#SoCS July 25/2020

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “check/cheque/Czech.” Use one, use ’em all, use ’em any way you’d like. Have fun!

The word cheque brought to mind an incident which happened long back. My mother told me about it. In those days the finances of the family were usually looked after by the men. My father worked in the Indian railways and the salary was not very high and my mother used to say by the end of the month there was hardly any money in hand. She kept some rupees hidden away to be used in the last week of the month. We never knew shortage in any way and our needs too were not much. We lived in the campus and life was all about going to school, coming back, finishing homework and going out to play 😊.

In the seventies television first appeared on the scene. Two or three families had them and they were very kind enough to allow children and adults to gather in their houses on Sunday evenings to watch the movie on Door Darshan, the only TV channel then. We used to check the movie to be shown on Sunday evening, in the newspaper and if it was something that we wanted to see, we would go to their house. It was fun.

To come back to my mother, she told me she had never been to a bank in those days. One day my father told her to take a cheque, go to the bank and cash it. She was so scared that she asked her close friend to come with her. The friend too had never been to the bank. The two ladies went together and very anxiously asked one staff to help them. He was very kind and helped them to encash the cheque. Since then my mother had gone to the bank many times with my father but she was never very comfortable with it.

And I also remember her words when thinking about life. In those days she saved a little money which my father told her to keep aside for herself, it was a very small sum. To buy a sari, she had to save for many months. She would check the amount she had saved once in three months. Once she had the amount she needed, she would go to the shop with her friend to buy the sari. In 1979, a team of about five hundred people from Indian Railways were sent on deputation for three years to Nigeria. My parents had a wonderful time there. After returning from there my mother did not have to save money for months to buy a sari. She could buy one any time she wanted to. But she always said the joy that one sari gave after saving for months was very special. I think this holds good for most things in life.