-faced Miss Turtle. Not for nothing was he a PTurtle. Like the Ptolemies, he could be extravagant and waste a consonant.

“I wonder how she managed to ‘hook’ him, especially, after the scandal” Mrs. Bladderfish added and became slimmer.

SCANDAL! What a delightfully delicious word!

Mrs. Lobster raised her antennae. Mrs. Clam opened her valves wide and Mrs. Shark uncovered her gills to catch the scandal.

“You know, her younger sister had eloped with a LAND Tortoise, quite an undesirable character!” Mrs. Bladderfish said and became absolutely flat. It was heavenly to be rid of the NEWS. Tortoises were almost like slum-dwellers in their world.

“Does Darcy know of this?” Mrs. Shark asked acidly. She did not like anyone richer than herself, and to think that, that pasty Miss Turtle might afford ten gold doubloons, once she married Darcy, was a galling thought. 'In all fairness’, she decided to tell Darcy about the scandal. She was a vertebrate ‘do-gooder’, a great believer in telling the truth where it might do maximum damage. She also secretly resolved to persuade Mr. Shark to change his name to Mr. Pshark. After all, she was a Ptarmagant in her own right and like Catherine De Medici or Lucretia Borgia, had perfected the art of Ptomaine poisoning. She banged MY Hitkari cup on MY Crown saucer rather with force.

It makes me see red that MY broken crockery was being used by these lowly, backboneless exoskeletons (Lovely word, don’t you think?) for their kitty party and for their nefarious scheming. Wasn’t it enough that even when intact, my crockery did exactly the same function of spreading malicious gossip and scandal in our own Society’s kitty parties?

I have decided never to buy crockery again.

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