THE BILL – a short story.

Ramesh entered the Udipi restaurant to feed himself. He had not had a decent meal for two days now. He was here in Mumbai, many hundred miles separating him from his home town – all due to circumstances beyond his control. They are always beyond control – these circumstances.

It is only after circumstances make their appearance that we realize that they are beyond our control. The “only if” and “but’s” make their appearance soon after, adding to the already battered mind.

Ramesh was an industrious boy with a talent for impressing people. One does not really need an educational qualification for doing this. Some people do have the knack to effortlessly create a lasting impression of sincerity in the minds of people. Ramesh was one such person.

He had begun as a peon in an office. The job was his when he first faced his boss. Something about his demeanor made the boss hire him immediately, otherwise references are often asked for. Ramesh did not have any references on him nor was he asked to furnish them.

In a short time of two years he had risen from a peon to the post of a salesman.

Mumbai was the most natural choice of a young man who had only dreams of making it big - somehow. He would have remained in his home town but as said earlier, circumstances had forced him to flee the place.

Today too he found himself in an odd circumstance. This one had been recurring with boring regularity especially at the end of every month. He was left with only forty rupees in his pocket. Enough to feed him now, but then that was the last bit of money he had to survive on for the next seven days before the next salary would be given to him.

He had by now fallen into the vicious circle of drawing his salary in advance and was also in debt with friends. A limit has been now reached when he would have to continuously shell out his full salaries for the next six months to be able to get out of this vicious circle and be unburdened.

The system in Mumbai restaurants was based on trust. A customer was to eat first and then pay the bill either to the waiter and leave a tip or to the cashier directly and leave the restaurant.

As it was the case at every month end, he wanted to eat and avoid paying the restaurant’s bill. He chose different restaurants to do this. He had managed to do this successfully for the past three months and today he was going to try it again. The restaurant that he selected today was located in Worli.

“Thali with Roti”, he ordered the waiter to bring. The tone had to be correct. Not discourteous but with enough command in it for the waiter not to suspect that the bill was going to the treated with disdain. A friendly smile only added in giving a false sense of security to the waiter.

Ramesh looked around to plan his exit and found that the restaurant had one that landed right onto the road.

It was well in to lunch time. Worli is located bang in the middle of the city of Bombay.

The offices located in Worli were spewing out hungry crowds in to the restaurants located in the vicinity. Also, since Worli had a passpost office, the public applying and waiting for new passports would come in hordes to feed themselves.

This restaurant too had its share of crowd. The cashier was as usual sitting behind a table and putting the moneys he received from customers in to the open drawers in front of him.

Ramesh had no one to write back to. He had lost his mother when he was seventeen. He had a younger brother. Their father worked in the local colliery and earned enough to feed them comfortably. But Ramesh’s younger brother fell in to bad company and soon dropped out of school. To turn in to a wastrel was his next step.

The whole neighbourhood used to complain about the boy’s antics to their father but he used to dismiss it off and his sympathy for the motherless children was well known. Also, the boy was his father’s pet child.

A day was to come sooner or later when this had to happen. His brother got into a street side brawl and was fatally stabbed. Ramesh was barely out of his teens then. His father could not bear the shock of his younger son’s death and soon took to being sick.

A young Ramesh had to go to work to look after his ailing father. It was only a matter of time when the debts mounted to unbearable proportions. Two years of sickness and his father had no strength to fight any longer. One evening he died in his sleep.

No sooner that he died his creditors descended on to Ramesh’s. His life became miserable and Ramesh took off. He landed in Mumbai and decided to make his fortune here.

The thali finally arrived before him. He will not pay the bill today, he again said to himself and bit into the roti with determination. The food would not have tasted any better whether he paid or not….He reasoned to himself.

The thali was a large round plate with many small utensils containing curries. The number of curries in the plate was obviously determined by the cost of the thali. This one contained four curries. Also the Roti was reasonable thick. This would be followed by a small plate of rice.  

