When the Mamus Mamued me!

Hey all u people, guess I’m back before I was expected to. Actually I got a very important call today! No, it wasn’t a call from any coveted B-School but was even more important than that to me. As I slept late last night as usual, coz today was a holiday for me so my plans were to sleep till late, but that wasn’t to be. At 10am or so I got a phone call & as my mother told me who it was on the line, I sat up straight to attend the call!

On the other side of the connection was a police official calling me Suvra Kant ‘babu’ & delivered me the news that I had to be there at the police station for the verification required for my Passport application. Boy, Was I happy or what! I shall be celebrating the 1st anniversary of my plan of going for a passport very soon. The poor passport form had to bear the loads of my overweight books in some corner of my book shelf for about 6-8 good months! Then poor me had to pass the trauma of filling the form & yes I also had to act like a ungootha chaap to give the thumb impression in all the forms. Then, again the forms had to wait for their companions in form of the other certificates for about a month or so. Finally many thanks to my neighbour uncle who deposited the same for me in the passport office. As if this wasn’t enough, I heard scary stories from people who said that they had been waiting for months for this prized call!

On that aspect I was lucky enough as I got the call in a span of just over a month & I didn’t mind getting up at 10am for that(on a holiday). I got ready & dressed just normally to go for the verification coz I’d heard that if they get to know that u r from a well to do family(even if u aren’t), they pounce upon you. So ready to go to a police station for the first time in my life, I took Rs.50, change from my father as I thought that if they asked for something then this would be it & then I would always have the excuses of being a student and all. But I really wanted to see how they would go about it, as I’d heard about these enough but never been in such a position before.

As I reached the police station a lady inspector/havildar/sub-inspector(sorry that ends by vocab on police officials) was taking a report of a poor woman of some kind of brawl in her house or something. This lady reminded me of all the corrupt police officials I’ve seen in the Mithun movies. She kept on interrogating the woman who was slowly getting jittery in replying the absurd queries of the lady-whatever. I interrupted her to ask for the person who had called me & the lady-*** showed me the way very politely, couldn’t believe it really, this lady could be polite also! Still overhearing the resumed conversation between the two women, I went into the room of the two people who searched my form out & asked me for my original certificates. I had not brought them then, but I still had a feeling that they could do without it just looking at their attitude but I insisted on getting them from my house as I felt that this would require an extra ‘malai’ over that Rs. 50 note later on. So off I went & got back to this place in a while. Now there were no one to lodge any complaint but we had an uncle & aunty who had come for their verification too. Simultaneously my verification also started & all sort of historical questions were darted at me. One of the two men wrote all the details on a small piece of paper & tried making sure that I was the real Suvra Kanta Roy. Lastly that uncle, aunty & myself were taken to that lady-whatever. I never expected this, but she was the one to look for the identification mark & all that stuff. First she asked the aunty that what was her profession & this apparently smart aunty replied “rosoi!”,it was nice to see someone using her sense of humour in the police station . I mean I felt that this was a really cool answer! Then I was interrogated for my details & as I said that I required the passport for joining into Wipro, I could imagine that lady thinking, “so here we have a nice bakra!”.

Finally all the formalities were completed & I was sitting alone before the two hungry wolves ready to pounce on their prey. I kept my face straight & was waiting to see how they would ask for the bribe. The one who had been writing finally spoke out & said that as I was going to join Wipro soon so I would be needing the passport pretty soon, I said that I could do well if I got it by june or so. He looked more concerned & said, “yeah that means quite early”. I kept quiet. Then they started speaking to each other, one said to the other that what would he do with this one, would he send it to Khandagiri or solve matters there itself, the other said that since babu(that is me) would need it early so he would have to solve matters there itself. Then they talked a bit of technical stuff related to my passport that were bouncers to me. I tried to act absolutely innocent, listening to them like I’d come right from the kindergarten. They continued with their useless stuff more so that I could understand, but I acted like a 7yr old in a topless bar. I wanted them to be straight & clear. I wanted them to earn their bribe from a student & wanted to see how shameless they could get.
At last he spoke out! He said so sir u may go, & just take care of our babu so that u have no troubles at all & u get ur passport soon. The exact words in Oriya were, “Au ama babu katha tike bhujibe jemiti ki aapana ku apankara passport ta subidha re mili jiba!”. While I took out my purse, I saw the lady-whatever entering the room to join the feast & what the hell! That Rs. 50 note had vanished from my purse. There was a Rs.10 note & another piece of 100. I expected all eyes to be on my purse & I didn’t look up to confirm! Just took out the 100 note & tried handing it on to the so called ‘babu’. He indicated me to keep it on the table, as if he was not even involved in such a dirty job, just because I wanted to feed those morons coz they were my girlfriends in the last birth, so he was reluctantly accepting it. I quickly left the place without looking at anyone. As I put my hand on my chest pocket to take my glasses out, I found the Rs. 50 note. Realizing that I’d made a loss of 50 rupees just because erratic allocation of places for different notes, I tried to console myself by feeling that maybe those extra 50 rupees would get me my passport before I celebrate the 1st anniversary!

Really, this was the first experience of mine of this kind. While seeing the Rs. 100 note on his table, just for a while I remembered the tehelka tapes. I’m really tempted to blame the system but no, we are all corrupt. No one cares to take the risk of revolting. Nor do ‘they’ care if someone refuses to pay, the file just won’t move thereafter. No one knows exactly how to break this deadlock, every student like me doing such a thing for the first time must be feeling a thorn piercing somewhere but no one knows the location of this thorn & how to take it out, or may I say we never even care to know because it doesn’t pierce too hard on us. Think about it!