Honest Salsa

After enduring painful monsoon traffic, bumps and snarls for almost two hours, I was famished when we reached a friend’s place over the weekend. I requested my friend instantly – much to the chagrin of my wife – for something to eat. As soon as we were served some snacks, accompanied with a bright coloured sauce, I was tempted to pounce. To my disappointment, the sauce was on the other side of the table and I asked my friend to pass me the nice looking chutney. 

Lo and behold! The outburst began. He scorned at me; handed me the bowl of chutney; explained the pains they had undergone that day to prepare that special salsa sauce for the first time and cautioned me of the tempest ahead (his wife would be joining shortly!) for me for having called this fruit of labour as mere chutney!

My wife looked at me with equal disdain. My hunger vanished. The cheese bites were stuck, akin to Adam’s apple, in the passage. I was feeling sinful. The poverty of language had never been an impediment till that moment; nor had honesty!

I have always been a connoisseur of good food, though, with experience, the appreciations have flown from the heart rather than the head. My emotional honesty has emerged over several years of travel and turmoil.

One incident just flashed on my memory screen. Soon after my marriage, when I started carrying lunchbox - romantically prepared by my wife - to office, I would religiously appreciate the food on return. Appreciation is a great motivation – the more I praised, the more spices she added - till one evening when my colleagues visited our home for dinner. In their enthusiasm to laud my wife’s culinary skills, they told her that the contents of the lunchbox were too spicy for me to handle and that I bought food from the canteen while they finished my tiffin.

The aftermath is best left to each one’s imagination!

However, this and many a travail later, i realized that honesty was a risky, yet supreme credo. The world is imploring upon the citizens – preachers and practitioners alike – to remain honest. Nevertheless, the news of scams and scandals and shame of corruption continues unabated. Honesty is in compliance with one’s internal value system. The belief that one holds as paramount – be it simplicity or greed or indulgence or deceit or sensitivity or anything else – governs an individual’s definition of honesty. The construct is subjective and the practitioner has to take a conscious call between short-term pleasure and long-term happiness.

Before the onslaught would start, I quickly banked on Google to find that salsa was a spicy sauce of chopped vegetables or fruits used as a condiment especially with Mexican dishes. Where were the Mexican dishes, I wondered? Chutney, I discovered, was an Indian condiment of mangoes, tomatoes, onions, chilies, etc. Had I defied truth by calling salsa as chutney? If I would have called it salsa sauce, would the taste have been different?

A minimalist by choice, I preferred to keep my arguments cut down by Occam’s razor and waited for my friend’s wife to arrive. I preferred happiness over pleasure or in other words, chutney over salsa! Having settled the mental conflict, I waited for the real duel. What would be the right stance – saying the truth or subscribing to what pleases the world? His wife entered.

And, simultaneously - Ding-dong.

A few more guests arrived. A smile donned my lips as much as it adorned my wife and my friend’s faces as the discussion would now migrate to other subjects.

I sat relieved, saved from possible emotional wreckage! 

With an unanswered query – honest though, I lived to thrive rather than whither….