Sitting at the 2nd Floor of the K-8 Koyambedu Traffic Police Station and speaking with the Head Constable, a gentleman by name Amalraj, and his accomplice, I couldn't help but wonder in amazement how the seemingly innocuous things led on to this. I was reminded of this one particular afternoon in Coimby.
Apart from that I was likely to get a new internet connection at my home-away-from-home, the 29th of September, 2009 seemed like most other Tuesday afternoons. The Coimby sun was shining at it's scorching brightest when Sahay Raj, a Field Engineer representing Tata Telecommunications, rung the door bell. On getting the door, I quickly examined him to see if he had got along his paraphernalia; none – just his beaming smile.
He handed me an application form, that he pulled out of thin air, to fill out while he went upstairs to assess the place where he would affix the equipment that would make home internet ready. I had only skimmed through the details the form was capturing and he was already back. Not to say he was any Ubermensch, but just that having worked for a banking back-office had instilled enough caution in me to make me wary of what the venomous fine print was capable of. I wanted to do a Watson on what the neatly arranged boxes of the application form were capturing. He offered to fill it for me, but I readily declined.
Once I was done filling out the application form, I asked for him to fill in his name and number on the tear off acknowledgement slip at the bottom of the form. And like the zillion other pieces of paper that I keep dumping into my wallet, even that acknowledgement slip found its rightful place in my wallet.
Amalraj kept asking question after question to verify my identity in true-blue CCTP style. Even as I was answering each of questions putting my best Tamil tongue forward, I wondered at parodoxes of why certain things meant more to certain people and how the very same things could be utterly worthless to others. The things that immediately came to my mind were those bits of random paper that I used to stuff my wallet up with – to any sane person, they'd be trash, but they were of immense emotional value to me. To me, they represent my thoughts and my consciousness as I was going to phases in my life.
On that Sunday morning, the Traffic Police Station on the 2nd floor of the K-8 was unlike any police station I had ever been to. In that, it was missing the normal clatter and clammer of most police stations. And as events have led me to, I have indeed seen quite a few police stations for various reasons. This room was rectangular and painted a police station white. The door-side of the room was to a corridor and the opposite side overlooked the neighbouring houses through a wooden framed window in the centre of the wall, about 3 feet from the floor. From where I was sitting, though, not much was visible of the outside. Amalraj and his accomplice sat with their backs to the wall on either side of the window. In their inquiry, I could sense a mix of doubt and greed. Or so I thought, keeping alive the conditioning I had been subject to all my life. As I kept juggling between answering and thinking and as my thoughts were drifting to my last birthday, I marvelled at the phenomenal capabilities of the human brain.
Birthdays have never really meant anything to me. In fact I have always found the whole ga-ga over celebrating birthdays as "special" days another of the many pointless activities my fellow "civilised" human beings engage in. If not for the gifts that a certain precious souls shower on me, I would even give away my thoughts on birthdays to them. I mean who doesn't like gifts! This one dear one got me a nice black Hidesign wallet on my previous birthday. I've grown very fond of it, so much that I've had it constantly protruding off my bum for nearly every day since then. And mind you, it's not only because of the wallet. Gifts (most of them at least) are a way of showing you care. Or so they say.
I got reminded of another evening at Krishna Prabu's house when I was there to catch up with a few friends and spend a normal jobless evening. Krishna is a man whose heart is as big as himself, and has been known to throw treats at the fall of a hat. That day was exceptionally special for him. "I have become a businessman," he announced, holding out a business card towards me. His father and his partner-in-business had purchased a quarry and he was clearly overjoyed at the prospects. I read the business card as I congratulated Krishna on his transition and promptly put the business card to where it was to rightly belong – the mini dumpyard in my wallet.
"So you work even on Sundays?" I asked Amalraj, to break the silence and the monotony of his questioning. "We have to work, otherwise we will be with our families na?" replied his accomplice. I didn't know what more to say.
Of all the things I carried in my wallet, till yesterday morning I didn't carry any of my new accounts' debit cards in my wallet. The account was anyway dry so I thought why the trouble. But after I had deposited my salary draft in the account, I thought it was time to carry the cards along. With a sense of pride, coming mostly out of the money that was going to fill up in the account and the fact the CitiAlerts which till a few days back embarrassingly declared, "You have Rs 0.00 in your account. You can withdraw upto Rs. 0.00." would now show a five digit sum in about 2 days' time, I dumped even the debit cards in my wallet. I then checked with Harsh to see if he wanted to do some catching up. With the pride still high in me, Harsh and I watched Toy Story 3 at PVR Cinemas. Boy, does the movie choke you or what!
