Andey De Prices 10,000 Rupay: The Egg Price Tragedy
Nani would complain every morning about us not being very “kaaltured,” “no manner-shanner,” “no displin.” Anger was absolutely no issue for her. She was angry about everything. The water cuts in summer. The load shedding. The rising prices.
“Aandey de prices dekhey, teh naal thodi cold drink dey.”
She would start her complain loop with egg prices, followed a close second by the fizzy drinks we loved drinking to beat the summer. This discursive thread then extend logically to other incidental rising prices.
It wasn’t like she was short of money. As a war widow she got our grandfather’s pension, she had enough land and enough gold on her self to make her an easy target for anyone with even a mild affliction for bling. She carried stack loads of rupees packed in separate stashes that went into five different pouches of varying sizes in her handbag. One evening when she went for her egg shopping she was carrying a grand total of 10,000 rupees in many of these pouches. The men on the scooter must have been watching her for days, they must have seen her pulling out various small stashes of rupees from her various pouches because they knew exactly who they needed to pick on. She said she heard nothing and the next thing she knew the handbag she was holding in the crook of her right arm was gone.
“Naal. 10,000 hajaar rupay. Haye thoday anday.” (With that, 10,000 rupees. Those eggs!)
Followed by a string of colourful Punjabi expletives. Too colourful to bear repetition for the “kaaltured” classes.
She was hysterical. She kept repeating this line about going out to buy eggs and losing 10,000 rupees. This abusive laden streak was completely in character with her character who had a fondness for repeating things. We had to go to the police station with her because she was in no state to walk alone. The lines were in a loop. She must have said the same thing over 100 times not giving the cop on duty a moment to get a word in. How she had all these various pouches of various shapes, sizes and colours. How they all contained cash. How she made sure it was split so if one were missing she would be able reach out for money in the other. She did this because she had not visualised worst case, in this case the entire handbag being stolen.
I was almost beginning to feel sorry for the cop. Like us, he had been listening to this saga for nearly an hour. I am sure he had many more important cases to attend to but Nani being Nani didn’t believe in pauses.
When the cop finally spoke, he had just one question: “Beejee ainay paisay anday vastay?” (You took so much money to buy eggs?)
We should not have laughed.
It was seriously not funny. But we could not stop. Looking at us, even the policeman started laughing. Soon other people around us started laughing. It was like someone had released laughing gas.
She had her police report with the promise of no guarantee of the bag ever being found. Meaning the money was gone. I think it was not so much losing the money, it was our wrong laughter moment which got to her. On our longest walk back to her home, she did not let us hear the end of it. After which, she never let us forget the day we laughed when she lost 10,000 rupees. “Paisay dee no value,” she scolded us in her Pinglish — you know when Punjabi meets English.
The sentence would become part of our inner consciousness.
Try as hard as I may in the years ahead, I would not be able to forget this connection between money and value.
There are many other things she never let us forget.
Her past.
Our mother’s death.
The Red Helmet is Deepika Shetty’s debut novel. It is now available at several book stores across India and on Amazon and Flipkart
Note: The Red Helmet is an inventive, irreverent, coming-of-age novel. It is a not so delightful romp through 1980s and early 1990s India. It talks about growing up at a certain time in an uncertain India. It speaks of loss, it speaks of love and the journeys it compels us to make.
The Red Helmet marks the debut of a not so brilliant writer. But she’d like to assure you, if you buy this book, her next one will only get better.