After living for two decades in Qrs C1-97 and when all doors and windows stopped closing if open and opening if closed, we moved to the best Qrs at IIT: Qrs B-140 where we lived for over a decade till my retirement... a 3-bedroom, 3-bathroom affair.
As soon as we moved in, we found there was a lone bathroom attached to the Guest Bedroom, in which there was a Designer Western Toilet. It was so tiny that I was sure my predecessor there, Prof KVR of the 'Protocol' fame, a rotund figure a la Piloo Modi, could never have been able to squeeze in. And after squeezing in, and turning back, I noticed a huge mirror screwed up on the door, not up the wash basin, but way above the commode...you can only fantasize about the choice of its location...
So, I decided to unscrew it from the door and screw it back on the wall of the Guest Bedroom (so-called...it was supposed to be my Study...but by then I was too old to study).
I didn't know that unscrewing a 20-year-old rusted mirror and screwing it back elsewhere could be a hazardous task. So, I took my screw-driver and by main force succeeded in taking it out. And when I tried to screw it back on the wall, all hell broke loose, and one hard turn of the screw-driver cracked it with a discomforting 'phut'.
By then there was this Carpenter in the Tech Market, who was young and efficient but known to be abrupt. I took the mirror with its gaping semicircular chip off to him and asked him if he could kindly fix it on my wall, after cutting it to size. He looked hard at me and said that he was not into house-calls and spat on the Tech Market Wall his mouthful of 'the blood of them beetles they chew' (as the wise Japanese tourist to Cal explained to the horror-stricken Yankee tourist).
It was already 8 PM and I was forlorn. And I appealed mutely to the Father Carpenter who took pity on me and asked me to go to the DVC glass shop and get the damn thing cut to size with the diamond-cutter and then bring it back; which I did. By the time I returned, the Father seemed to have coaxed his Son, since the Son ordered me to take him on my pillion quick...he has lots of pending work in his Shop.
With a few expert drills and soothing screwings he did the job in 2 minutes flat and ordered me to drop him back in the Tech Market.
I was mighty pleased watching him at work and asked him how much should I pay him for his house-call and expertise (I was looking at a round Rs 100).
He then emitted one more grunt, refused payment, and rebuked me:
"Hom oisa admi nahin hain jo aapki musibat mey faida uthainge!"
rendered loosely as:
"I am not the sort who would capitalize on your trouble"
It was then that I recalled that in some communities a broken mirror in a new house is an evil omen...nothing horrible happened to me though...other than a car loan and a house loan both at a whopping 14% interest which I couldn't fully repay by the time I retired...
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And then the other day we took possession of our Nile Valley Apartment and were looking for a Hyderabadi Carpenter who would do the wood work in our 3 bedrooms, Hall and kitchen.
And we were referred to the best carpenter in the locality, Mr Reddy.
One phone call brought him to our doorstep. I answered the door bell and in walked a tall gentleman with a designer bag in his hand and announced himself as the renowned Reddy Carpenter. I couldn't believe my eyes...he was so different than the gloomy Sardarjee or the glib IIT carpenter RD or the Tech Market Despot.
He took his seat on the sofa and after my son and D-i-L presented themselves, he took out a laptop from his bag and went about giving demos of various designs...a virtual tour of the interiors after he would be through. My son and D-i-L had done a lot of home work and so decided on which of the things they liked best, in a couple of hours.
And then he quoted his price after making some complicated calculations on his compu... after some haggling it came to a cool Rs 3 lakhs. And he wanted the money in 3 installments of 1 lakh each. And he was averse to check or draft but wanted crisp thousand rupee notes.
My son had only credit cards and internet banking and he hardly withdraws or carries cash.
The first lakh was easy...he went in and collected all the sundry dollar and euro notes he saved up on his dozen and more Business Trips and a rough calculation came to over a lakh in the latest rupee exchange rate.
All he had to do was ring up an Exchange Guy who presented himself at our home with wads of thousand rupee notes stuffed into his bulging pockets. And in 15 minutes the Exchange was through and the Reddy Sir was paid.
And within a week, he brought a minitruckful of about a hundred machine-cut plywood sheets of various sizes...Jaswant Singh of Gole Bazaar would have fainted.
And after dumping them in our Nile Valley he asked for the next lakh in cash in 2 days.
That was when I had to withdraw a lakh of rupees from our Savings Bank Account in the high-end SR Nagar Branch of SBI. I didn't want to go there and encash a check, because all the seven queues would be 25 long and I can' stand that long. Of course there was a separate line for Senior Citizens and Ladies, but by now you know that I don't like to be seen as either in public...as I told Aniket, I am an evergreen teenager at heart.
So, we decided to draw the amount from an ATM, and I rang up the Relationship Manager (relationship???) to find out the upper limit of cash I can draw in a day.
He replied at once: "40K if yours is a Mastro Card and 50K if it is a Visa Card"
I pulled out my Card to look and you guessed it right...Murphy's Law...it was a Mastro...
That meant I needed 3 trips to the ATM in 3 days...
And then there was this Hyderabad Bandh:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2011/09/atm.html
Happy Gandhi Jayanti!
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