Whatever be the other pluses and minuses of being a female from the North-East, there is one definite advantage. If you go to Lalitha's for lunch, you get a mile's start ahead of the rest when it comes to getting service (Is it a mile's start or a meal's start, ek meel ki badhat ?).

(I know the above paragraph is confusing/misleading and I ought to rewrite it, but, hey, what the heck!)

So I went to Lalitha's for Lunch on Saturday and there was this group of four girls from the North-east sitting two tables away from me.And these NorthE waiters at Lalitha's kept chatting them up, getting them extra rice, or extra 'sobji',or extra 'cord', even when the girls were protesting 'enough, enough' or something to that effect. They all but put the food in their mouths (Though it bothers me, I am not going to resolve the 'they/their' syntactical conflict in this sentence). And here I was franctically waving my slip of paper, on which was written 'Meal: 1 Nos', like a Firang waving a white flag in the middle of some African tribal war, and hardly even getting a nod of reassurance.

The girls themselves? They were pretty. One of them had thick dark hair, the other large expressive eyes, the third a close-up smile and the fourth, Uf! don't even ask...Together they would have made up any man's dreamboat.

I was going to give the close-up smile, the look, but I didn't want to get into trouble with the Annadaata-waiter-maaibaaps and delay my lunch more than it already was.