Big Breakthrough

Mallika Kagzi (seated) spells out her conditions for getting tea

Trivial as this may appear, our problem of having tea in the Garden has been sorted out. Mallika Kagzi has very kindly acceded to our plea to accept PAYMENT for the tea she gets for Club members on request, especially in these cold wintry mornings.
She however, put forth one condition: The Club should provide her a "nice" thermos flask.
The first to jump at this was Siba Prasad Maitra. This morning he requested her for the tea he intends treating us to on his birthday the day after tomorrow. Ordinarily Mallika would have volunteered with hot home-brewed tea (as she has been doing in the past), but now she will have to accept payment from Maitra for this favour.
Earlier in the morning, Santosh Tyagi had wanted to give us tea along with the biscuits she had brought from Delhi. She did not want to bother Mallika and had relied on the tea vendor close to the Garden who had been catering to us, off and on, for the past several years. This morning he refused.

Santosh Tyagi treats us to biscuits

He said that unless we obtain permission from the watchman at the Garden gate, he cannot send us the tea. Twice in the recent past, he had been

Khatoon Baig

refused entry in the Garden, he explained.
Santosh did not want to kick up a row and we all settled for having the biscuits without tea. It was humiliating and left a bad taste – more so, since the issue of lifting the restrictions on food and beverages (ref post of December 10) is yet to be formally taken up. That was when a collective decision was taken to no longer be at anybody’s mercy and that we would have our celebrations as before and collectively face the consequences.
In an unrelated development, we hear that Khatoon Baig is going through a terrible time because of asthma. She hadn’t quite recovered from the hospitalization in Hyderabad (ref post of December 2) and given the cold wave and pollution levels in Mumbai, her condition had badly aggravated. She was hospitalized again – at Kokilaben for a week and last Saturday, we are told she was discharged in a relatively “stable” state. The worst is over, but she is still in distress. Let us all pray for her.