Around Mumbai in 100 bucks

Our telephone rang at 11:00 AM this lazy Sunday morning. A quaint, southie-accented gent was at the other end and he introduced himself as a son-in-law of my FIL's landlord in Chennai. He got a job in Mumbai and as expected he needed some help in finding an accommodation.

Now most paavam*-type first-timers arrive in Bombay with huge skeptic-gray tinted glasses on. Like the lenses can help them differentiate between the good and the evil, the samaritans and the swindlers. Like the lenses can help them from getting gobbled up by the aaneka-jaaneka-type-hindi speaking taxi-wallahs. Like the lenses can give them keen detectors to keep conmen at bay. (I wish the detectors helped them figure similarities between conmen and godmen, but I digress!). In my opinion, any new city visited will have all kinds of people. What is required is a reasonably good insight.

So this gent talks to my MIL and my naive MIL invites him home so that S (my husband) can help him around. She gave him the bus numbers which will get him to our place. So far so good. Next thing, she starts to speed up her cooking. She was all sorry for this gent and thought maybe its a good idea to ask him if he'll eat at our place. Now, no tair-saadam** swearing individual who's fresh off the Chennai boat would refuse such an enticing offer. Not that I hold any offence against tair-saadam. It happens to be my most important part of the meal in the day as well. I just meant it metaphorically here.

S took him to a real estate owner who was a neighbor in our building and he decided to help him find a few houses in the locality. Eventually S was dragged to all the houses by the gent because he could not speak hindi. This is another of the defense mechanisms adopted by most people. They cant accept the fact that they don't understand hindi. They cover it up by saying they are pundits in Sanskrit, they have learnt hindi in school for good 7-8 years, they can write poetry in hindi but the only hitch in life is that they cant speak Hindi.
*So what dude..! Don't you know English?*
But anyway, he saw a few houses and got back home for lunch and had few cribs that the houses were far away from his place of work.
*Since when 6 km, to work-place, is considered 'faraway' in a place like Mumbai?? *

Post lunch he started exploring some more houses with renewed vigor, expecting the estate agent will block a few houses for him until he got back to him in a couple of weeks. He was most distressed that this was not the practice here.
*I wonder which land of Eden he came from.*

Just when one saw some promising ray of hope on finalizing a house, the gent comes up with googly questions to the estate agent on Vaastu and stuff. Which direction does the window of the kitchen face, which direction does the bathroom door face, what does the house number total up to? He rejected all the houses based on one such criteria or the other. Finding a house to one's liking at reasonable rates is a blessing in Mumbai and someone squandering such opportunities for reasons as this is totally appalling. He finally decided to take a house (which totaled up to number 6) without even looking at the house let alone checking for the basic necessities, like water supply, clean surroundings etc.
*So much for wasting nearly 4 hours on him.*

When time came to pay up a token amount for blocking the lucky 6 house, the gent sheepishly confessed to S that he had only 100 bucks in his purse and requested S to lend him 2000 bucks. I mean hats off to this chap! He comes home, he gets us do all the work, he gets a free sumptuous lunch, he rejects all good houses for a stupid vaastu number and he finds an accommodation within 6 km radius of his workplace - All with just Rs. 100 in his pocket.

Maybe he's not so 'paavam' after all. :-)
* Humming the Raj Kapoor song "Around the world in 8 dollars" distorted as "Around Mumbai in 100 bucks" as I write this.*

For the linguistically challenged:
* Paavam = piteous, bechara (in hindi)
** tair-saadam = curd-rice