Sometimes, you have too much to say about a keepsake but not enough time to pen it down in your pandect to save it for a lifetime. Then, a period of loneliness comes across in your life, and you decide to journey through the past to experience the joy left behind.
It is amazing how the brain will connect one
thought to another until it gets where it wants to be. Chetan Bhagat wrote this
line in Revolution 2020, and it somehow fits the following events. Let
us ride to an evening when my friend Boney Meyn and I finally reached The Taj
Hotel, Dhaula Kuan, for one of my life's epics.
It was a February evening. In those times, we
both needed money, as our expenses were too high to manage with the money from
our parents. Boney—the man of ideas—brought us to this epic situation. We
arrived at the entrance of The Taj to work as waiters in a five-star hotel till
midnight.
The saga begins when Boney parked his Maruti
Esteem—as well as our self-esteem—at the entrance of The Taj. The janitor asked
about our visit. We answered truthfully; he looked at us, flabbergasted. When
he finally returned to his senses, he directed us to a distant parking lot,
half a kilometer from the grand entrance. Our Esteem was no less than an
alligator in a chicken farm among a few bicycles and fewer motorbikes.
For a random note: Boney and I were the
best-dressed waiters. I bought a pair of trousers, a white shirt from Janpath
Market, and black bi-occasion shoes from Sarojini Nagar Market for this fateful
day. Our goddamned attire at least shielded us from the wrath of hotel managers
during the uniform inspection. Little did we know that our clothes weren't
enough to save us from the challenges that awaited. We, the anyhow-cleared
candidates of the inspection trauma, had been sent to a mega banquet called the
Maharaja Hall (God bless my memory).
As we entered first, we noticed the Page-3
type crowd and the soothing touch of mellow lighting, instrumental music, and
an aroma of high society. It was quite a place for me, given I had never been
to a five-star hotel. However, it was not a relishing job. We had to serve the
food in a typical, articulate manner and pronounce the names of the dishes we
had never heard. The party, where everyone was someone important, ended within
an hour, without earning a single pourboire.
Apart from the pourboire misfortune,
everything was going as per our anticipation before we were sent to the Shah
Jahan Hall (God bless my memory: Part 2). We were about to be sent to the hall
where the South African Cricket team for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011
quarterfinal match was having dinner, but our fate dragged us to the Shah Jahan
Hall. This hall was crammed with herds of brusque upstart Delhiites. Let alone
Page-3, one will never give a place on the three-millionth page to this kind of
crowd—a journo's calculation.
The brusque upstarts were demanding something
constantly. Poor Boney pleaded to escape this godforsaken place each time he
passed me. We both were exhausted, battered, and drained but could not find a
safe opportunity to escape. I realized that requesting the management to let us
go would not be a good idea because they would not let us quit easily. They
could abuse us or do things worse than that. I was afraid of the latter because
sometimes it is better to flee gobsmacked after being awarded an abuse than to
be thrown out. So, my paranoid but still strategic mind told him to wait for a
safe chance.
It was not a cakewalk to sneak through the
awry crowd in the banquet hall. It used to take 4–5 minutes to cross that
hundred-meter hurdle race flawlessly, especially with a tray full of utensils.
And when the time to booze came, the hall got even more stuffed and haphazard.
First, the hall manager guided me to deliver a
tray full of whisky glasses. Now, that hundred-meter hurdle, already more than
a hundred times tougher than a real one, seemed five hundred times more
toilsome. Delivering a tray full of 35 whisky glasses, each weighing 500 grams,
is not an easy nut to crack when you had to beg those morons for the charity of
a narrow escape, quite literally. The torture got worse when the demons went
groggy.
Then, as if the torture I endured was not
enough, the manager promoted me to the next level: the
thirty-bottles-full-of-liquor task. Now, I had reached the zenith of my
endurance. I was quickly contemplating the best way to get out of this
goddamned place. Boney was also looking as if paralyzed and food-deprived. Mr.
I-Can-Endure-Anything was about to collapse on the floor at any moment.
I was going through the ordeal when the
manager ordered me to serve pegs to the boorish metropolitans. Now, this was
the enough-is-enough situation, where a trick had to be played rather than
giving up.
I went to the hallway adjacent to the banquet
and sat on the floor, my head bolstered on my bent knees. I started to play
numb and did not respond to anyone until the senior manager arrived.
Boney appeared on the scene at that moment and
started fibbing about my fictitious fever and nausea. My sick-fallen
performance was no less than an award-winning one. They asked about my
identity. I dished my college ID card out. That did the trick. The ID card
startled them. They started behaving and treating us like humans again.
Finally, my college, which I thought was good-for-nothing, saved me. After all,
an ID card belonging to Jain TV works in awkward situations like this, even a
little, even more in The Taj Hotel.
Now they offered us food and drinks too. They
were even more intrigued when we said we had our car and turned down their
offer of a cab to return to our place. They escorted us to the same entrance
gateway where this odyssey began. We somehow reached the car and sprawled on
the seats. Our bodies were crumbling down. The masochism was over. It took a
while for our blood circulation to return to normal again.
