As a young kid I often used stomachaches as an excuse to avoid going to school. My parents could never tell if my tummy was really hurting or I was just faking; teachers didn’t ask for a doctor’s note, since stomachaches weren’t the kind of illness that required a visit to the hospital. In my case, I usually got better by two in the afternoon—around the time school got out. It was a handy problem to come up with when I didn’t feel like spending eight hours in a classroom. My mother always suspected that it was just an excuse and for that reason she would look at my face to detect the fakery. She would say things like, “What did you eat yesterday? I don’t think I cooked anything that could cause a stomach upset. Everyone else seems to be okay.”
Since I knew my acting would be put to the test, I would grab my tummy, bend in two, shove my face into the pillow, and not look up for a very long time. She would give up, and say, “You never seem to get sick on a Sunday for some reason.” I would lift my head just enough to breathe and sneak a look to see if she was still there. Seeing her long shadow created by the rising sun, I would duck my head back into the pillow, bending and twisting my torso. Stomachache stories continued into my adulthood. Schoolteachers, college professors, tutors, bosses—everyone got to hear one. Some of my friends teased me. “Oh, Deepak’s here, seems like his stomach’s not hurting today.”
One day in Charlottesville, I didn’t feel like going to work. It was a beautiful day, and I just didn’t want to spend my time inside a building surrounded by electronics. I took the phone inside the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat, and called Cindy. I left a message on her answering machine saying that I was sick, and brought the phone close as I flushed the toilet. I thought the sound of water running would give me some credibility since I hadn’t actually talked to her, and she didn’t get to listen to my weary voice.
I enjoyed not working. The next day, I showed up wearing neatly ironed clothes, my hair well combed, looking fresh. As soon as I walked in, Cindy came to me, looking worried.
“Are you okay, Deepak?” she asked.
Surprised by her concern, I said, “Yeah,” trying to figure out what made her ask that. Taking a healthy stride forward, I moved toward the backroom.
Jackie, who was cutting open a box, stopped and said, “You feelin’ alright Deepak?”
“Yes, I am,” I said matter-of-factly.
“What made you sick?” It dawned on me that I had totally forgotten that I had been off the day before, and was supposed to have been out sick. Since my days off were mostly during the week—and because I had never called in sick before—I had confused my sick day with a regular day off. I realized I was supposed to look tired, weak, and disheveled.
I had to come up with a quick answer to Jackie’s question. I said, “Oh, I think I ate something in the mall and that might have made me sick.” As soon as I finished the sentence, I realized that she might find it hard to believe since I always brought lunch from home.
“For real?” she asked. Before I tried to explain more, she said, “Where did you eat?” Glad to be past the first hurdle, I said, “I think I ate at that pizza place.” I thought she wouldn’t ask any more questions and would leave me alone, but I didn’t realize that by telling her where I had eaten, I’d gotten myself into bigger trouble.
I’d never had such an interrogation in India. You knew that people knew that you were lying. There, I didn’t have to act like I was sick, and no one asked any questions about what made me sick since they already knew that I wasn’t sick. Stomachaches were “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” kinds of excuses.
I hung my coat, and started walking away from Jackie. “Oh, you know what Deepak? You should go sue them,” she said just when I was stepping out of the backroom. I took a step back, and looked at her. She didn’t look like she was joking.
I smiled, and said, “Sue them for what?”
She said, “Sue them because their food made you sick. They will pay for your medicines, hospital bills, and whatever—” I had never had to visit a lawyer, and had never sued anyone in my life. Hearing Jackie talk with such seriousness, I didn’t know how to react. I wanted to laugh out loud.
I said, “Yes, you are right, Jackie, but it’s okay. I won’t eat there again.”
“No, Deepak, I am serious, you should go sue them.” She dropped the box cutter, and walked onto the sales floor. “Cindy, I think Deepak should sue those pizza people—he ate there the other day and got sick.”
“Hey, you know what?” Cindy turned around, and said, “my stomach has been feeling weird since I ate their pizza the other day.” This was getting out of control. I knew I hadn’t eaten there, and I was not sick. I didn’t want to sue anyone, and especially not for something that never happened. Cindy walked hurriedly to the backroom.
