Aa...bey

It was 12.45 in the night and we were yet to give the final touches to the group assignment that was to be submitted the next day morning.

Elsewhere in the Dining Hall ( DH) there were similar groups huddled together to finish their assignment before the submission deadline date .

Our group assignment was on ‘labour legislations pertaining to contract labour’ with special emphasis on the contribution of women and child labour that trickled through the unorganized sector into the Organized sector . It was Professor Pathak's assignment.

Professor Pathak was a middle aged man with a goatee beard like that of Aamir khan’s .
He had the look of a man who must have been a passionate radicalist in his youth before he mellowed down to settle into the comfort and security of academia . He always said he wanted original research on the assignment topics and would reward such assignments with generous grades.

Our group, had 9 of such ‘exciting’ assignments whose deadlines were falling in the next two weeks. In any case what would the professor know if we picked up some obscure statistics from Economic and political weekly ( EPW) journals or the United nations development report.

Those were not the days of google . The library section which stocked the EPW and HBR nad UNDP report was dark and dingy and smelled of moist walls. If you were deficient with calcium you would love that smell.

On this particular night we were scurrying thru the United nations report on unorganized labour to reel out statistics on the contribution to the GDP from unorganized sectors of economy.
How the United Nations manages to get such statistics is quite puzzling to me . For I have never met any guy who says ‘ I am collecting statistics for UN’ or something like that.

I am tempted to ask the lady who sells hair clips on the local train to VT if anyone ever contacted her in the slum where she lived for an interview or for a census report or statistics for data on unorganized labour for the United nations… but I am sure her reply will be in the negative.

Not that we were bothered about the authenticity of the stastistics . As long as Prof. Pathak gave us decent grades … how did it matter whether the contribution to GDP was 5 % or 95% .

I was yawning. If you have observed, yawning is contagious and it had caught on to all three of us in the group. Instinct told us that we need to head towards Shetty’s for a cup of tea … which was the only way to energise us to chase the submission deadline.

Shetty’s was just a 5 minute walk situated on the highway, just outside of the campus.
00.45 a.m is not a very holy hour to be walking on a highway . But then there was a flurry of activity all around at that hour. When we reached Shetty’s , two truck drivers were having their dinner of Tandoori roti and chicken masala. The bottles placed on the table suggested that it was with some beer or whisky that they were gulping down their late night dinner with.

We decided to sit outside on the side of entrance stairs outside the Shetty’s shop instead of going inside.

We sat down on the stairs and craned our necks to catch the sight of the server boy who was serving the drunk truck drivers inside the restaurant . One of us called out … ‘Aa ..bey… teen cutting’ … we then revised the order and made it ‘one special cutting’ for me and ‘two ordinary cutting’ for my group mates..
The ‘special cutting’ was not very different in taste or ingredients . Just that it was served with a saucer underneath the glass tumbler and was expensive by 25 paise as compared to the ‘ordinary cutting’.

Despite the cost , I preferred the special for a very special reason . The server boy always got the tumblers and as he carried them , he would balance them between his fingers. One could see drops of tea spilling down his dirty fingernails into the glass tumblers. And to me it was repulsive. If I mentioned it to the guys with whom I used to hang around, i would be mercilessly teased and picked at for being finicky. So I never really mentioned the reason for my preferences of the ‘special cutting’ tea over the ‘ordinary cutting’ tea.

The Boy would come down with the order . The Boy ... he always was ...never probably had a name …the Boss at the cash counter never called him by a name …
When the Boss took the order , and that was when the boy was busy serving other customers, he would call out …

‘aa...bey teen cutting laa’ … ( hey you get three ‘cutting’ )

‘Aa…bey’ was how he was always called. That could not have been his name. Because ‘Aa…bey’ is a slang used among boys or men to call out each other. I do not know its exact meaning , but I do remember that our primary school teacher thrashed two of the boys, whom she overheard calling each other ‘Aa …bey’ … I guess it was a bad word or something like that.

