Friday's Nasties

This volume of Friday's, Byzylyk, reminds me of a story from my childhood, in a poor country. In the cantonments where I lived, I was surrounded by Muslims, who cooked various aromatic cuisines, such as aloo dum, aloo paratha, biryani, and rich moghul curries. Frustrated with my daily meals of smoking dried up birch leaves while pretending they were tobacco cigarettes, I decided one day to venture out of my cantonment towards the kingdom of Id, where all the Muslims of the world lived together. I hired a bullock cart driver who knew the way to Id. Along the way, my co-passengers, who were going to a mathematics conference in Id, discussed various topics which they refered to as the Stephen King universe, starting from the picture of the universe, space and time, the expanding universe, the uncertainty principal, elementary particles and the forces of nature, black holes, which I might add was unpleasantly rebuked by a long discussion on black holes ain't so black, then the origin of the universe, the arrow of time, worm holes and time travel, the exhortation of single mindedness, Alexander the crown prince of indefinites, and so on, until nightfall, as we were about to enter the Gates of Id, when the Bullock cart driver who had been quiet throughout the journey turned around and said, you know, I know a place not far from the kingdom of Id, where they are having a conference on the unification of physics. But, as a young laddy from a poor cantonment, as we entered the Gates of Id, all I could think about was digging into aloo dum, and aloo paratha. Decades later, when I was living in Cuba, repairing old cars with new parts, I remembered this story, and wondered, indeed, some are born to sweet delight, and some are born to endless night.