She came back in a flash, and said, “Deepak, let’s go and talk to those people.” A court scene flashed in my mind—me standing inside a wooden box facing the pizza guy, the judge telling me that they couldn’t find any evidence that I had eaten the pizza, and then fining me hundreds of dollars for lying.
Terrified by just thinking of what could happen, I told Cindy, “I am sorry, Cindy, but I don’t want to do this.”
“Why?”
“It’s because I am not 100 percent sure that it was the pizza that made me sick.”
“Alright, that’s fair enough.” I fixed my collar and walked back to the backroom to get a glass of water. I had never thought that calling in sick could cause such a drama. I also didn’t know that people were ready to take anyone to court for trivial matters such as getting sick from eating pizza.
In India, I could never imagine suing a roadside street vendor who sold samosas—fried dumplings—to hundreds of people. The thought of taking the vendor to court would not occur to anyone, even if he or she knew for sure that it was the vendor’s food that had caused a serious stomach infection. The most they would do is not eat there again. Hiring a lawyer would require too much effort, time and money, and God only knows what they would get if they won the lawsuit—maybe a free meal if they were lucky.
The saga of suing the pizza guy brought to mind an incident that took place in Chowk—an older part of Lucknow. I was with my friends, eating at a famous kebab place that served tiny round meat patties with flat bread. Everything was being cooked right before our eyes. We were enjoying the food and admiring the high ceilings. The restaurant building seemed to be very old. We finished eating, and just when we were leaving the place, I asked the manager, who was sitting at the entrance, “How old is this building?”
Dabbing a thumb on his tongue to help count the rupees, he said, “Hundred and eighty years old.”
I said, “Wow, the owner must be a rich man.”
He said, “Not really.” He pointed his finger at someone wearing tattered clothes, sitting at the curb on the street, smoking a bidi, tobacco wrapped in a leaf. “That’s the owner,” he said. I was surprised, and wanted to ask more about him, but the manager wasn’t in the mood to answer any more questions.
I came out of the restaurant, and stood next to the person who was supposed to be the owner. I looked at him. He looked at me. He appeared frail and old. Gray hairs were peeking out of his shirt, which revealed his scrawny chest. His teeth were stained from too much smoking. I made it clear that I wanted to talk to him. I said, “I’ve been told you are the owner of that building.”
“Yes, I am,” he said.
“The building must be worth a lot of money, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“So—”
“Are you wondering why I am sitting here smoking a bidi?”
“Yes,” I said, and smiled.
He pointed his finger in one direction and said, “All these shops in this building are owned by people like me. You can find them sleeping on the steps of the building, on the sidewalk, or in the liquor store drinking cheap country-made alcohol.”
“So, what am I missing here?” I said. “Why are they in such a state?”
“My ancestors rented this building to the ancestors of that kebab guy. The terms of contract haven’t changed in the last hundred years, and the rent is still thirty rupees—fifty cents—a month. I have taken the matter to court, but it’s been thirty years, and who knows how long it will take.” He scratched his stubble, and looked at me helplessly. “I hang around this building because I know I own it, but all I get is thirty rupees from him. He is the one who is making money, using my property. I can’t do anything.”
Thirty rupees might have been a big sum as a monthly rent one hundred years ago, but now it wouldn’t even get me a plate full of kebabs in Lucknow. When Jackie wanted me to sue the pizza place in Charlottesville, I couldn’t help but think about that poor owner of the building sitting outside the restaurant, smoking cheap bidis.
After a week or two, when people at work had forgotten about me getting sick, I told Cindy how my friends in India would laugh if they found out that I wanted to sue someone for selling a bad pizza.
“Why?”
“It’s because people don’t go to court for something as minor as getting sick from eating at a restaurant.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“In this country people are always scared about getting sued for something or other,” she said. She paused for a moment, and said, “See that yellow sign there? The mall has to put it out every time they mop the floors, because if people slip and get hurt they could sue the mall for not warning them.” I had seen the sign before, and I knew it was supposed to tell people that the floor was wet, but I didn’t know that people could actually sue the mall if the sign wasn’t there and they slipped and got hurt.
“So, people would sue even if it was their own fault that they fell?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, people are always looking for an excuse to sue you,” said Cindy. “They would sue a coffee shop for not warning them that the coffee was too hot to drink, they would sue an ice cream place for serving them too cold an ice cream, they would sue a barber for giving them a bad haircut, and they would sue you for the most ridiculous thing you could ever think of. And you can get in some serious trouble if you get sued. Some people have gone bankrupt, spent a long time in jail, you know.”
