Road Trip to Vaitheeswaran Kovil - Part 10 ::: Why, not having cash turned out to be beneficial

The bill had a lot of items listed one after the other, with the price for each marked against it. I guess that's what a bill is supposed to look like, but I am clarifying it, just in case you have any doubts.

But the most important number in that bill was at the bottom (duh!) and it was 695.00. Yes. Almost 700 bucks for 9 archanai thattu saamaan. Apart from the usual stuff in such thattus, let me list out the special items for V.Kovil:
1. a piece of jaggery each, for the 3 of us. hardly 10gms i think.
2. 2 pieces of red cloth. quality of the material? u know the blue cloth we use for car cleaning. exact same material, just the color was different.
3. 3 small garlands. no fancy flowers in them. just regular white and green garland.
4. 3 sets of salt and pepper packets. barely a handful in each.
5. 5 neiy villaku. each costs 5 rupees in Besant Nagar temple.

So these f*ers were obviously trying to steal us. We might as well have had our car stopped on the way by highway robbers and still spent less!

Since we didn't have that much cash on hand, and since these vultures started crowding around us, our survival instincts got the better of us. We started arguing with the buggers.

There was nothing special in the arguments actually. I did start off disputing some of the items he had listed. Those were the things he hadn't supplied. My mother was obviously able to question the rates of the garlands et al. There was lot of back and forth talk and those guys actually said that they had missed out to include some other items and if they add those, it would come to 750 rupees.

The guys on the opposite side were mainly 3 in number. The first guy who lead us into the temple and the other guy who filled in for him inside. The third guy had come in only for settlement.

In the whole fight that was taking place, my mother dealt what I consider to be the master stroke. She went on questioning why this 3rd guy was there in the whole discussion. She demanded that he vacate the place and that she would talk only to the 2 guys we had interacted with.

Even if I had argued with those guys in full blast, I wouldn't have had the presence of mind to reduce the strength of the opponent. That move really helped us. We now had to deal with only 2 guys and obviously it strengthened us.

They tried an emotional blackmail that they didn't want even one paisa and we retorted that we would rather put the whole 700 bucks in the hundial than give it to them. But we also told them very clearly that we were willing to settle for Rs.400 only and that too only because we made the mistake of not asking them for the price up-front.

That's all the cash we had loosely on hand. My father was carrying some 2K in a big wallet. But in all our visible money holders, we barely had Rs.400. We gave it to them making it very clear that we really didn't have the cash.

My mother's argument and the fact that we didn't have visible cash on us, kinda helped and the lepers went away with the money.

We then set off to Hotel Sadhabishekam for breakfast. Surprisingly, their kitchen closes by 9.30 AM for breakfast and they reopen only around 11.30 for lunch. It was 9.40 when we reached there and so we missed out on what is considered to be good food in that neighborhood.

We couldn't find any other good restaurant in that area and headed back to our Hotel in Sirkazhi. A few 100 metres before our hotel, we saw a decent looking joint named Vasantha Bhavan and ate there. The stuff was really good.

After that, we returned to the Hotel and there it was pack-up time.

Just-la miss - me in a street brawl

Yesterday was not one of my good days. Probably it went bad because I had to run a good 50m in the morning to catch the bus. But I digress.

I was upset with some events at work, late in the evening. In hindsight, it was not required but anyway, it happened.

So I was returning home with some negative energy. And since yesterday was 'kaanum pongal' the area around Vandalur Uyir College (for those of who not well versed in Madras tamizh, its Vandalur Zoo) witnessed MASSIVE traffic jam. A stretch of hardly 100m took us 50 minutes!

Effectively, my bus reached B'Ngr around 8.50 PM. The driver was also not in that great a mood I guess, coz he stopped a bit in the middle of the road. So when I got down, I found a car headed towards me in the gap between the bus and the end of the road. Though it stopped before hitting me, his act of trying to squeeze into the gap kinda blew me away.

As is my wont on such occasions, I gave the fellow THE FINGER.

He was quite stunned. And he gave me a muted finger back, but then I was almost near his window. So he got his window down and asked me as to why I gave him the finger. I told him that his attempt in squeezing through was going to injure me and so I did what I did.

He then started rattling off a series of words that I will not publish here. I gave him back a bit by asking to shut up and F* off. I started walking away. He continued his tirade of the F word with various prefixes and suffixes. Tried calling me back. But I just kept walking.

Some 10 or 20 metres after I walked, I again heard his voice and turned back. The chap had come back in his car, driving on the wrong side. He parked his car in a diagonal manner, kinda making it look like he was cutting off my path.

He got down and headed towards me with a very angry face. Again started off saying things. Like 'what do u think u r doing?' 'u don't know me' 'i will smash ur f*ing face' and the lot.

Luckily, the guy was not big or anything. He was an average 40 year old. Probably Bengali or Oriya. He wasn't taller than me too. So my confidence was quite high. I may not have been able to whack him down if it got down to a fist fight. But I would surely have not gone down without causing considerable damage to him.

Anyways, I didn't retaliate or anything. I had a good face off with him at a nose to nose distance of probably 6 inches. I told him to just keep going. Pointed him to his seat in the car and repeated the statement - "Just keep going". I then moved away from his face and started walking home.

I looked back to see if he was still pursuing me or something, but nothing of that sort happened. I saw him get into his car and I didn't bother to look back after that.

Even after I reached home and was feeding Jimmy his usual quota of rusk, I was looking out for that guy.

So a pretty good way to end a day eh?