The unexpected

I come back from the States to an unexpected incident.

Delhi is back to being sunny and warm, and things are familiar again. The first morning back, my house mate Andy greets me with my car keys and the following tale -

Our landlord had informed Andy a few weeks back that she was interested in selling the flat and that people would be by to look at the apartment. The weekend before I returned, a man shows up at our place on Saturday to look at the place. Andy has asked our landlord to give us a heads up before someone came over, but hadn't heard anything from our landlord about this guy coming over. The guy knew the landlords as well as Andy's name and looks fairly legit, so Andy lets the guy in and gives him the tour.

All of us are anxious about what a future landlord will do with the place and this guy tells Andy that he'd be happy to continue renting it to him. All through the tour the guys talking on his cell phone and he seems to like the place. Andy's just glad that a potential new landlord won't be kicking him out. He wants his wife and brother-in-law to see the place as well and Andy says it's okay for him to wait here for his wife to come over. He sits him down in front of the TV, gets him water, makes him comfortable etc. At this point guys phone, that he's been talking on the entire time, runs out of juice and borrows Andy's phone to call his wife. Andy returns to his room to continue working at his desk. What follows is the sound of the main door closing. Andy comes out to find our potential future landlord has left with his cell phone! This is Andy's first weekend in the house alone (I'm in the States and Mrig's in South Africa), and he gets burgled. With us out, he doesn't know what else could have been taken from our rooms. He tries calling his phone but the bugger has turned his phone off. Next he calls Airtel and they give him the last number dialed from his phone. Apparently this dude called someone else in our neighborhood about a car that the guy was selling. With his phone turned off, Andys got no way of finding the guy.

But wait - it gets better. Now I've never dealt with Indian cops directly because we all know how useless and frustrating the experience can be. It's impossible to get them to even lodge a case let alone hear you out. Andy calls the cops. And 5 cops show up to investigate a stolen cell phone! First 2 come, and while he's trying to communicate with them, there's a knock on the door and 1 more joins, then 5 mins later another knock, and after that again another knock, and we end up with 5 cops in our living room. Now this is a fairly complicated story and Andy's non-existant Hindi isn't going to help him much in this situation. He suggests the policemen talk to his friend on the phone who can translate. The landline being in his bedroom, all 5 cops follow him into the bedroom. So Andy gets to spend Sat afternoon with 5 uniformed men in his bedroom :)

Since then he's been called in to photo ID people. They've shown him 2 pics, one was clearly not the guy and the other was a small 2x2 newspaper print quality picture. But for Andy (like most white people) all brown guys look the same. So I don't see much hope in him every ID'ing the guy.

I joke about it, but in all seriousness it's pretty annoying to have someone walk into your home and walk out with you phone. And even more annoying is that Andy can get 5 cops to show up and register a case but my friends who had their car smashed the other night couldn't get them to register anything. As the saying goes - yeh hai Dilli mere yaar...