Guest Column - Winter Coat - Supratim Sengupta

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 Dear Sir,

In the spirit of the season and inspired by your "Good deeds" series, here is an account of an experience that took place about 12 years ago. The title is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Nikolai Gogol's famous short-story "Overcoat".

best regards

 
Supratim

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It was beginning to get chilly with temperatures in the evening dipping to single digits. It was barely ten days since I landed in Edmonton without any heavy-duty winter clothing necessary to deal with the long Canadian winter.  I had to get a winter coat quickly. So, that evening I caught a bus to the nearest mall to shop for a new winter coat. I soon spotted a clothing store displaying winter coats of various kinds and walked in. Normally, I hate shopping. A visit to Big Bazaar for more than 20 minutes leaves me in a dazed and confused state. But malls were new to me then and the brightly lit store with stacks of jackets, sweaters and other winter wear seemed mesmerizing. I began to walk around taking it all in and in no hurry to look for my main reason for entering the store.

It was a fairly small store, not the Wal Mart variety, with just two young ladies managing the cash counters as well as helping customers. It was also fairly empty and soon one of the sales girls came over with the customary "do you need any help?" question. My normal reaction to such a query is to politely say "No, thanks!". Never was comfortable about anyone showing me loads of clothes as I felt pressurized to make a quick decision. I always prefer to procrastinate undisturbed about what to buy after I have answered the "whether to buy" question which usually takes a while as well. But on that occasion I mumbled something like "I am looking for a winter coat!". She showed me some winter coats hanging at one corner of the store and thankfully left me to browse by myself. Soon, I spotted it, a dashing blue-black (just like the Sulekha ink colour) coat which looked cozy enough to withstand any wind-chill factor and seemed perfect for my needs. There were a  few others as well but I knew I wanted the blue-black one.

There was just this little matter of cost. The price-tag on the blue-black coat was missing and I had to take it to the counter to ask for the price. That is when I realized I could not possibly buy it. The cost was about $95, way over my budget. I had less than $300 to last me for 3 more weeks until I got my first month's fellowship. Neither did I have a magical piece of plastic with which I could "buy now and pay later".  I reluctantly took it back to the corner where I had found it.

By then, the store was empty, the two sales girls were probably bored and both came over to see if "I needed any help" to make my decision. I had selected another albeit far less desirable winter coat as a fall-back option. It cost about $65, a whopping $30 less than my preferred
choice. Having just moved from India, I was still in the habit of converting all costs to INR and could not justify  spending an extra INR1000 on a winter coat just because it had caught my fancy. The friendly sales girls started telling me that my preferred choice was a better product,
the $95 price was a heavily discounted one and I was getting better value for money, all the convincing I did not need. Then I did something uncharacteristic, I told them that I had just arrived in Canada and could not afford the blue-black coat then. Still, I dithered for a while, avoiding taking the inevitable decision and both the sales girls went back to cash counters leaving me by myself. 

Eventually, I went back to the counter taking my second choice winter coat and told them that I had decided to get that one because the blue-black one was too expensive for me. Then something unexpected happened. The store was still empty and the two sales girls consulted among themselves for a while and told me that they have decided to give me the employee's discount that they were entitled to bringing down the price of the blue-black winter coat to about $55, even less than my second choice coat.They had to make the purchase in one of their names and one of them jokingly told me in mock seriousness that if I wanted to return to the store again I would have to show proof that I was related to one of them. They were clearly violating the employee "code" in order to help a complete stranger buy a winter coat that had caught his fancy but was way beyond his means. I was overwhelmed but all I could do was thank them for their generosity.
 
I have often wondered why they did what they did. Surely they must have heard the phrase "I can't afford this one" many times before from other customers.  Maybe with my dithering, I had somehow conveyed the impression that I badly wanted the blue-black coat. Perhaps such analysis is both unsatisfactory and pointless. Perhaps it was a random act of kindness by two nice people which had the effect of reassuring a stranger far from home, making him feel welcome in the distant land.

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