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

5 comments:

Unknown said...

haha those were the gud ol dys ... i still hve the MEL & JADE prserved evn though it is without the cover . the rest i hve sold it out bt nt this ,coz it ws very tough to get 5o rs n top of dt 1 rupee short .. hw we use to mke excuses n go out jst to buy th MB , n hw we use to keep inside our text book n our parents thinkin we were studin late nite.... hehe ohh n the bathroom my God i think il stop nw or else evryhting vll cum out nw haha

Anonymous said...

I remember the time when I was short of just one rupee and I came from my sis house. Earlier,I had spent the money foolishly with my friend on eating and shopping etc. I had just 2 Rs in my pocket and instead of buying the ticket for 3 Rs I took 2 Rs ticket and sat just in the middle of the bus so that neither of the conductors are able to recognise. As there are no checkers in the private buses so I sat in the middle confidently. Bud i did not bother to take even a single buck from my sis. But I realised how even the single rupee counts a lot.

Thats why its called

Money money money
better than sunshine
sweeter than honey.

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朋友 said...
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IN85 said...

I too remember once falling short by only 25 paise. It was my cousin sister's wedding in Calcutta and me and my cousin brother decided to gift her something with our piggy bank cash. We managed to buy a cheap make up box for her and got it gift wrapped (extra charges for that) and in this process exhausted all the money we had. Then we moved on and suddenly realized on our way that we haven't put in any name card in it. So we hurried back to the store and asked for one. The shop keeper that it would cost us an extra 25 paise. We begged and pleaded the shopkeeper to give it us for free after all it was only 25 paise and would buy only a single toffee or phuchka but he didn't budge. We wanted the gift to look perfect and so at last I stole a used name card from one of my sister's present and overwrote our name. Phew, we realized the value of 25 paise that day.