Summer in Hannover – I: A Dinner at Paris

After reading the news of resuming the bus service from the Indian city of Amrithsar to the Pakistan city of Lahore, crossing the Wagah border, it was my dream to travel an international journey in bus and I could realize it by going to the German city of Hannover from Paris in a bus. I will write about this journey in the coming 4 – 5 posts of tigersamachar.

Prior to start our story I would like to talk about two days I spend in India house, Paris before this trip. Friday evening tiger came to India house for a reunion with SP and Raghavan.

The food in the 4th floor is in a pathetic state after the chief cook Advocate Valya Raman Nair left Paris. However people are managing to prepare something and call it as tasty food. It was Raghavan who made the dinner for that day and I noticed excess oil in curry and other items. After dinner I asked Raghavan, why he add this much oil in everything. His answer was that of a typical Malayali – “That oil was not mine and so I added a lot” -. Thanks god for the salt is his own!.

Finishing up the dinner, Tiger, Raghavan, Bhaskar and Sarati went for walking in the moon light in Cité Universitaire campus to get a relief from the hot summer in paris. The campus looks like the IIT campus but the difference is there is no deer or monkeys. However you can see lot of beautiful girls there, that is almost impossible to find in IIT Campus.

We walked talking about the dramatic incident happened in india house just before we leave. I cannot mention it here as it is a sensitive topic. However I still wonder how it is possible to open a door without using a key or breaking the lock!. Let’s leave it as we already wrote a lot about India house in previous posts.

On the way we noticed some trees that lost skin in some areas leaving white patches on dark background. Raghavan said “it looks like …bla..bla..bla…. sorry I don’t remember that word”. He doesnt know how to tell the name of that symptom in english. Tiger or even Bhaskar, who is working in biological sciences or Sarati cannot get that word, but we know what it is called in our language such as ‘Vella-pandu’ in Malayalam.

As usual, tiger was curious to find that word, and after SP reached there on Saturday, tiger asked SP about this, unfortunately he too doesn’t know. But he is not ready to leave it saying he doesn’t know. He said there is no english word for that as the skin of english people are white and they cannot recognize it and that’s why there’s no chance for having a suitable english word. I asked many of my friends but nobody knows the proper word.

Finally I sent a mail to the Living Malayalam-English-Malayalam Dictionary, Nalin Kumar (Nalinakshan Vaidyar). Within seconds I got the reply with the correct word, vitiligo. Leucoderma (also called Leukoderma) is another term for vitiligo. I hope today’s tigersamachar helped you to learn a new word.

I think you have reached the heights of boring. Let me stop here for today, you will read the rest of Summer in Hannover in the forthcoming posts of tigersamachar. Check tigersamachar regularly for latest updates.