After Cindy told me how Americans were always ready to sue, I realized that most businesses in the mall took steps to protect themselves from being sued. I started noticing warning signs on everything. I had never paid attention to the coffee I got from Justin, but when I looked, I saw that the lid of the cup said, in capital letters, “CAUTION HOT.” A clearly wet floor had a sign that said “WET FLOOR.” A cookie shop that sold cookies with nuts in them had a sign that said “WARNING: OUR COOKIES CONTAIN NUTS.” A door that opened automatically when you approached had one that said “CAUTION: AUTOMATIC DOOR.”
The culture of cautioning people about every little thing seemed a little overdone. Having grown up in a country where such warnings were not common, I had gotten used to surprises. I once found an antenna-type thing sticking out of my teacup, which turned out to be a spider leg. I complained to the tea guy; he threw the rest of the tea and the spider away, filled the cup up again, and gave it to me as if it were no big deal. Another time, my mother sent me to get a spice that was supposed to go in a dish she was cooking. The grocery store was down the road, next to a bicycle repair shack. I walked down wearing my bathroom slippers. As I was dealing with the shopkeeper, I felt as if my big toe were on fire. I looked down and saw a welding gun spitting blue flame right next to my foot. The bicycle guy next door had turned the machine on without realizing where the gun was. I came home hopping on one leg with no spice.
Yet another time, when I was riding on my bicycle, singing a happy Hindi song, I fell into an open manhole that had no warning around it. Luckily the bicycle wheel was too big to go through the hole. I managed to stay above ground. All these incidents taught me that if anything bad happened to me, it had to be entirely my fault. I must not have looked, or I should have been more careful. No one suggested suing the chaiwallah for serving tea with spiders in it, the bicycle-repair guy for being careless with his welding torch, or the municipal corporation of Lucknow for leaving the manhole open.
A few days later, on a Sunday, I was supposed to work at the store by myself; the other scheduled employee called in sick. Sundays were short days since the mall was open for just five hours. I could have handled it on my own, but Cindy arranged for Alexi, an employee from a different store, to come assist me for a few hours.
It was a usual Sunday—families dressed in nice clothes coming after church to have lunch in the mall, husbands and wives walking hand in hand enjoying a day off, casually strolling, and checking out the deals in various stores. Normally, we didn’t do a lot of business on Sundays; since people knew we were only open for five hours, most of them didn’t bother coming in. Once in a while we got busy, but it was mostly slow.
In the last hour, I saw a lady walking in with a digital camera bundle pack. This was bad news since it was already a slow day, and if she returned the camera—which was worth about four hundred dollars—it would put the total sales for the day in the negative. She was a middle-aged white lady with short hair, wearing a light-green T-shirt and white shorts. She took hurried steps, and brought the camera box to the counter and put it in front of Alexi.
“Just need to return it. My husband bought this for me a few days ago, but I don’t need it,” she said, and pulled a crumpled receipt from her purse. Alexi looked at the receipt, and showed it to me. The camera had been bought only two weeks ago, so it was within the time frame of our return policy. I had been hoping she had bought it more than a month ago so we could just do an exchange and not return the money. I looked at Alexi, and she looked at me. We didn’t say anything, but we understood what we wanted to say—it sucks! Alexi started to refund the sale, but when she looked for the barcode on the camera package, she noticed that it had been cut out—there was a hole instead.
Alexi showed it to me, and I immediately knew what had happened. About fifteen days ago we had run a mail-in-rebate sale on the cameras. Customers were supposed to pay four hundred dollars for the camera, but they could get a hundred dollars back if they filled out the information on the receipt, and sent it in along with the barcode on the package. This lady seemed to have taken advantage of the rebate before she brought the camera to the store. I asked her where the barcode was, since we couldn’t take the product back without it.
She seemed prepared for the question, and replied, “I don’t know what happened to it, but the camera is unopened, and everything is there, you can check if you want.”
“It’s not about the camera, ma’am. The barcode isn’t there. We can’t resell it like this.”
“Here’s the camera that we bought from you guys—you take it back, and give me my money.”
