Natasha and the Juice Bar Owner
India
To a westerner, fed on a diet of European rationalism, with its tendency for planning, calculating, timescales and order, India may seem a very strange place. It has a different logic, which can be unfathomable to most westerners. But what about Indians? The ways of foreigners may seem even stranger to them. East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Rudyard Kipling’s belief that we are joined only at God’s judgement seat may well hold substance. Although the world is being shrunk, the qualities that make civilisations different still exist – almost to the point of absurdity.
I met Natasha in a hotel in Delhi. She was from Germany, that bastion of rationality and order, and was having a horrendous day. She was from “near Munich.” I have never met anyone who actually lives in Munich, only “near Munich.” Maybe it is the name of a city close to Munich where ten million Germans live: the city of “Near Munich”, near Munich. Apparently she was running short of money and had decided to do a little bit of insurance fraud by reporting to the police that someone had stolen her video camera. Having read so many stories about police corruption and incompetency in the Indian press, she thought that the police would be a pushover: a bunch of chai-swilling, chapatti munching deadlegs. How wrong she was.
She arrived at the local police station and said that she had been sitting at a street side juice bar on the Main Bazaar when someone had snatched the camera from off her shoulder. At the police station she had been surrounded by police officers in a small room, and they were not munching chapattis, swilling chai or taking this lightly as she had hoped. The more they grilled her, the smaller the room became and the more she became self-conscious that she was lying through her teeth. She felt that they knew it, and the more she felt that they knew it, the more the sweat began to pour. The grilling was getting hot – too hot for comfort.
Two officers suggested that they accompany her to the juice bar in an attempt to validate her story. She had never expected for one minute that they would tear themselves away from their apparent daily grind of chai-drinking in the station to do a bit of hands-on investigating. Quite strange really considering it is part and parcel of the job.
Shortly after arriving at the juice bar, her bogus story began to disintegrate before her eyes. She had forgotten that there had been a power cut at the time of the alleged incident, so no one was serving juice at the bar. Being Delhi, power cuts are a fairly frequent and prolonged phenomenon and any potential criminal mastermind must surely take this into account when planning any form of scam. What is more, the owner did not even recognise her. It may have helped a little if she had at least visited the bar in the first place. She hadn’t thought it through. The police knew she was lying, but she managed to wriggle out of the situation by piling a few more lies onto the lies already told.
Unfortunately, the juice bar owner was not so lucky – he was frog-marched off to the police station in front of his neighbours, with the police probably believing that he had been in on the failed scam.
Natasha gave fraud a bad name. But she is not unique among travellers in India. Many foreigners often try to get some money from their insurance companies, usually with the compliance of a local doctor who willingly fills in the necessary forms. There is a lot of money to be made from a bogus disease. Most of the time it seems to work. When insurance scamming fails, then I feel sorry for all of those juice bar owners in India who end up getting frog-marched to the local police station through no fault of their own. And, people like Natasha, who end up disappointed because they don’t get their insurance money, double their disappointment by feeling terribly guilty for placing some unsuspecting juice bar owner in trouble. Then they go on their merry way. All of those poor unsuspecting juice bar owners across India probably wonder what the heck is going on.
It is all rather strange really because a lot of foreigners in India seem to wallow in some kind of perverse delight from their constant moaning about rickshaw drivers, hoteliers or anyone else who attempts to cheat them out of a handful of rupees. They suddenly become quite high-minded and self-righteous people and will argue the toss over next to nothing, justifying their stance by saying it is all a matter of principle. Yet they have few qualms about ripping off their insurance companies. Double standards? Perhaps, but I can’t really say as perhaps Kipling was right after all and never the twain shall meet. That is, of course, unless the whole thing ends up in a court of law.
