The other day I was in a mall. If it gives you the impression that I hardly visit a mall, you are mistaken. In fact, we go there more times a month than is healthy either for our pocket or our health. No! I don’t go there for shopping. We go there on evenings when we are too tired watching the romcoms on TV. What are sitcoms, by the way? Yes. We will talk about my absolute ignorance about the actual meaning of the two later. But now about the mall.
So, it was a weekday. Let it be known that we never visit malls on weekends. By the way, we have realised that days in a week have ceased to have any meaning for us. We merely have time – time for the morning tea, breakfast, some more tea, lunch, afternoon tea, snack and dinner. We check the days only when we decide to go to the mall.
Well. It is like this. The other day, we were bored to the bone. So we decided that we should visit the mall. We got ready. And then realised that it was a Sunday. It should have struck us much before. Because on Sundays, our driver is on his weekly off. But we are old, and such lapses are increasingly becoming more and more common.
What are with the weekends! You see, it is amazing to see the malls swarming with people who are clueless about what to do with their time if they are let loose from their official tethers. That we go to the mall because we lack club memberships or work and don’t know what to do with our time is understandable. Because we are senile buffoons who ceased to be productive for society long back. But why do the malls overflow with the productive generation? To prove Mr N R Narayana Murthy right in a roundabout way?
Be that as it may, this is meant to be about us. So, that day we were bored to the bone. Am I repeating? That proves I am old. Anyway, so we decided to go to the mall to have coffee at the food court. We go to the food court for coffee, assuming that it is cheaper because the chairs are hard! (But am I right?)
The problem is, in this mall, the tea shops at the food court are right in front of the bars (did you know that they call them pubs these days?)! So by the time you finish your first cup, have taken a good look at how fashion struggles to stay profitable on bodies that are steps behind temporally, your belly aches for dinner.
Did you know the varieties of margaritas these bars have on offer!? Well by the time you taste your way through to the right mix, you are almost drunk. If you thought you would escape inebriation because you are a whiskey drinker, you are wrong. For they offer 2:1. If someone past 60 doesn’t feel dizzy with three pegs under the belt, then kudos to him/her. One good thing, though. The food we order invariably gets packed into doggy bags, and the next two dinners come free!
Pix credit:chatgpt
