Ek..Ek..Ek...

Year: 1996
Place: City of Joy

Little background before I enter into this story. I along with 8 others were the selected few to be positioned in City of Joy during our first job.

Being from the great state of Tamil nadu, most of us "choose" not to take up hindi in our school. Only 2 out of those 8 had any level of expertise in hindi. There was this little problem. Bengalis share our passion for language and decided not to speak anything other than Bengali. Life was not difficult in our office, since it was multilingual anyway. But at home, it is whole another issue.

While we dealt with neighbours in universal sign and hinglish language (and with their beautiful daughters in eye language), it did not work that well with doodh-walas and dobhi-walis. So, we decided to invent a plan. We (6 of us whose combined hindi knowledge is slightly lower than 6 month old north indian baby) decided to put one of the only 2 hindi speakers to be our liasons to day-to-day world.

Ofcourse, we wanted to interview both of them before offering the position and was devicing set of questions. But one guy dropped out of the race (fearing rejection?) and left the decision to be unanimous and unopposed.

We put our liason-dude to test the very next day. Dhobi-lady walked in to get our clothes. Go dude, we all blessed him. "Guys, if you are in the hall, she may ask something in hindi to you and you may be embarrased so why don't you guys stay in your rooms", our liason told us.
We thought that was very thoughtful of him and stayed in and continued watching the movie.

Half way through the movie, we could hear our friend still talking to that lady. Not to invade into his privacy, we continued. He came and announced that his first task was successful. We teased him about his long chat he had. (Secretly admiring his hindi speaking ability)

Next week came and we are all ready with our next load of clothes(almost 50 of them). And by now, we started trusting our friend's ability. We got the same instruction from him to go to our room. We suspected something J (jollu) is going on and checked in to our room.

After what seemed like an hour, we sent one of our spy to see what exactly is happening. And we all put our ears to the wall and started listening. What we heard made even the hindi-language babies in us to roll on the floor and laugh our a** off. It was stream of "Ek..Ek..Ek..". One Ek for every cloth :)

We had two options,
1) to tease the hell out of him (that means he will not do the work)
2) Keep quiet and keep the teasing for later.

We prudently chose the latter. Aur aaj tak har ek baar usko "Ek Ek" ke bare mein yaad
dilate hain! (I am Prathmik First class you know)

Now this story is told to so many people so, I won't be surpised if you heard this from one of us somehow in past 10 years :)

Note:
1) Just for the record, he later excelled and started using Panch & Ek combination to convey
the numbers
2) I got the Hindi sentence about from my wife and I totally got the meaning wrong (I blame the
government)
3) Most of it is a work of fiction based on some truth ofcourse. (Aka Da Vinci Code)