A quick tale 186

When her steely resolve melted

She can remember the last time it happened. 20th August 2001. It was exactly two days before she found out about calories and suchlike. Ever since she learnt that she would have to powerwalk for 35 minutes to burn the calories from one vadai, she hasn't touched one. Of course, she has the odd bite (more like a smidgen of a crumb of a bite) every now and then. But straightaway she would start to walk furiously until she was satisfied that the offending crumb had been sweated off. And her body had been restored to its pre-vadai caloric state.

That was until today when she visited her sister-in-law who, as it often happens in stories likes this, was frying masal vadais for tiffin. Go on, have one, urged the sister-in-law, as she placed a plate of deliciously golden vadais in front of her. You can always exercise later, she suggested. Under such compulsion, our lady's steely resolve melted and she found herself biting into a vadai. It was as if the years of denial had finally taken their toll and the floodgates burst open. Before she knew it, she was having a second, a third, a fourth...she had cleaned out a plateful of vadais. Two thousand eight hundred calories in all! She would have to run for seven hours non-stop to burn off all the calories. And that was never going to happen. She thought about it for a moment, let out a long burp, patted her stomach and asked her host if she had some sambar to wash down the vadais.