Tuesday May 1, 01:53 AM
Napkins and laugh curves
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"That is an NRI sitting over there with her property broker consultant," said boss, "and they are busy calculating the value of the family property." This, I also realised, after refreshing paper napkins for the third time on the only table in the hotel where somebody was eating upma with fork-and-knife, though why we have to provide so much cutlery for every dish I have never understood. And I have been serving at such hotels for decades now, and never have I seen so many NRIs calculating figures on paper napkins than I have now. "It would be cheaper to give them cloth napkins," said I to boss, "but then, they would probably take them away." These born-again NRIs, mostly doctors and engineers who left in the '60s and '70s, are terrible misers. Not only are their tips frozen like them in the '70s, but they also pilfer ashtrays and napkins. When caught, they usually say things like, "This is a free advertisement for your hotel back home in Yonkers." An unmarked napkin? Boss himself takes holidays on cruise ships-where everything moveable is RFID-tagged. He tells me that people who look suspiciously like NRIs form the bulk of those stopped on the gangway when their huge soft suitcases go beep-beep, like Road Runner. He has seen even mattresses being disgorged. So the ad souvenir plea does not hold much imli in his rasam. So we always count the cutlery before letting NRIs go, and if anything is missing, we charge for extra chutney and ghee, or even for mineral water poured from the jug into the bottle and then into the glass with deftness that we did not learn from PC Sarkar. But we can always spot them getting excited about family property. It happens like this. Somebody in Yonkers tell the NRI that the ancestral property is worth so much. The NRI gets excited, because by now spouse has wandered off to another marriage, and children are playing bass guitar in Coyote Ugly, where both genders wear short skirts with unshaven legs. And rupees divided by the dollar at an exchange rate of 33 starts looking very exciting. They then come to India, and end up with Boman Irani lookalikes from Khosla ka Ghosla, after which the script goes awry. Then they come back to our hotel, but this time with people who look like they are from the IT Department. And we bring out the paper napkins again, as they calculate how much back-tax is owed since the time they left India.
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