Strange are the ways the primary school teachers enforce discipline. I was once sent out of the class because the class monitor caught me exchanging glances with the girl in the desk ahead , when all I was attempting was to borrow her eraser during the ‘Silence’ period.

The ‘Silence’ period is when you are not supposed to talk and maintain pin drop silence.
She caught me and I was made to stand outside the class for the entire period for breaking the rule. I could have argued that my entire conversation was non-verbal and I had not broken the rules of the ‘silence’ period. But then the verdict was given during the silence period and if I opened my mouth to speak, that would have gone against me. So I complied. Such are the ways of implementing discipline in Primary schools.
I suspect they trained the Primary school teachers in the concentration camps during the world war II. That is where they picked up these best practices from.
*****
The boy got us our order … one special and two cutting chai … we started sipping it slowly and hurried up later…not because there was the GDP assignment to catch up, but because the Tea was getting cold.

We repeated this routine , almost every mid-night when the assignment deadlines approached . We would mostly sit at the entrance stairs at Shetty’s and sip our tea.

The boy was always dressed up in the same half knickers and an oversized shirt torn in the underarms. It was probably donated to him by his benevolent boss.

It was late in the night one day when we were waiting for usual order of one special and two cutting. The boy came yawning with our order and accidentally dropped some hot tea on my jeans . He panicked and dropped the glass . The glass broke , and the chai spilled all over. My class mate gave him a staring look. The Shetty boss minding the cash counter was not there. He usually left by around 10.00 p.m and left it to the boy to run the place at such unholy hours. He probably had other ‘holy’ things to catch up in that hour. A mistake like this in Shetty boss’s presence would have meant some good thrashing for the boy from his boss in public view.

The loss of a glass tumbler would not go unnoticed by the boss when he would come down the next morning. But the boy pleaded with us , not to tell Shetty boss about his sloppy customer service. We understood, brushed off the matter and asked him for the change.

He fumbled in his mental calculations and then gave us the change for the Rs. 10 note that we handed over to him. Strange… it never occurred to us to give him a tip or something like that in all the years that we had tea at Shetty’s.

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It was a Saturday .
The training workshop was on Six Sigma methodology .
This was being conducted in the state of the art - swanky new office which had recently been bought and refurbished in the other end of the city . I reached the conference room ‘C’ which is where our workshop was to be held . I was a little late and the facilitator hd started facilitating an introduction round where the participants went about telling their names, projects and hobbies in that order. Which is when I made my entry apologetically.

The session started about 30 mts late and we were to rush up , since there was a lot of theory on statistics related to six-sigma that had to be covered.

At about elevenish … the terminologies in Six sigma were swarming around our heads like a bunch of bees shooed away from the honey comb. The facililtator realized it . He sensibly decided to call for the tea break . The tea seemed to be arriving late .

After about 10 mts of wait time, which the smokers used productively for a leisurely smoke , a server came in with a tray of gleaming crockery filled with tea and coffee . Since we were already late, it was announced that tea / coffee would be served during the session .
The session began.
The server whispered ‘tea/ coffee’ into my ears and I replied ‘Tea’.
A cup of tea and saucer in shining white and gold rimmed crockery was placed in front of me . The server got around asking the others in a similar fashion.
When he was serving the other end of the table, I caught him glancing and staring at me … It was a momentary discomfort … for it had been long since men had stopped giving glances at me… I rechecked my attire to see if everything was in proper place .


After another two hours, the facilitator announced lunch much to the relief of the participants. The lunch again would not arrive . And it was getting late. We were told by the organizer , that there were three workshops going on at the same time and it was shortage of canteen staff which led to this problem.

After another 10 mts. of wait time, the server scurried with the lunch and laid it out on the table. I again caught him glancing at me .
The stare … looked familiar … or was it the eyes…
Somewhere lost in the memory lane…

We were overshooting lunch time and so the facilitator announced that we have the dessert quickly and assemble back. The smokers cribbed and protested and then took off for a quick smoke.
In the rest room after lunch I was trying hard to remember why this face felt familiar.

