Shopping and assorted nonsense…

For once, this one time, I GO HOME. It’s been so long that the watchman stopped me to pop up a singular question: “Shaab, kishke ghar jana hai?”. Shattered, am I? No – its a new watchman, no harm done.
“No.4, Chandrashekhar Bhat ji”, I beamed.
“Aap vishitor ho?”. Now, however uncivilized one is, one doesn’t retort to one such question, “Oye, mere baap ka ghar hai be”. I shrug, “Haan ji, vijitor. Srinivas, mobile no. …”.
“Jaiye shaab, first floor” – C’est la vie. I am a visitor taking directions to my own home. Sigh.

A bad start to the weekend does nothing to fade my excitement. Why am I excited? My cousin’s come home. Deepthi, after a lot of pestering, decided to look this way. Or, was it her husband? Anyways, Deepi and the BIL were home, I was only looking forward for their august company. I tend to learn a lot from them, a divine knowledge I usually gathered. The last time we met, the BIL had suggested, “When in a mall, don thy glasses. Turn your gaze towards any flying migratory flamingoes, nobody will know.” How true bhava! How true. We had our share of fun, roamed around the entire city. The statutory tourist spots and the not so statutory ones, the pani puris and the mirchis, the tank bunds and the IMAX, the golconda to the 12 noon at Salarjung, the Snow World to Durgam Cheruvu. We saw it all.

Hyderabad, they say (don’t ask me who says so, I know not), is a city of pearls, or, as mom puts it, you get good pearls for really good bargains. Now, what ‘good’ pearls are, or what a ‘good bargain’ is, I’ll have to ask mom again. Anyways, like I said you get good pearls, Deepthi was enticed into putting this quote to test. She needed companions, my mom and sis volunteered. She needed someone to foot the bill, she forced her husband to volunteer. They needed someone to fill up for the driver, they found me. Ahoy! Old City it was, to buy a set of pearls, the very same things similar to the ones you find the market for Rs.10. Wonder what’s the difference.

We drove, errr, I drove, the ladies behind me were conferring on weird things like embedding pearls with gold; the BIL next to me was looking somewhere, lost, frightened by every concept these ladies exploded with, still trying real hard to hold his fright. There are, he later confessed, a few things a newly wed man is forced to do, the most significant one being paying extortionist breed of bills, the ones that would’ve given one a fatal cardiac arrest in one’s sweet bachelorhood, with a smile.

Old City in Hyderabad is a remarkable place. It gets even more remarkable during Ramadan, particular on the eve of Id. It gets astonishing when you drive there in a four wheeler. Goofy once remarked that Thrissur Pooram is the most crowded event on Planet Earth. No way mate. Old City is. Trouble started once I crossed the Musi, didn’t end until 3 hours later – all this while I carefully compelled the sedan to crawl through a pluralistic mass of humanity, in some cases, moving metal scrap too – the other vehicles piloted by those unfortunate men and women behind the wheels, ones whose feminine relations have coerced them to come this far. Phew!! Mess it was. We escaped, still alive, just so, with just enough energy to drive a few hours more, no pearls in hand. It so ensued during that messy melee of 3 hours when I was very preoccupied in escaping alive without as much as a single scratch on the blessed body of the Maruti that, the very shop our ladies wanted to visit was so swarmed by a horde of similar minded men and women, that our ladies had a hitch that they wouldn’t discover their privacy of shopping there. They returned empty handed. In the end, a singularly challenging creep of 3 hours ended with my sis announcing proudly, “Anna, MG Roadinge hopa. Jagadamba Pearls”. Any instinct of throwing her into the river was annulled by the presence of the ever smiling mom. “Putta, MG Road”, she quipped.

Ammmmmmmmmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

MG Road it was. Jagadamba Pearls it was. And real pearls it was. Pearls on the table, pearls in the runner, pearls in shelves, pearls in the mirror. White pearls, cream coloured pearls, pinkish pearls, blue coloured pearls, big pearls, small pearls, pearl necklaces, unset pearl, round pearls, oval pearls, flat pearls, what the heck pearls. If that didn’t suffice, there were more pearls in the almirah. The jeweller, of course, had no hesitation in pulling down the house to show us his collection, our ladies, of course, had no hesitation in browsing through the entirety of it.

The first hour was fairly enjoyable to the two ill-fated young men. The shop has a good management, they know how to keep the men pre-occupied. A nice flow of freshly made chilled lemon juice. Ladies tend to get a little busy opionioning on the beauty of these things in the showcase, we helped ourselves to quench our thirst.

The second hour was exhausted counting the population inside the shop. When we realized we had accounted for everyone inside, we moved out and started over our complex mathematical discussions over the per capita two-wheeler usage in India, which in turn led to our even more complex discussion on reducing the per capita fuel consumption the country. Wah bhava, you are a genius.

Two hours turned to three, mind frozen with calculations of a Leibnitzian order, we were running into the 17th minute of the fourth, just about when the two notably ingenuous minds started contemplating such things as banging our foreheads against those pearl filled shelves, Deepi emerged. “We’re done. Now pay up, we’ll wait near the car”.
The drive back home was pleasurable indeed. The ladies scrutinizing their purchase, myself driving – still without a scratch and the BIL silenty contemplating if it would’ve been better had he stayed back in Bangalore.