Vanakkam!!!

The journey from Bangalore to Chennai was a smooth one. It was 6:30 in the morning and the bus driver began to scream that this was the last stop and everyone started alighting. We got down the bus and noticed that we were in front of a huge messy market near Chennai Bus Station.

We were supposed to call Puttu Mama (Adarsh's uncle) who was then to pick us up in his car. As luck had its part to play, we found that our mobile phone was switched off due to low battery. Before we even began to look for public phones, a group of 4-6 auto drivers came towards us and greeted us "Vanakkam". They tried to converse with us in broken English/Hindi. All they knew was "yes", "no" and a few other Hindi words which almost meant the same.

We assumed that they were trying to get us into one of their auto rickshaws and so we avoided them. One of them came closer to us and was showing us his mobile. I was not at all comfortable with the whole idea of chit-chatting with auto drivers so we simply indicated that we needed no taxis/autos and began looking for phone booths. Only then it struck to us that they were actually trying to tell that there were no public phones nearby and so one of them was offering his mobile phone for us to make the call.

Let me tell you, all these years, friends told various stories about Chennai/Tamil Nadu. I heard that no one there responds to strangers if they talked in English or any other language than Tamil. Tamilians were in romance with their mother-tongue that they would reply (if at all) only in Tamil. We thought they would not be so helpful to people like us who understood very little Tamil. 

And here, we get to see a group of auto drivers trying to help us and offer their personal phones to make STD calls!!! Yes, we had to call back to Ujire (my in law's place) and get our uncle's phone number as our mobile was switched off and thus had no access to contact numbers. We told that we will pay back them the cost of the call and made phone calls back home, took our uncle's phone number and then again dialled back to Puttu Mama informing him about our exact location so that he could come and pick us up.

By the time we hung the phone, we realized that the driver's balance had become zero. He had a very low balance remaining in his pre-paid phone, yet he had offered us help. Upon that, he simply denied the cash we offered. With his Rajini style and his mixed Tamil-cum-English words, he intended to say that it was a small help and wanted nothing in return. We felt guilty that we used up his remaining balance and could not repay it.

Helplessly, we stood there waiting for Puttu Mama. We were expecting him in 10 minutes and it was almost 20 mins of waiting, and there were no signs. We did not want to make yet another call from the driver's phone and so we simply continued to wait.

Nearby, was a huge hotel and we thought we could get some help in making calls at its reception. The reception was huge, and there were 2 men dressed in black suits. I told them my situation and requested if I could use the reception phone to make a local call. The brute reply that came out of the sophisticated receptionist was: "Sorry Madam, we cannot help you with this. We cannot let you make calls nor charge you for it". Phew... and there it ended. I walked out with thoughts of the extreme behaviour of the helpful average auto driver at one end and the posh-yet-blunt receptionists at the other.

After waiting for another 10-15 minutes, we felt that it is no point waiting for this long, as our uncle could be waiting at some other end trying to find us. So we decided to use the drivers phone one last time, but right away pay them back the cost of all the calls. Since that driver had no more balance remaining in his phone, he looked for other drivers and came back with a mobile phone so that we could make our call. Our uncle was waiting for us somewhere close by and we could spot him. After returning the phone, the drivers again denied to be repaid and we had a deeper sense of guilt now.

We had to repay their gratitude somehow. So Adarsh took out a sweet box out of his bag. We gave a box of our favorite Dharwad Peda to them and immediately we could see the expressions on their faces and a sense of relief on our faces too. They were delighted at it and a bigger crowd of auto drivers gathered in seconds and finished the sweets in no time. We soon sighted Puttu Mama and hopped into his car with a feeling of satisfaction and smiled at each other at the whole episode.