One boring Sunday evening, with 'Monday blues' already encroached into our minds, me and my friend decided to head off someplace with our destination undecided. You might wonder, how jobless people we were. I tell you, this is fun sometimes. Only sometimes. I gave the honour of riding the bike to my friend. For the first time in his history and my life, the speedometer never crossed 30km/hr over a ride of about 30mins. I imagined - if I was a celebrity, this one would have made it into the headlines of few crappy news channels in India. Something like -"Arjun was spotted in a bike moving not more than 30kms/hr. What could be the reason? please sms your opinions to this number. We have our correspondent live from Bangalore to give more details about this shocking revealation." I was dreaming. I was loving it.
We were heading towards the heart of the city. Sunday evening, no traffic at all. Heaven. He still never crossed the 30 km/hr mark. I got anxious, so shouted loud at him against other sounds of the surroundings - " Are you awake??" Din't get a reply. With a louder voice, I shouted again - "Are you alive??"
"Yes of course you asshole. You would have been sorting out issues in hell if I were asleep." he said politely.
I shouted back - " You are in good mood."
"Lucky for you."
" Thank You."
We passed through Cubbon Park which now, in the dark looked like a jungle. Then came this huge 16 storeyed building, a mall, and an office complex. It's called the UB City. UB is Vijay Mallya's . That meant - High Class. It also meant - Very decently dressed girls in red. Think about that. We can have a debate sometime.
I said - "Stop. Lets checkout this place."
He was awake and hence stopped. The mall was about only 80% complete. Hence there had not been publicity about it, so that meant less people. Something that I can pay for, being in B'lore. We entered in. An F1 model car was at the entrance. My dosth observed it for half an hour. I was passing time, looking out for girls in red. I wan't to meet Vijay Mallya someday. Okay, by the looks of this mall, it was High Class to the high-class. We were only dreaming to be High Class. I mean we were students. Not even our grades were high class.
Anyway, we went window shopping. I swear I hadn't even heard of those names. The outlets, I mean. As a fact we weren't dressed up aptly. Who knew we would end up here . In one of those outlets, we could find some civilization. Attractive, foreign homo-sapiens that too. He said, "I need to buy a pair of shoes for myself. Come on lets have a look. " I thought that was a joke but then we entered the stall, the doors of which were opened by a guy with a wide smile on his face. I thought, I should write to Mallya about this.To replace that guy by a girl. He went straight to the shoe section and enquired a pretty stall girl (of course) about what his shoe size would be. I've never seen a person who could spend half an hour sorting out 'shoe size' matters. He tried out a few of them as well. Poor girl, she must have been thinking that we had rich fathers who gave us credit cards or debit cards.
Anyway, this guy finally came to a conclusion. His size was 9. "Shall I show you few more different varieties, Sir?" She enquired. He asked her - " What's the price of this?"
"It's Rs. 9,700, Sir." she replied.
Mamma MiaHe came to me and opened his wallet- There was Rs 40 and some dirt in it. He digged out my wallet from my pocket and discovered Rs.50. Arrogant guy. Anyway, we had a magic figure of Rs.90. He turned back to the girl and said the most stupid thing I've ever heard. He said - "Haha. No . Just that, my Birthday is coming up, so hinting my friend about my shoe size."
She replied - " My boss had hinted me about people like you."
I said to my mind -
Mamma Mia