The problem with PVR however is the parking. 2 storeys down in the basement and with the hundred vehicles crowding the two over-worked parking fee collection booths, breathing can be real murderer. Why, stop there for a second longer and the hundred odd motorists would all sound their horns so loud it would put a stadium-full of vuvuzelas to shame. Not wanting to test anybody's patience, most people are sensible enough to figure out their payout and keep it ready. Unless otherwise, like in our case, there is a miscalculation and you have to take out wallets and search for change and hand over notes a second time round – all the while withstanding the torturous horns and carbon monoxide tearing through your ears and alveoli. Who then has the time to keep wallets back in their places, all you want to do then is run for your ears and breath. Luckily for us, I was pillion and had Harsh's paper carry bag and could drop the wallet in the carry bag and not worry about having to stop to put the wallet back in the pocket.
I was beginning to realise that part of Amalraj's questioning was to evaluate my financial standing. And I must say I did well to not appear too flamboyant lest he develop any interest or anything. To some extent, I warded off any questions that I thought had ulterior motives. I looked at my watch, it pointed to 1:15PM.
After PVR, Harsh and I had decided on going home and we were almost on our ways back when I remembered that Chandrakumar and a few other friends were planning on a get-together at the beach. Initially I was to not make it to the get together owing to other plans I had of leaving town to make it for a birthday, but that didn't work out and I was staying back. So I thought why not catch up with old time buddies and I called on Chandra to check if they were still at the Beach. They were. Harsh and I headed to the Beach now.
I was pleasantly surprised to find Amrit along with Chandra. We spent a good 2 hours or so at the shores remembering old times, catching up on each other and laughing till our cheeks hurt owing to, among many other things, the difficulties and double entendres of Amrit and his life as one of the seamen. All pun intended.
It was then time to head back home. But before we went our ways, we clicked a few pictures by the Gandhi Statue and then it was bye-bye time. First the salary, then Toy Story 3, and then this tryst by the beach with friends - it had turned out to be quite a fulfilling Saturday and I couldn't ask for more. We were all smiles when Harsh dropped me to where my vehicle was. As I was heading to my vehicle, I remembered my wallet was still in Harsh's paper carry bag and I asked if I could take it back.
I felt a deep filmi pang as I noticed he was holding the contents of the bag in his hand. It almost felt as though the vision from the periphery of my eyes was blacking out. He seemed perplexed at my asking about the wallet. He didn't know it was in there, I didn't ever tell him. A flurry of thoughts – of all the things that were in there and all that they meant to me– ran though my head. We dashed to the Beach to see if we test our chances of find it. Not surprisingly, we didn't. We looked helter skelter but to no avail. It wasn't as much about the money that was in there. Not that I didn't care about the dough at all, but the emotional value of the things other than the money – the wallet itself, the other things I had in there – was way much more. A paroxysm now engulfed me.
I gave up hope and got back home on a vehicle running out of fuel midway. Unlucky? "There is no such thing as 'luck' and it's only a wallet and some random things that I lost," I told myself in consolation. "It could have been worse. I'm still breathing and alive," I continued. Somehow, money-less and dejected at my loss, I got back home. I decided on sleeping it out and didn't wake up the next morning until a call woke me up by around 11ish.
A very cynical me sensed that after my account of what I had lost, Amalraj had by now sensed that I was in no positionto be able to do him any favours and had reluctantly given up on his attempts too. He handed over the money-and-alot-of-my-other-'precious'-stuff-less wallet that "he had found on his early morning walk at the Beach" with just the now cancelled cards, my driving license and two other 'precious' belongings back.
More than the joy of having gotten back my wallet was my bewilderment of how Amalraj had gotten through to me. He called Sahay Raj first, about 7 times, to a 'No asnwer'. Krishna was next. Krishna called me, but I was too heartbroken to speak to anybody that morning and ignored the call. Krishna called another friend to inform me; he called me, same reaction. Eventually I answered a call and the rest is what you've just read.
Who would have thought that an innocuous and redundant stub of an acknowledment slip of a now non-existent internet connection or a business card that normally should have found its place in a business card holder would bring me back my wallet. My account falls terribly short of being able to illustrate the pleathora of things that should have happened and I shouldn't have got my wallet back. But none of them did, and I got the wallet back.
I have never believed in Chaos Theory, or any other logic that has been applied to our futile existence on this planet. But a certain few things happen which instill an element of doubt.