Ramesh estimated it to cost atleast thirty rupees. If he paid the bill then that would leave only ten rupees in his pocket   

However, if he was caught escaping, he could always plead that he was an absentminded man. But then how to spend the next few days without any money in the pocket, he shuddered. He ate with relish as if it was going to be his last meal…..determined not to pay for it even in the worst of the circumstances.

The rice came when he finished eating his rotis.  

Now was going to be the difficult part. By the time he would eat the rice the waiter would come and ask whether he had finished with his orders. It was then that he would put ‘operation escape’ into action.

Ramesh looked up and saw that the cashier’s table was crowded with people falling over one another to pay their bills. Ramesh smiled and thought that this was going to be easy. He could make an easy escape and he clenched his left first as if psyching himself up to the task. His right hand was pushing another morsel of rice in to his mouth.

He finished eating and he raised himself and made his way to the wash basins for washing his hand.

Lunch time was the time when one had only to shift one’s buttocks on the cushioned seats when another pair would squeeze itself in. No sooner had Ramesh risen that the space was occupied by another gentleman.

Ramesh saw this and thought that his escape was now going to be a cake walk. The crowd was making it easier to escape without paying his bill.

Since most of the patrons ate with their fingers they would have to invariably get up and wash their hands at the wash basins. In case the patron did not want any thing more the waiter would himself write out the bill and place it on the table while the patron would be at the wash basin washing his hands.

Then the waiter would move on to fill in other orders.

The patron was expected to come back and leave the cash at the table or pick up the bill and pay it directly to the cashier.

Ramesh had returned to the table and would have left without ordering anything else but the waiter saw him come back from the wash basin. He came to Ramesh very quickly carrying with him the orders of the others sitting nearby and served them.

But by then Ramesh had lost his seat to a newcomer and he remained standing. The waiter asked him, “Anything else, sir?”

“Yes. A glass of pineapple juice” said Ramesh.

The juice would be freshly extracted and would take some time to come. Mean while the waiter would have to attend to the other customers who were in a hurry to eat and leave. Also since Ramesh had ordered juice his bill was kept in abeyance till the juice was served.

The waiter left to place Ramesh’s order at the juice counter. He would be busy fetching the other orders from the kitchen. Ramesh saw the crowd at the cashier’s counter. He sensed his chance of escape and hurried towards the exit….because he did not want to pay the bill.

Ramesh had reached the door step and in a moment would have stepped outside on to the road. There was quite a crowd waiting at the bus stop outside, near the restaurant. A few buses were waiting for commuters to board. He would have only to take a few more quick steps to land himself first into the bus. He concentrated on his goal – the bus, as he did not want to pay the bill.

The waiter turned and came out of the kitchen and his eyes went to the entrance of the restaurant. He saw Ramesh going out without paying. In the split of a second he knew that this customer of his was evading the bill. He was used to such antics of certain customers and faced atleast one such case everyday.

He called out loudly to the cashier, “Sir, That man in the yellow shirt, he hasn’t paid”.

The cashier had an assistant standing near by and he heard the call. He responded within a flash and made a leap towards Ramesh.

The bus conductor rang his bell twice as a signal for the driver to leave. Ramesh heard the waiter shout and knew he was going to be caught….for the first time in his life. He propelled himself towards the bus with the assistant cashier in hot pursuit. By then the waiter too had made his way to the door step.  

The bus moved. There was a loud explosion. A bomb had exploded.

200 kgs of RDX that had been left by some communal minds, in a jeep parked nearby – strategically timed to explode during lunch time. It had exploded without any warning. The pellets flew in different directions and the heat wave generated by the bomb travelled in all directions with a speed of 6000 Kms a second. The temperature generated by the heat wave reached 4000 degrees in a matter of seconds. The searing heat took with it many lives and permanently damaged the nearby buildings.

Ramesh did not pay the bill…. Or did he?

© -copyright - sunshine