Before I utter another word, let me ask of all of you something I rarely ask for…forgiveness. Because what follows can be misconstrued as a pathetic attempt at writing porn in the slim hope that this genre of writing may indeed prove to be more lucrative than the domains I have been meandering about for the last several years.

In all fairness I must submit that the blame cannot solely be put on my shoulders. I have as my accomplices, a few of my friends who want me to explain the meaning of a viral (and how it is different from a Socially Transmitted Disease) and a few friends who get their jollies mainly by looking at impossible dimensions, improbable proportions and insane nudity.

And the innocent, unknowing (and hopefully forgiving) victim is a friend who works with a product that aims to replace butter.

Now, butter and I…or rather butter and most of us have had a very unhealthy relationship for quite a few years. Those of us who used to consume a loaf of bread and a slab of butter in one sitting, or those of us who have drooled at Chowpatty as the Pav Bhajiwalla slapped a 500gm cube of pasteurised Amul and those of us who knew a dal tadka only when a cubelette of butter was slipped onto a bowl of steaming hot tempered dal at the dhaba, know that we enjoyed more than just the hoardings that were utterly butterly delicious.

So when I recently read that margarine which had been designed to replace butter around the world on health grounds was now found to be more popular than before, my joy knew no bounds. I could now tell my wife that eating margarine was healthy and also hope that someday soon someone would discover that the yellow of an egg was good for the heart.

But I digress…and steering myself back onto track and coming confidently out of the skid I begin my story about Butter Toast.

For those of you who think this is going to be a recipe for a breakfast special, please leave this forum…only those of you who are adult enough or at least adulterous may please stay on and read…

Butter Toast is an Amsterdam specialty. To make it you need two white females of about so many years and of such and such size, one black male who is impressively endowed and visibly aroused and a few kilograms of butter. You take the butter, thaw it sufficiently to be able to cover both females in a nice overall way that leaves them…well…buttered.

You take a huge sheet of grease resistant paper and spread it over the bed. Then you get the girls to lie down on the bed keeping a distance of about a foot in between them. And you lay them down facing each other.

You play dirty music and spray aromatic aphrodisiacs and when the girls are ready and boiling, you slip in the black fellow (or the burnt toast if you want to call him that) in between the two ladies. Keep your stove on simmer for a while and once you see signs of the cup bubbling over, turn it up to high and then let the dish climax into a natural progression.

So these two black brothers (no, I am not being racist…just refusing to be color blind) walk into an establishment which advertises that one of its Chefs’ Special is Butter Toast. And ask for a sumptuous meal. The hostess leads them into a parlor where they choose their ‘butterbelles’ and then move onto separate chambers.

Just a few minutes later we hear a lot of commotion, a loud noise and one of the brothers comes running out of his room…his clothes hastily put back on…and screams at the Manager and demands his money back.

Only after he has been calmed down does he reveal that he feels he has been cheated because he paid for real butter and what he got was just margarine. And no amount of counseling from the Manager about the benefits of margarine versus the dangers of real butter could help convince the man to change his mind. The Manager was just about to pay and make the whole situation go away when the other black ran screaming out of his room.

And he was in tears.

I should have listened to my friends who warned me about butter and advised me to shift to margarine. But No…I was adamant he said. And insisted on the real butter experience, though it was against the rules. And now both my buttered partners have been affected. Their cholesterol levels went so high that they couldn’t toast my bread.

When the other brother heard this, he quietly walked up to the manager and apologized for his earlier outburst.

That was when an old man who looked like Moses, stepped out from behind the curtains with a video camera in hand and said…now hear ye, hear ye…listen to the moral of this story…butter is good…but margarine is better…so if your wife wants to shift from Amul to Mello, please let her…

and everyone lived happily ever after:-)