Thursday, November 26, 2009

Money Trouble……..When I fell short by a mere rupee!!!


When I first read a Mills & Boons novel, I was simply blown over like any other starry eyed teenager. I had seen many novels and heard many a stories from friends, but I never actually bought one for a long time. The cover pictures that I saw warned me in advance that my folks are definitely not going to like me reading one of those books…..but the lure of the forbidden was just too much to resist, so I decided to buy my first Mills & Boons, I was perhaps in class 7 or 8….. :-))
Now arranging for money was the tough part, surreptitious inquiries revealed I needed 50 bucks for this! Back in those days, getting hold of 50 rupees was kind of impossible! So my partner-in-crime, my younger sister decided to pool all the savings we had. We searched all our secret hiding places, all the piggy banks were emptied and all we could manage was 29 Rs….sigh!

We then sat down and began scratching our heads, splitting our hair to find a solution to THE biggest problem of our lives at that point of time…..we just needed 31 bucks more and we could lay hand on that DREAM BOOK….ohhhh so near yet so far!!!! BINGO….suddenly I remembered about twenty rupees that I had inside one of my long forgotten books. Wow…..I finally had the money to buy the novel….well that was what I thought before I counted the total money…!!!!

It was exactly 49 Rs…..unbelievable and total filmy, but I swear this is exactly how it had happened! And finding that 1re took eternity…..in fact I remember we could manage the one rupee only on the next day. Whenever I muse about this incident, it never fails to bring a smile to my face and give a tug at all my heartstrings! We all have our personal filmy moments in our lives I guess…..Finally we did manage the fifty bucks and the excuse to go out of the house to buy the book was an innovative (according to me) ‘I want to go to a friend house in the neighborhood, her family is moving out of Kohima’....hehehe!!!

I remember the protagonists of the story were named Mel and Jade…….and probably the name of the novel was Man Trouble….well in my case it was no man trouble at all, it was plain and simple money trouble….:P