The Purple haze:Day 2

DAY 2: 27^th September ,Saturday, 2008

I ride back home with no other thought than how stupid I can be, thinking about all the possibilities that could happen in the morning. I reached home, couldn’t sleep for nuts.

Woke up early in the morning, brushed, went for my stupid driving class with the teacher cracking some fuckall jokes for which I had to laugh.

 

I was not sure whether I should inform my family at this point of time, going against the thought I just took my bike and reached haze at 10:30 am.

The security asked me to stand outside till Santosh ( the cashier) or one of the floor managers come.

 

Here I am , standing helplessly for around two hours. My phone went out of charge, so I copied sonali’s and paro ( one of the juniors ) number on my hand.

I called Paro and asked him to check with all his bloody IIT friends whether they have taken my bag. I called Sonali and asked her to urge Anand to send some Haze bloke as soon as possible. In two hours, nothing happened apart from I finished like some ten ciggies.

 

This was one of those helpless moments where I was standing with no one to talk to, no charge in the phone, crowded with weird thoughts about what possibly could happen to me. At one point of time I even thought my manager Madhukar will throw me out of Cisco ( but he was very very helpful in the end).

I needed someone to be there, moreover a phone so that I can do something. So I called the only number I could remember… Mansi’s number and got Varun’s number. I called him and explained him the situation and what do I get from his side… He fucking laughed… lol…. But he was there for me in next 15 minutes.

I didn’t know what to do, I was sitting in purple haze 11:30 in the morning with some Metallica being played in the background. I ordered a large whiskey, and waited for someone to turn up. By the time Varun came, I had gulped 3 large and I narrated the entire story.

 

Time was running out, my hopes of avoiding Cisco and Family and going on with the scheduled Bangkok trip seemed fading. I called my manager Madhukar and explained him the situation… He understood and gave me some instructions that I must do with respect to Cisco security policy.

At around 1 pm my savior came, the brilliant cashier Santosh. We decided that lets see the cctv that was recorded last night and try and figure out something.

We spent around one hour watching the video with no hopes, in the end stages… there was this bastard who was carrying two bags on the way to exit. I stopped and zoomed and confirmed that it was my bag.

 

First feeling, I was so happy and relieved to at least know what happened to my bag. Second, I was so angry with this guy, If he had come in front of me that time I would have killed him. Then I thought it was a mistake by that person since he looked very much educated and must have just picked the bag by mistake and will return it by the end of day. I ordered few more drinks and gulped them down…neat and pure.

 

Here is where my investigation begins. The guy who took my bag was from the group who left last… so we could easily figure out which table they were from. For my luck, that table bill was paid by a credit card. I got the ICICI transaction slip from the pub.

The name of the card holder was Rajeev Mukherjee. We swore at him few times and went ahead to find out his details.

 

We tried calling ICICI customer care and lodge a false transaction complaint from the merchant side so as to get more details about Rajeev Mukherjee. Let me tell you one thing… ICICI customer care sucks. Sucks big time. There no way you can talk to a human being unless and until you have your own credit card. Even then it will take some gruesome rounds with that electronic chick giving some amazingly useless options.

 

Time had come that we involve police to get things accelerated a bit. After having lunch in paramount ( Ghee rice and Dal fry), we ( Varun and I) went to Kormangala Police station. This is undoubtedly the funniest part of this story.

 

Both of us enter the Police station with apprehension in our mind. Every single Policeman staring at us…. Why??? Me… A thin, kinda high on whiskey with slightly unshaven rugged beard with torn cargo’s. Basically a very dirty shabby appearance. But  it wasn’t me who caught everybody’s attention. The man… Varun, with torn jeans and heavily bearded chin… looked like a terrorist who has not had bath for days.

Anyways I filed a FIR for the loss of laptop and passport. The cop gave us some gyaan for 15 minutes and belted me around for another 15 minutes about how careless I am. He called someone on the walky talky and assigned one police for our case.

 

That Police came with another two cops. We took them to Haze ,showed them  the cctv video and gave them the transaction slip. They were confused so we suggested why don’t we go to ICICI bank in Koramangala.

They agreed and we were in ICICI in 10 minutes. Just imagine… two shabby and heavily bearded guys with 3 cops in this blast season.

 

Let me tell you this, cops don’t know English and rest of the world doesn’t know Kannada. We learnt that we need to get a request letter from police and provide it to the bank. We did that, then we got to talk to the most dumb bank manager I have ever met.

She understood the scene and says there is no way any bank can give the details with just last 4 digits of the card number and the Merchant ID. I cant imagine a bank manager can say this. I got damn pissed and bluffed the following sentence with some support from Varun : “ Are you telling me if there is some discrepancy in a transaction you guys don’t have a database where in you locate the particular transaction and troubleshoot. Don’t give me this bullshit, I am a software engineer and there is no way you can claim that you can not give me the details with just a transaction slip”.

 

I was shocked I said that and so was the bank manager Priya. She got confused and said they cant help us and directed us to ICICI bommanhalli branch since they handle credit card details. All this while the cop was silent, when he heard bommanhalli , he quickly escaped by saying that is outside Koramangala’s limit and he cant help me anymore.

It comes under Madivala Police limit so I need to contact them. It was already 6 pm and Saturday. The bank closed with Sunday and Monday being bank holidays and my flight on  Tuesday night. I couldn’t believe after giving so many details there was absolutely no one who could help me. Neither the police nor the stupid ICICI bank.

 

In the meanwhile I called Cisco Security call center and updated them with the proceedings, Initially they belted out a things to do for me, but after sometime I get a call saying that there has been a bomb blast in delhi , some 10 Kms away from Cisco Office so they are all busy with that and there will be some delay in handling my case.

I could not ask Varun to stay longer because first time in his life he was actually studying for some GRE. So I went back home, explained everything to my family and heard their taunts,charged my  phone and left.

 

Its amazing how people react to such things, they know the person is in deep shit and still give comments like how can be so careless. I know I was careless and that’s why this happened, but no one gives a shit what I went through… same old question..why was I so careless. I can take some suggestions of what I should do now rather than what I should’ve done.

 

At around 8 pm I head towards Haze with no clue what to do. I had this tiny miny hope that the person will return the bag today and everything will be over. I will take the police case back, his life will not be screwed over a mistake etc etc.

I needed some company so I called the two juniors Inder and Paro. They were there in like 15 minutes. We kept smoking and discussing what to do next. We came to a conclusion that we rather I need to check my contacts who has some influence in Police or in ICICI. I called like thousand people with futile attempts. I even called Cisco HR thinking they will know such people. It was Saturday night, what can I expect … people will leave everything and start searching their respective contacts.

 

At the end of the day we concluded with no results and headed have dinner. I was going back to haze when I met some of my friends …. There we go again… Repeat the whole story again, listen to their expert comments ( they were all trying to help me ), smoke some more..etc etc. I took all of them and headed towards haze for a last check and there was nothing. These bastards invited me to their house to play poker, and I shamelessly accepted the offer.

 

I was riding to their house when the cashier Santosh called and asked me to come back to haze. I was suddenly thrilled and ripped through the traffic back to haze. When I reached Santosh bent down and lifted a bag ( it seems just a sentence here… but my whole mind was racing with some fluid at a super speed ). I was so depressed after seeing the bag, It wasn’t mine. Some guy had left it that night and he even came back before it closed to take it back.

 

I went to my friends place dejected and played poker all night.. made some money which I never got, laughed about my whole scene and state and slept without a clue what I should do next.