India Tofu and the Teacup of Doom

While I was in India my pipes froze and my tub and toilet backed up, way up, according to my pet watching friend. It was a Poopocalypse! It took him awhile to convince the landlord that he had not flushed a bird (yes, a literal bird), as he first suspected, but that the whole system was not draining. At one point my friend went upstairs as the landlord was plunging the sink and when he came down ... my landlord was emptying the poo-filled toilet with one of my drinking glasses. He had walked into my kitchen, opened the cupboard, pulled out a clean whiskey glass and started bailing shit with it. Not an empty yoghurt container or take out container, no, a whiskey glass. My friend almost lost his mind! He wordlessly went upstairs, got a cheap plastic cup and physically took the turd-smeared glass away from the landlord and gave him the cup. My violated whiskey glass then ended up in the garbage.

The next day the landlord and his wife came back and presented my friend with a Norman Rockwell mug (pictured) still in its box to replace my whiskey glass. It had a painting of a boy and his grandfather and was titled "Looking out to sea." Not my style but a nice conciliatory gesture. My friend told me about the mug when I first got home but I forgot about it until this week, when I pulled it out and saw brown specks inside. Seeds? Mouse turds? I don't know but, after the fraught relationship I have had with them the past few years, I have a heartwarming image in my mind of my landlady picking those mouse turds specially for me.