“Do you have 5 minutes to talk, Chandru?”
There was this visceral faux seriousness in her tone and I braced for impact: she was either going to spin an elaborate ruse to ask for money. Or worse.
I’ve heard many a tale about random, female strangers breaking the ice with my guy friends (the social ones usually). Then there is also Kirti, an introverted ex-colleague who has shared his tales of unknown women (or may be just ‘woman’) chatting him up. And I’ve wondered if that kind of a thing actually happens to people or if they’re all just bluffing through their teeth. Secretly, I knew that these things happen; perhaps not as frequently as the movies make out to be. But I also knew that this shit never happened with me and that put a dissonance between reality and perception of it.
So it did come as a surprise when a girl riding in the same share-auto as I chatted me up. She was the only one in the autorickshaw when I got in and just as I got in, the driver let out a stream of Telugu with one specific English word: “police”. That caught my attention (by which time he left the autorickshaw to recruit more riders) so I asked her, “Aapko hindi aati hai?” to which she said yes. Then I asked her if she would translate to me what the driver had just said and she obliged. I thanked her and automatically assumed that was the end of it.
As new riders trickled in while the autorickshaw and its driver stood waiting to fill beyond-full-capacity (5 people ride in what’s typically a 3-seater auto, and that’s excluding the driver; 3 in the back where riders usually sit and 2 on either side of the driver. Welcome to South Asia), she asked me if I was working here, where I was from, what role I had at work and a bunch of other common things a stranger would ask. She said she loved Tamil songs, that she preferred them over Telugu ones, and then just as my brain began anticipating a non-mainstream human, I heard her profess love for “Rowdy Baby” (the song from Mari 2) and I decided this was an open-and-shut case of mainstream boredom. She did the talking, I did the listening. She did offer, not with the cautious dispassion of courtesy but with exuberant enthusiasm, to be my guide to explore Hyderabad.
Having found 3 other people, we took off from Gachibowli. Since more women had gotten into the autorickshaw, I had to relinquish my seat next to this girl and sit next to the driver. The conversation couldn’t happen across this specific seating arrangement so my mind was racing through options: may be I will get down with her if she got down before me and try to get her number and - eventually - do what the West and the movies have told us to do?
Someone got down before either of us so I got to sit next to her. The conversation resumed and her opening statement this time was, “Chandru, does your startup have any job openings?” Sadly, no. “May be if you know of some other startup or company with an opening, let me know?” Sure, thing. Now, the gentleman in me kicked in and I skirted the phone number part completely and asked, instead, for her email. “I’ll give you my number,” she offered. We exchanged our numbers and she called me three days later at about 9.45pm.
(To be continued)