She avoided talking about the barcode, and didn’t want to say anything about the rebate that she’d already received. I was trying to draw her attention to the fact, but didn’t want to accuse her outright. I thought I could handle this on my own, and didn’t want to call Cindy on her day off.
“I’m sorry, but we need the box to be in the same condition as when it was sold,” I insisted.
Now the lady put a mean smile on her face, and said, “Listen, my husband is a lawyer. Please don’t make me call him.” She pulled out her cell phone and flipped it open, as a warning. Alexi and I looked at each other—trying to decide what to do. Although I had learned some things about lawsuits in America from talking to Cindy and observing people’s behavior, this was the first time someone had come near to threatening to sue me. I was careful, and didn’t take the lady’s threat lightly, but at the same time I wasn’t scared since I didn’t think she could have sued me personally. I also wondered about what she could sue us for—we were just asking her to bring the box back in the same condition as when she bought it. She was trying to use her husband as a threat. I didn’t change my stance.
“Perhaps you can ask your husband if he has the barcode.”
“I can call him, but I am sure he doesn’t know where it is.” She already had the phone open, but instead of calling her husband, she flipped the phone closed. She stood there, looking at me, and Alexi. We didn’t say anything and looked at her blankly, waiting for her to talk to her husband.
“Come on, guys, give me my money back, or I’m calling my husband, he’s a lawyer.”
I smiled at her, and said, “It would be nice if you asked him if he knows anything about the barcode. He may have cut it off and put it somewhere.”
The lady opened her phone, scrolled through the contact list, hit the call button, and attached the phone to her ear. “I’ll let you talk to him, but let me warn you . . . he can be nasty.” I had been working at ElectronicsHut a while at this point and had gotten used to rude customers of various kinds. Some called me an Arab, some accused me of lying, some said I couldn’t speak English, and some said I was just incompetent. Most of the unruly people took their frustration out on me, but no one tried to harm or threaten me in any way. This lady was the first person I had encountered who had threatened me directly.
Every time she said, “My husband is a lawyer, don’t make him come here,” I wondered if the husband and wife were equally implicated in this fraud. I took a deep breath, and kept quiet. I looked at my watch—ten minutes were left before the store was supposed to close.
I could have told her to leave and come back the next day since we weren’t supposed to stay inside the building after the mall closed. Then she would have been someone else’s problem. I wouldn’t have to deal with her. While these thoughts occurred to me, she said, “Honey, this guy isn’t taking the camera back, can you talk to him?” She handed me the phone, straining her neck muscles as if to say, Oops!
Before I said anything, I heard the guy screaming on the other end, “I don’t wanna hear anything, just put my fucking four hundred bucks back on the card, that’s all.” He hung up. I took the phone away from my ear, and looked at the lady.
She said, “I warned you, he can be rude.”
I wanted to log out and tell the lady, Ma’am, I am sorry, but my shift is over—it is 5:30, and I have plans for the evening. You can call your husband and tell him to come down here and sue the company. Good luck! There was a risk that I might lose my job for saying all that and walking out on the customer, but Cindy had gotten to know me well enough to understand the situation, and forgive me. I didn’t want to disappoint Cindy, but I also didn’t want to return the money. I called her and explained the situation.
She said, “Don’t worry, Deepak. Just deduct the mail-in-rebate money, return the rest of it, and send her on her way. If she gives you any trouble after that, call security.”
I had put Cindy on the speakerphone so that she could be heard by all of us. I knew my interpretation of her message wouldn’t have been as effective. Her commanding tone, no-nonsense language, and powerful voice turned the woman, who had been acting as if she were a rock star, into a chicken. She didn’t say a word, and I didn’t have to explain anything. I asked for her card and returned the money, minus the hundred dollars that she had already gotten back in the mail.
As the customer walked out, I took a deep breath and thought what an eventful two hours we’d had. The lady was definitely a drama queen—she had put up quite a show of threatening us and had almost forced us to return her the money. I wondered if her husband was really a lawyer. I would have thought that most people who go to law schools to be trained to win cases in courts and make big money wouldn’t have spouses who go around lying for petty cash. Today was one of those rare days when I didn’t have to take the abuse from a rude customer. I looked at the final numbers. The store had taken a hit with that big return. I usually felt deflated after a slow day of sales, but today was different. I closed the store and walked out of the mall whistling a happy tune.