Hospitality

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Hospitality nowadays refers to joints giving food and shelter.

During my early years in Nellore, hotels such as the famous Kamala Vilas advertised like this:

"Boarding & Lodging"

Let us take Boarding first:

Boarding Guests can be broadly divided into three groups:

1, Atithis: These are the ones invited beforehand with proper notice; like the three inevitable brahmins in తద్దినములు (religious ancestral death anniversary rituals)

2. Abhyagatis: These tend to drop in just at the meal time; like the clerks pouring into Kamala Vilas during their hectic lunch-breaks, making 3-men-long waiting lines behind each boarder (thus spoiling the fun in eating that heavenly sambar-rice)

3. Aagantakas: These arrive either by accident or by design much after meal time when the housewife closes the kitchen feeding the leftovers to welcome beggars or street dogs (there being no fridges those days).

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Let us confine ourselves to the Aagantakas...the other two are uninteresting.

During the Pandav Vanavas (forest-sojourn) many sages used to visit them, mainly attracted by Yudhishtir, either to teach him or converse with him or learn from him. Their cottage was bustling with unexpected guests (like students used to flock to my Qrs at IIT Kharagpur on the pretext of clarifying their doubts in physics but in reality to gobble the sumptuous dosas fed by my wife).

Draupadi was fed up and complained to her husband and he prayed to the Sun God.

Sun God was pleased and gifted Draupadi an Akshaya Patra (a silver vessel that yields unlimited food on praying to it).

But it came (like all good things in life) with a proviso, caveat, or constraint:

It would stop providing food once Draupadi herself eats her meal after feeding everyone else...till the next meal time.

(Something similar happened to Gupi Gyne and Bagha Byne...two friends in that celebrated Bengali movie of Satyajit Ray...the two were given an Akshaya Patra by ghosts in the forest with the proviso that it would work if and only if Gupi and Bagha clapped their palms joined to each other's...much like Ishani's 'High Five'...and like India and Pakistan wanting to get into the Security Council, courtesy China).

Duryodhan once plotted to trouble Draupadi and sent the splenetic sage Durvasa to go and seek food for him and his chelas after Draupadi finishes her meal and cleans her Akshaya Patra. 

Which the sage did.

And Draupadi was forlorn and, as usual, prayed to Lord Krishna who arrived hungry asking for a bite of curry.

And Draupadi said "nothing doing"...that was precisely why he was summoned...

And Krishna asked Draupadi to fetch her bowl, peered into it, and discovered a bit of leftover curry sticking to its sides (there being no Vim Vessel-Cleaning Liquid-Lemon-Flavor then).

He gulped it and Durvasa and his chelas at once found their bellies bloating with excess food. And fled pronto.

There is a sublime reason for this:

Krishna lets out his secret: He is the Jatharagni (Gastric Hunger Juice) residing in the bellies of ALL beings (in a shloka from Gita that my grandfather used to recite before eating his every meal):

अहं वैश्वानरो भूत्वा प्राणिनां देहमाश्रित: |
प्राणापानसमायुक्त: पचाम्यन्नं चतुर्विधम् ||

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Speaking of my wife's unlimited feeding of dosas to Bengali Aagantakas:

She used to keep a vessel-full of dosa-batter in her spare fridge in our Guest Room in Qrs B-140 at IIT KGP.

One evening at 9 PM, Ms MS (Junior) arrived at our flat bearing gifts from the US where she was doing her PhD then at Cincinnati.

And I asked her how was her mom Ms MS (Senior) who was recently widowed then unfortunately.

"She is waiting in the rickshaw outside"

"Fetch her in"

"No...she can't visit...till her one-year mourning period is over"

"Go...tell her that Auntie is making dosas"

And to our delight and amusement both mother and daughter bustled in all smiles.

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Jesus Christ (called "Jesu Krishto" by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa fondly) also had to improvise for his 4000 Aagantakas by a miracle like Lord Krishna's:

This story, which appears only in Mark and Matthew, is also known as the miracle of the seven loaves and fish, as the Gospel of Matthew refers to seven loaves and a few small fish used by Jesus to feed a multitude.^[4] According to the Gospels, a large crowd had gathered and was following Jesus. Jesus called his disciples to him and said:

"I have compassion for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry, or they may collapse on the way."

His disciples answered:

"Where could we get enough bread in this remote place to feed such a crowd?"

"How many loaves do you have?" Jesus asked.

"Seven," they replied, "and a few small fish."

Jesus told the crowd to sit down on the ground. Then he took the seven loaves and the fish, and when he had given thanks, he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and they in turn to the people. They all ate and were satisfied. Afterwards, the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were leftover. The number of those who ate was four thousand men, besides women and children. After Jesus had sent the crowd away, he got into the boat and went to the vicinity of Magadan (or Magdala).

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My mother told me this droll incident:

The stock of rice was getting depleted by the day in our Gudur home and father was postponing its replenishment...typical male procrastination. And finally the Britannia Biscuit Tin holding rice got emptied after cooking dinner one night, and father promised to go to the shop early next morning to fetch rice for next day's lunch and the rest of the month.

And then at 11 in the night 3 paternal cousins of mine landed up at our home on their way to Nellore from Tirupati by the last bus that got stuck up due to some mechanical failure. Upon discreet inquiries they revealed that they didn't have their dinner and were as hungry as Durvasa's chelas.

Not having an Akshaya Patra of the Lord Krishna variety, mother had to ask one of my younger sisters, a prize-winning athlete in her school, to jump over the backyard partition wall into the neighbor's house, wake them up, and borrow a kilo of rice for the nonce.

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Coming to Aagantakas of the Lodging Variety, here is a story told me by Professor kV Rao, a decade senior to me at IIT KGP:

KVR was often traveling to Delhi to participate in the Question Paper Setting and Answer Script Evaluation of the plethora of exams conducted by the UPSC. I asked him if he enjoyed his travels and he said, yes, it was fun since Air Travel and Hospitality were free. But, he said, he had to still shell down money from his pocket, which he didn't mind. He made 'Connections' :)

One night the flight was delayed and by the time he reached the UPSC Guest House he was told: "No Room" bluntly.

And then he remembered that one of his ex-students, PVR, was then a Research Associates at IIT Delhi; and he had his hostel address.

So he went there and knocked on the door of PVR who was in his dreamland that research associates dream in, whatever...

And KVR thrust himself into the single room with a single cot and single table and a single chair, spread his towel on the floor, and lay down murmuring apologies.

PVR was stunned and requested KVR to exchange sleeping quarters with him: PVR on the floor and KVR on the cot.

There was this prolonged argument of protocol, the consummation of which was that the cot was lifted and rested against the wall, and both the guest and host slept on the floor side by side reminiscing.... 

Like that Aesop's Father, Son, and the Donkey :)

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