The facilitator accounced that we split into groups to do a case study … on the possibilities of Six sigma rigour in our routine day to day work .

An enthusiastic participant in the group took the lead and I was relieved. It gets difficult to concentrate on such abstract things especially after lunch .

You require to be very Clever to be a facilitator. If you have noticed , all case studies are always scheduled after lunch, so that the participants are awake while the facilitator, slips into a siesta.
mmm… should aspire to be a facilitator … it sounds good in your performance appraisal to say ‘ facilitated xxx sessions ‘ …

Thankfully the enthusiastic participant volunteered to present the case study . The presentations were over and tea was announced. This time around… the tea had arrived before time . And therefore was getting cold.

The server caught me glancing at him . He looked like he wanted to start a conversation with me. Knowing that the subtle class hierarchy demanded me to start the conversation, I walked upto him and said … ‘your face looks familiar’ .

His eyes brightened up …
‘ medam … aap Shetty me chai peene aata tha … ‘ ( Madam … you used to frequent the shetty’s for tea ???) …

Ah… now it all came flooding in … the half knickers and the oversized shirt were replaced by a spotless white and black uniform with a black waist coat and a bow tie over the collar.

He had grown a little taller. Otherwise, the eyes were the same … the boyish innocence on the face interspersed with pimples was still there … except for a thin line of moustache that had sprouted over the upper lip .

I tried to recollect the name… could not remember if there was any …
I told him he looked very different and that was why I could not recognize him.
He said it was the same with me.
‘ Medam …aap bhi jada ho gaya’ ( Madam … you too have put on weight) he said , giving a suggestive, shy glance over my six month pregnant stomach as if suggesting .. ‘I wish you well’ .

He said he was working with the ‘Sai-krupa caterers’ and had joined over here a month back. Had been drifting here and there after Shetty boss threw him out after getting couple of other boys from their native place near Mangalore.

He was now employed with another of the Shetty’s from the very same native place near Mangalore. This Shetty owned and managed 'Sai-krupa catering services' which was supplying our lunch and tea/coffee .

Today was a busy day with three conferences running in parallel and he was the only one to manage the show since it was a Saturday .
As it always happens with trainees on probation, he was being tested for his abilities to ‘deliver under pressure’ on a saturday afternoon.

He was in a hurry , for the tea break had been announced in the next conference room and wanted to take leave. I said I Understood

We got back for the wrap up session on Six sigma methodology.

I was doing my mental calculations. How many years had passed by ... Was it six or eight or nine .

He must have been not more than 10-12 years old then . He must now be over eighteen because otherwise the contractor would not employ him . If he did employ ‘under eighteen minors’ and if anyone complained, he would lose our contract. The contractors were told about it and had it written on the signed agreement .
Because we are a Multinational organization operating under strict global standards and adhere strictly to the ‘code of conduct’.
Our code of conduct , prohibits employment of child labour , either directly or indirectly through our contractors.

But I guess it does not say much about employing young adult labour that has gained its expertise in its area of work during childhood .

When the rest of us were slogging out for our assignments on GDP growth and child labour contribution from the unorganized sector, these boys instead of being in school , served us our chai and finished their ‘internships’ during childhood.

By the time we graduated , got our placements and later our promotions, they too climbed up their career ladders and graduated from half knickers to wear a waist coat and a bow tie and served tea / coffee in air conditioned board rooms of the swanky offices of the Multinational Corporations.

Mercifully, the six sigma training session got over.

On our way back I met the boy who was now folding up the white cloth that was laid out to cover the serving tables. It must have been a long day for him . But he did not look tired.

He had a look of confidence and enthusiasm that is typically found in young men and women who have recently got a fantastic career break and are all eager to prove their worth in their new jobs.