Praising Cod, and Puns for the Halibut

When heat quivers over rush hour at one of the busiest intersections in town, when the thick air is a sickly swirl of crawfish etouffe and chicken masala and tortilla soup all a-simmer in the restaurants crowded together on the tar, there isn’t much for a weary driver to do but peruse the jumble of billboards.

“Order Kalamari, Get a Pappa’s T-Shirt Free,” suggests Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen, a Cajun fish house.

Next door, Khyber North Indian Grill shoots back: “Squid Pro Quo.”

“Come Try Our Stuffed Flounder,” Pappadeaux urges another day.

“On What Charge?” puns Khyber.

This is the story of an Indian immigrant with an insurgent spirit and a bottomless appetite for wordplay who found his soapbox, canvas and stage in the form of a roadside marquee. But his torrent of daily puns is something of a tragicomedy in plastic, for Mickey Kapoor has spent nearly a decade trying to needle a rise out of his stoic neighbor, to no avail.

“Every Tuesday’s Fat Tuesday!” the seafood house enthuses.

“Praise the Lard!” Khyber smirks.

Theirs is a quintessential dispute in this city of patchwork ethnicity, this thriving immigration hub that knows no zoning laws. It is a landscape that is seldom pretty but almost always interesting, with its haphazard mix of fortunetellers, Montessori schools and Vietnamese grocery stores. It is also a city of cars, a town that exists in the frame of a windshield.

“What am I supposed to do, put a price up there? It’s just so dull,” Kapoor said. “Instead, I go for the moral low ground.”

He’s built up a loyal following: Kapoor’s phone shrills with impatient calls from marquee-watchers if he hasn’t drummed up a fresh pun by lunchtime. Hundreds have strolled into his brick eatery of brass hookahs and Afghan carpets not to nibble on his saag paneer but to meet the man who calls himself the “Marquee de Sade.”

Kapoor found his calling eight years ago, when he sank wearily into the park bench outside his brand-new Indian eatery. This was his third Houston restaurant; he’d been working his way in from the outskirts of town for years. As real estate goes, he’d finally arrived, with a slice of concrete on a bustling intersection midway between the wealthy River Oaks enclave and Rice University.

It’s a moment Kapoor now refers to as “one little cosmic accident.” His eye fell on the sign next door. “Go Rockets!” he read--and snorted to himself. How dull, he thought. How banal. Was that any way to root for the home basketball team? Obviously, his new environs needed a creative infusion. And so he posted a retort: “And Please Come Back!”

That first mischievous shot started a steely--and one-sided--war. Day after day, for eight sarcastic years, each manager at the seafood house has played the straight man to Kapoor’s relentless clowning. Pappadeaux is Felix to Oscar, George to Gracie, Rowan to Martin.

“Our Crab Fingers Are Delightful!” Pappadeaux chirps.

“Let No Crab Give You the Finger,” snickers the peanut gallery next door.

Pappadeaux has borne the ribbing with the deliberate oblivion of a kid who has convinced himself that the bullies will get bored and leave him alone--if only he ignores their jeers. Manager Jennifer Brewer said she doesn’t mind the signboard next door. She’s new on the job, she said, and so are the other managers.

“I haven’t even seen anything that makes sense as far as dogging us,” she said.

It’s an impressive show of restraint from a restaurant whose customers pass under the shadow of a massive pink and orange trout to cross the threshold. A frame of soggy boardwalk rings the base of Pappadeaux’s marquee. A motorboat is wedged through the signpost, as if some drunken fisherman ran aground, hopped down to earth and wandered off into this ghostly jungle of traffic lights and strip malls.

Pappadeaux’s unflinching equanimity is a sore spot for Kapoor, who dreams of a neighbor who’d fire back a block-letter rejoinder. “Oh, these poor guys,” Kapoor said in one of his few quiet moments. “They’ve taken such a beating over the years.”

But his remorse is short-lived.

“Hiring Today 3-5,” Pappadeaux announced one morning.

“My You Do Start Them Young,” Khyber cooed.

Kapoor doesn’t confine himself to tormenting the fish restaurant next door. He’s angered animal rights groups with “Let Our Kharma Run Over Your Dogma.” One Mother’s Day, he quipped, “If Gandhi’s Mother Had Cooked Like This, He Might Never Have Fasted.” That aphorism brought the wrath of thousands--”it seemed like thousands, anyway”--of his fellow Indians.

To the dismay of the disgruntled, Kapoor delights in every second of scandal. “When they get offended,” he explained, “you’ve scored.”

That’s just one of the laws of the billboard war, whose etiquette is far more nuanced than it looks. There are two kinds of rules: those Kapoor cheerfully disregards and the ones he follows religiously. Years back, when Pappadeaux managers complained they were being harassed, the two eateries hammered out a rough agreement. Kapoor promised not to disparage the food or the staff.

He’s been breaking his word ever since.

“Obviously, here we are insulting the food, which means we are breaking a ground rule,” he said, pointing in the general direction of his signpost and arching his brows. It was a Secretary’s Day, and the Pappadeaux billboard gushed: “Your Secretary Will Fall in Love With Our Blackened Tuna.”

“As They Say Love Is Blind,” Khyber said.

Predictably, the rules Kapoor embraces are the ones he dreamed up for himself, the ones designed to make wordsmithing a more complex sport. He doesn’t like to repeat himself, even when Pappadeaux trots out the same old platitudes. Even trickier: He doesn’t think it’s fair game to parrot the words in the original message.

Born in India and raised in London, Kapoor is a die-hard pun maestro in wire-rimmed glasses. Take away his coffee cup and he’ll snap, “That’s a coffee-right infringement.” He calls it an affliction, says he hears voices in his bald head.

When it came time for his citizenship interview, Kapoor almost talked himself out of the United States. He couldn’t resist, not when the somber man across the table asked, “Do you believe in the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or subversion?”

“I’ll take subversion,” Kapoor replied.

Kapoor remembers his questioner leaning forward and saying, very seriously, “This is not a multiple-choice question.”

“In that case, vehemently no,” a remorseful Kapoor said.

“He thought, ‘Oh, the little brown man doesn’t understand,’” Kapoor said, and he choked on a fit of laughter. “Lucky for me.”

He got his citizenship anyway.