The first few days of the month always see the longest queues at the teller. Understandably. Breadwinners, after all that work, line up outside the ATM, each one running the same question through their minds. It doesn’t matter what your CTC is, how many people you support, where you live, what rent you pay, or if your vehicle runs on diesel or space-fuel.
Everyone in that queue have the same question. How much? The answer decides what enters the pocket.
The first withdrawal of the month pinches you. Always. After sweating bullets at the workplace, and earning your reward, it takes a heart and a half to walk up to that miserly box of steel and pull funds out of your account. Of course, you’re usually forced to it. Rents. Bills. Medicines. The cable guy. The milkman. The maid. A cousin in need. An uncle departing on a pilgrimage. Something, somehow, someone and somewhere almost always shows up with the need to eat out of your hard-earned money.
Thank goodness for mobiles. Long queues could get boring, and we’re lucky to have the cellphone double up as a means of infotainment. As the queue slugs forward, everyone in there are up to something, fingering their phones. The ones at the far end of the queue are usually playing a game, or checking out a movie review on GPRS. As you move closer to the entrance, people are texting their loved ones, or in some cases, the home ministry to figure out exactly how much dough is needed that evening. The folks on the threshold of their shot at the machine constantly switch focus from the clock on the cellphone to the guard, and then, to the door. The door itself is opaque, except for a little bit of a transparent portion, through which the frontliners burn their gaze.
The atmosphere gets volatile soon enough. Machines sometimes dispense only hundred-rupee notes, and the limit is forty at a time. This could lead to an extended waiting period which, in a fast city like Bangalore and a restless race like the Bangaloreans, doesn’t go down too well with the tech-savvy masses.
On luckier days, the machine dispenses hundred-rupee notes as well as thousand-rupee notes. But there are a few people in this world who will never be satisfied in life. The guard had to face the wrath of one such stubborn brat.
‘Why doesn’t this machine dispense five hundred rupee notes?!’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘What do you mean you don’t know? Aren’t you the guard here?’
He thought about it, and came up with a logical explanation.
‘Sir, in this area, only the rich reside. They have no use for five hundred rupee notes sir.’
The guard, at this moment, is busy aligning the queue. It’s like that rough draft in Microsoft Word with arbitrary spaces that doesn’t really need an alignment, but is a constant source of irritation, an itch, when left the way it is. I finally get my turn. I walk in, and in an uncomplicated manner use the fast withdrawal option. As my hard work vanishes electronically, making its appearance through the flat, thin, metallic cavity in the machine, I pull the notes out and shoot a look at the last line of the receipt that just printed itself out. I curse and crumple the slip before chucking it into the bin and heading out of the cube.
The queue is now longer. Same question, though. I manage a smile.
On the way back home, I have the option of picking between two routes. One is well-lit, a ‘link’ road, home to slums, strays and a pungent mixture of cow dung and human urine in a field. The other is darker, and hosts more drunkards than you would find outside Purple Haze on Saturday night. With a bad cold, I had made the choice: the link road any day.
The slums are, contrary to popular belief, very organized. It’s absolute chaos within, but there’s a method to the madness. The one I walk through, for instance, has a person they refer to as ‘anna’, which translates to ‘big brother’ in Kannada. Anna manages everything operational in the slum, including rations, logistics and scheduling the consumption of utilities.
While I step aside and hop on to the sidewalk, a tempo comes spluttering in. Anna walks out and whistles. Thrice.
Whistle, whistle. Pause. Whistle. Three sounds, when timed accurately, suggest that the week’s supplies have arrived. Anna was here, and he brought with him the grocery.
A call for the hungry. For the starved. Like water seeping through the cracks of earth, they rushed in from every corner of the slum. Children, carrying steel tumblers. Women, with jute bags. Some men too, although more relaxed. It isn’t a queue, but a huddle around a tempo that catered more to survival than mere hunger.
Ironically, everyone in that huddle too have the same question. Only this time, the answer decides what enters the stomach.
