Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

This collection published 2010

Copyright © Sidin Vadukut 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-143-06711-5

This digital edition published in 2016.

e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75016-4

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is dedicated to the Vadukuts and the Kapoors.
But most of all to K.
God only knows how you cope.

Contents

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Acknowledgments

1. DISCOVERY

Under the Sink

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Any resemblance between the characters in this book and people you, the reader, may know in real life are absolutely NOT purely coincidental. In fact such similarities are entirely plausible.

That is because somewhere out there is the real Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese. One day, perhaps soon perhaps later perhaps already, Varghese will pick up this book in a bookstore, or from a footpath vendor or will be gifted it by an adequately unclose friend from the office or housing complex. The room will immediately begin to spin around him. And then Varghese will wonder how in God’s name I got access to his diaries.

And my answer to him is this: Bloody fool!

Followed by: Never hide your uber-personal diaries, written in Microsoft Word and burnt on to compact discs, under the kitchen sink!

Now they are mine. My precious compact discs.

A few months ago, while I was still struggling to come up with an idea for a book to impress the people at Penguin India with, I moved into a new apartment in Delhi. While commencing on a thorough examination of the premises I found an old Domino’s Pizza box, quite beaten up, wedged under the kitchen sink inside the wooden cabinet. It had been tightly stuffed into the space behind the mouldy green drainpipe.

Common sense told me that the box was perhaps used to hold the pipe straight. But then a smaller voice in my head said there may be free pizza or some such involved. So I pulled it out and out fell seven compact discs (Moser Baer, non-rewritable). The discs were slightly scratched, but not unusable. There were no markings at all on any of the CDs to identify the data within.

My heart leapt for joy. Putting this discovery together with the fact that I knew some MBA type had lived in the flat before me, I instantly knew what was on those CDs.

Alas only three of the seven CDs had porn on them and all from the Numb Nuts Big Butts collection. (Which I already own on DVD, iPod Video and audio—only for flights.) This was a letdown. Then one CD had 300 MB worth of data on ball bearings, another had entire saved Wikipedia pages and the second last one had hundreds of pictures of dogs downloaded from the Internet.