“Oh no,” Josie said. “Not that again. Look what happened the last time.” She indicated the mess around them. “Which, by the way, I’m not cleaning up. I say we report a break in and then get the hell out of here.”
“Not yet,” Dhanesh said. “We have to send the spirit into the light.”
“How about we send him to the Burger King next door instead?” Steve tried.
Dhanesh ignored him. “Everyone, put your fingers on the pointer.” They reluctantly obeyed. “Now, spirit of McDonald’s, are you angry that we switched to vegetable oil?”
The pointer shot to the “No”.
“Thought not,” Dhanesh said. “Okay, did you only start eating the French fries once we switched to vegetable oil?”
The pointer slid to the “Yes”.
“Spirit of McDonald’s, are you, by chance, a Hindu?”
The pointer bounced on the “Yes”.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Steve yelled, staring at Dhanesh.
Dhanesh took his hand off the pointer and looked at his coworkers. “I think I get it,” he said to them. “Hindus are strict vegetarians. No beef. Never. It’s Dharmic law. Ahimsa - the principal of noninjury. It’s a Hindu's first duty in fulfilling religious obligations to God. Um, it’s like this, all of our actions have karmic consequences. If we inflict injury, or pain, or death, even indirectly by eating other creatures, we’ll experience an equal measure of suffering sometime in the future. In a next life.”
“I’m lost,” Josie said, holding the reddened paper in her hand. “This guy didn’t eat French fries cooked in beef. He ate them cooked in vegetable oil.”
Steve groaned at what she’d said. Pointing at the sheet, he said, “Cooked in vegetable oil, but flavored with beef. That’s how we kept the French fry flavor we’d always had.”
“But didn’t he know that? After all, it says so right here,” Josie said.
Steve shook his head. “No, now it says it. But back them it only said ‘natural flavors’. Beef was never mentioned. No one saw the need. To our credit, though, the new French fries are a hell of a lot healthier.”
Now it was Dhanesh’s turn to groan. “But that wouldn’t do a dead Hindu any good. Great that he died healthy; not so great that he broke with Ahimsa, even inadvertently.”
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