the case of the missing bath towels

Yesterday the maintenance guys from the consulate came over to take our welcome kit away. A welcome kit is the stuff that is supplied to you by the consulate while you wait for your own stuff to arrive, like kitchen things, bathroom things and linen. Now that all of our belongings have finally made their appearance, we have to give the loaned items back.

They spent an hour or two taking inventory of the items, which I had conveniently arranged in the storage room for easy collection, and then came to me to discuss the things that they could not locate. Two pillowcases. Check, those are in the linen closet. The crew boss crossed pillowcases off the list. Six soup bowls? I never had six soup bowls. I mean, how could I have lost or broken the entire set? Makes sense. Soup bowls get crossed off the list. One water glass. Check, I broke that the day we got here. Sorry. One sabine spatula and one sabine turine. Umm. I don't even know what that is. “Neither do I” says the crew boss. Sabine spatula and sabine turine get crossed off the list. Two bath towels. OK. Lemme go look.

I look in the linen closet. All of the towels are ours. I look in the bathroom cabinets. Nope. I make a very cursory glance through the storage dresser. No bath towels. As I'm explaining my lack of an explanation to the crew boss, I notice that Shanti is gesticulating in the background behind the maintenance guys' backs. She is making big eyes at me and jerking her head toward the wall behind her. I'm still explaining that I don't know what happened to the two missing bath towels and making big eyes back at her, shrugging my shoulders. Finally, I just say “What Shanti? Do you know where the towels are?” Everybody turns to look at her, and she drops her head in embarrassment. “The beer, madam”, she faintly whispers.

Ah! The beer! Of course! I had forgotten.

So then I have to tell the maintenance crew the following story to explain what happened to the two missing bath towels:

You see, when my husband was away in Delhi on a business trip, I tried to get as many chores done as possible. Among those things that needed to be done was the purchase of a supply of beer. You see, beer can only be purchased here in a small establishment called a “wine shop”. These wine shops have no wine, but do carry beer and liquor. They are often very seedy places and certainly not places where little American girls just wander up to the window and ask for two cases of beer. So I signed an Indian friend on to help me with this purchase, which came off without a hitch. I was so happy! I had successfully procured two cases of Kingfisher, the local Indian brew. This brew comes in very large bottles, of which I now proudly owned twenty-four (24).

I hauled my new beer stash back into the pantry and turned on the pantry refrigerator, which we had immediately, of course, dubbed the “beer refrigerator”. I unloaded the cases and neatly arranged the bottles. I then went about my business for the day.

As I was later making my dinner (“making my dinner” consists of spooning the yummy things that Shanti makes onto a plate, sticking said plate into the microwave, and setting the timer to approximately 1.75 minutes), I decided with glee that I would like a beer with my meal. I felt so posh. It had been a while since I had enjoyed a simple beer at home. I went back into the pantry, opened the refrigerator door, and promptly slammed it shut again. My brain whirred. What? Why? Why was there icy beer foam all over the place? What was that horrific hissing sound? Why did it look like a lot of those bottles had violently exploded? What the hell?

Of course, not being used to such a pampered lifestyle, it had never occurred to me that the “beer refrigerator” might actually be a freezer. Like, where normal families put their meat and stuff. Oh god, I thought. I have just blown up all my beer. I unplugged the “refrigerator” and grabbed two towels to put by the door, preparing for the melt-down. I couldn't possibly do anything at that moment. I mean, the beers were actually in the very act of exploding violently. There were shards of glass flying and bottle tops popping and gas hissing. It was scary. So I just turned off the light and went to watch a movie, beerless.

Next morning, I got up early, pulled on my overalls, and went to investigate the damage. The towels, of course, were soaked and stinky, sopping up the beer that was dripping out the door. I opened the freezer again to find that almost all of the bottles had completely exploded. Six or seven were intact, though they did have foam seeping out from under the bottle cap. I set these aside. I mean, come on. Somebody will drink them, some day. Right? (For the record, there are now only three left in the real refrigerator). The rest were just a mess. I started to carefully collect that nasty-looking shards of glass, bottle bottoms, soggy labels, and bottle caps with jagged rims still attached, etc.

I filled up one cardboard case and hauled it outside. Sival, great entrepreneur of trash that he is, came running to take the box from me (he gets three or four rupees per box from the box walla and glass is worth a fortune). I gave it to him. He looked into the box and looked back up at me. I smiled. He just shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Chalk another one up for the crazy American lady.

I went back to work and, by this time, Shanti arrived. She poked her head around the pantry door to find me sitting in a pool of beer and playing with broken glass. She screamed, wrinkled up her nose at the stench, and rolled her eyes heavenward. I was, after having initially been quite surly about the whole thing, feeling rather jovial. I mean, if you can't cry, then laugh. “Look Shanti! I blew up the beer!” She just sighed and said “Oh, madam”. Then she plopped down beside me and started to put glass in the box.

Sival hauled the last of the glass away and we, with much ceremony, put the stinky and sopping-wet towels in a plastic bag to be deposited in the dumpster. Shanti shuffled me off toward the shower and went to get the mop, muttering quietly to herself all the while: “Oh, madam. Oh, madam”.

“And that is what happened to the two missing bath towels!”, I said.

The maintenance guys, by this point, were laughing so hard that their eyes were watering. They were all mopping their eyes with their handkerchiefs. Shanti was giggling so much that she had turned off the heat under the chicken so she wouldn't burn it. The crew boss said “OK madam. It's OK. We just won't tell anybody about the towels and no one will ever miss them” . Two bath towels got crossed off the list.