Aqua and I were sit­ting at a place called Salon Mousse in Indi­rana­gar get­ting our beauty treat­ments done.

In front of us was a huge glass win­dow (and we debated whether it was sound proof since we couldn’t hear the traf­fic), a beau­ti­ful tree in front pro­vid­ing much needed green cover. It’s noon on a Wednesday.

As I stared out with a feel­ing of con­tent­ment, I feel I could get used to this way of living :)

These one day hol­i­days in the mid­dle of the week are very dif­fer­ent from the long week­ends. They are like guilty (and sin­ful) plea­sures. You work for two days and then sud­denly, you have a day off. It’s almost like you’ll hear your phone ring any minute with some­one shout­ing and ask­ing you to come back to work imme­di­ately. But no such thing hap­pened thank­fully.

It was such a gor­geous day that it would have been sin­ful to stay in. And what bet­ter way to cel­e­brate we thought than to get our­selves a lit­tle bit of pam­per­ing. While Aqua had a near makeover, I got a lit­tle bit of clean­ing activ­i­ties per­formed on my oth­er­wise rather ugly feet.

To cel­e­brate Suvarna Kar­nataka, we decided to have our­selves a very gor­geous and fill­ing lunch at 6 Bal­ly­gunge Place. We had to wait, of course. It seems every­one was eat­ing out and all domes­tic kitchens in Ban­ga­lore wore a deserted look, if you noticed yes­ter­day. The wait­ing time was ½ hour so we decided to have some cof­fee downstairs.

Finally, they had a table for us. Six of us women (Aqua and I were joined by 4 other assorted female spec­i­mens from dif­fer­ent parts of the city) imme­di­ately made our­selves com­fort­able inside the restau­rant, at one point mak­ing such a ruckus that I thought they would throw us out. But the Ben­galis turned out to be really nice people.

The only prob­lem with 6 Bal­ly­gunge is that Aqua and I are so much in love with the place (she being from Dar­jeel­ing and me from Assam) that we tend to over order and over eat.

But, throw­ing cau­tion to the winds and calo­ries, we had a really nice meal. Not every­one liked the fish. I realised that it had taken me a while to get used to sea food after eat­ing river fish for years. I guess the reverse also stands true. River fish tends to be sweet tast­ing, but oh so yummy. But not every­one seems to have liked the taste. Any­way, Deki and I tried every­thing with great enthu­si­asm, while the only veg­e­tar­ian in our group was pretty quiet all through the meal :)

We also had the chicken in red curry (which was nice and spicy) and prawns in mus­tard curry. I of course, rarely ever dis­like any food, and this being close to home cui­sine, gorged like a pig in frenzy. They had to keep the restau­rants open for a while longer as we weren’t done till we pol­ished of our mishti dois.

And appar­ently, in related news, the Suvarna Kar­nataka cel­e­bra­tions went off really went at the KSCA sta­dium with over thou­sands of peo­ple in atten­dance, reported today’s papers. And we’re well on our way to being renamed as Ben­ga­looru.

I have a bit of a worry. If Ban­ga­lore res­i­dents were called Ban­ga­lore­ans, what are they going to be called now?

I shud­der to even think about it!