Priya never responded to those high sounding words or may be she did which I lost, partly due to our over-ambitious driver (who can take on anyone in the world, or so he thinks) and partly due to the heavy traffic and the usual honking that accompanies it. Nothing has changed in Bangalore even though we have been almost rebuked by the PoI.
“Where are you put up?” Priya asked.
I have found that this is a common way of asking people as to which part of the city they stay in. And this is more common among people in software industry.
“Sanjaynagar, Aswathnagar to be precise, I hope you have heard about it” replied Aman.
Priya had boarded the bus near Indian Express(Bangalore's centre, almost) so I thought she might not know about the northern boundary of Bangalore.
“I think I have heard about the place, isn’t Vaibhav theater in that area?” she really amazed me with her sense of geography and with landmark and all – she surely had been to Sanjaynagar,Aswathnagar(to be precise).
“Yeah!! Vaibhav is in Sanjaynagar. You seem to have quite good knowledge about Bangalore”
“I am a ‘localite’, was born here and did my schooling and engineering from here” I should have guessed it but I was more concerned about that word which has somehow crept into local lingo. I am not sure whether it finds mention in leading English dictionaries but now that ‘samosa’ has been added ‘localite’, ‘native place’ and other very commonly used words may soon see the light of the day.
“Oh! Great”, Aman exclaimed (he didn’t mean it).
Though Priya was a ‘localite’, to know about a theater in one corner of the city requires more than one connection and I thought even Aman would have guessed that connection. But Casanovas are people who don’t give up unless the word flows from the horse’s mouth and they don’t believe in deduction from subtle hints either. Besides, our hero was no ordinary one; he belonged to that “the” class of people.
“You seem to have joined here recently” Aman said (this is not the way Aman, make it interrogative).
“Yeah, I joined in the first week of November and had to attend some training”
“But I never saw you in this bus” this guy surely knows a thing or two about conversing, sentence formation notwithstanding.
“I had the training in Madivala office and have a test today in EC so had to take this bus” Priya replied. (EC- Electronics City)
By this time we had crossed Kormangala and were near the St John’s Hospital. There is an unofficial bus stop near that junction and I was not able to hold my smile when I saw a lady, at the bus stop, rubbing her finger nails against each other. This is a very common sight these days, thanks to Swami Ramdev and to his spiritual sorties on some not so spiritual TV channels and to his twisting skills which has convinced people of the power of Hath Yoga.
To be continued...
