During my last trip to homebase, as usual, trudged along to the alphabet cloth store for the customary shopping mania. "Pall"avan, our rented car's driver, dropped us off at the corner, and went off to park. Pallavan, if I were to describe him, was a couple of teeth, sticking to a reed, with a mop of curls attached. May be he lacked some fat in the cranium too. We come back after a few hours (more or less), look for him outside the store, in the busiest section of Chennai. The kids are hungry and so are we. Finally spot him, or rather he spots us and we follow him with our 2 huge alphabetized bags. We go to this underground parking, which unbeknownst to us, belongs to the brahmandamana store, owned by the veshti clad country fella. We walk towards the car. We are stopped. At first, all I see is this humongous "meesai". Attached to the meesai is a hefty with a baton. He won't let us go. I am told to go the brahmandamana store and buy something for at least 100 Rs. As it is, I am not impressed with the wares sold here, and on top of that, I am being forced to buy. I might even have thought about it, except that the kids were starving. It would have meant at least 1/2 hour to finish the purchase. So I tell meesai, no way dood. Babies are starving, senti mummy stuff. Meesai is tough. Pallavan decides to play hero. He didn't know we were going to the 'wrong' store Probably true, ding bat that he was. We manage to get in the car. Meesai brings 2 adiyaals. Pallavan's rattham boils. Words traded. Strong ones. I had to intervene and play the women alone with kids angle, strongly. Quite strongly. My mind was running headlines - women accosted in underground parking. Finally, they decide to let us go. Relieved to have averted that scuffle.
After that day, I preferred using the friendly neighborhood autokarans.
Alphabet clothing store needs to provide parking.
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