The mess and the movie...

The yearly tuition fee was Rs.127 during my MBBS course in JIPMER. But the monthly mess bill used to be in the range of Rs.250 – 275 per month. There used to be two messes for undergraduates. One was a south Indian mess called Lister mess where Idlis and dosais were served and the other the north Indian mess called the Osler mess where Dal Chawal and Rajma were served. The mess used to be a student co-operative and one of the senior students used to be the mess secretary and run the mess. He is responsible for fixing the menu, buying the provisions and paying the mess staff. The total monthly expenditure used to be divided among the members eating at the mess. I have heard of mess secretaries who had purchased a Lambretta scooter after being a mess secretary for a few months. Some special dishes used to served to him and his guests in his hostel room from the mess. Breakfast menu for the entire week is usually fixed without any deviation. Every alternate used to be sliced bread ( the feel used to be that of something in between a new born baby’s cheek and a crunchy Brittania biscuit) You can have as many slices as possible and the jam that is served with it used to be a pink liquid which looked and also tasted no different from Rooh Afzah Sherbet. We used to drink it at times. Bread and jam was my favourite breakfast item though. Poori used to be served twice a week and this item is often 1/3 to half fried in oil because of the fast consumption. A part of the poori used to be crunchy and the rest doughy and easy to swallow. Wednesday and Saturday used to be special dinner days where fried rice , chicken, potato chips and lime juice used to be served. Everyone used to look forward to these two days. The chicken, for some reason used to be imported from Ethiopia which was reeling under famine. The squeezed off lemon slices after the lemon juice is done used to go into the lemon pickle that used to be served during the rest of the week days.

Sunday used to be the dosa day and there always used to be queue. You need to get into the mess in the morning and pick your plate ( made of quality aluminium in 1937 which had multiple punched out compartments in squares and rectangles but dented in multiple places because of wear and tear and occasional fights between the mess boys who were allocated washing utensils duties once in a while) You can leave your plate in the queue and go have a haircut and come back to get your dosai. If you need to have a second helping of dosa you need to have a second haircut though. A couple of times I had seen members throwing mess plates like a javelin when their dosas were not served on time. Post this throw, the mess plate used to look like a Maruthi 800 crushed between two friendly Ashok Leyland trucks.

The mess bill in the hostel history had never crossed Rs.300 per month ever till I took over as a mess secretary. My first month’s bill was Rs.367 and all hell broke loose. I had served spicy Podi for idlis with ghee and unlimited Gongura chutney during lunch and started serving chicken born and brought up in the Unted States of America. All the mess members have gained an average weight of 1.2 kilograms in that one single month but had made enough noise after seeing the bill amount. I never looked back since that and there was a progressive increase in the mess bill month after month. I could not manage to buy even a bicycle seat cover leave alone a Lambretta or a Vespa. My successor could not maintain the taste and flavour of food I gave but had managed to maintain the bill amount much to the dismay of the population he had served. Thus I became known as a good mess secretary and was added to the hall of fame.

Across the road in the ladies Curie Hostel it was a different story altogether. The average mess bill never crossed Rs.125 and in spite of it the girls used to gain an average weight of 800 gms every month and looked chubby and charming. One fine month the bill came to Rs.137 and all hell broke loose. We all from the male hostel could witness this catastrophe of pieces of hell falling on the Curie hostel with a thud. Emergency general body meeting was called and after wasting much of adrenaline and other female hormones in a vocal fist fight that had resulted in bruises that could not be seen with naked eye it was decided to institute a fact finding team that will go into the massive corruption that went into the matters of the mess that had resulted in such an inflated bill. The FFT could not confirm whether the culprit mess secretary had laundered money or had transferred a large sum to an unmarked Swiss account. There was this threat of the mess closing down. Sources used to say that a lot of these girls from the hostel used to feed on the goodies sold in a bakery outside the college and the boy friends who accompanied them had become bankrupt one by one.

The worst part of this messy business was the notice board where the list of defualters used to be put in month after month with the dues against their names. These defaulters are not allowed into the mess and not served food. Some of the toppers in the list used to have dues that ran into 5 digits. I had figured in the list once or twice and those months were very difficult and shameful. However, the dinner gathering in the mess used to be a memorable affair with most of us in not so frequently washed lungis used to have long chats and discussions over the dinner and take a walk out of the campus to buy a banana or two from the cigarette shop outside that used to result in a good bowel movement the following day. And all of a sudden we all would decide on a movie in Lungis in a nearby movie tent with a roof and walls made of dried and knitted coconut leaves. The only hassle was the urinals which were out in the open and resemble a miniature Pulicat lake after every intermission and we often used to wade home through those scented waters in our Hawaii chappals with all that mud stuck to their under surface.

Those were the days…