We just completed our India trip last week. For families living abroad, a trip to India involves months of planning - ensuring leaves are sanctioned at workplaces, classes are cancelled or made up, gifts are purchased for family members and most importantly, all your documents and important papers are organized. Our trip was meaningful, refreshing, and productive. We had planned to finish many pending tasks in this trip, most of which are related to banks, and thankfully, things worked out.
One of these tasks was to close my ~25-year old account in a nationalized bank, about 20 kms from where I stayed, in Bangalore. For a city notorious for its traffic, traveling this distance twice in a day is not for the faint-hearted. However, one fine morning, we braved our way through the Bangalore traffic to accomplish this mission. We were very skeptical, preparing ourselves for hours of ordeal and falling short of some required document or the other, to our pleasant surprise though, things were relatively fast. We found the bank staff to be very efficient and attentive, something I was not expecting. While the process was relatively smooth, couple of things on that day inspired this post.
- As I was looking at the passbook while waiting to be called in the bank, I saw a number on the very first page. As I said, this is a very old account, in fact, my very first account, however, the moment I saw the number I knew what it was - my roll number in the first year of my undergraduation. My recent memory is very faulty - I don't recall half of the things people around me refer to, but the moment I saw that number, my heart skipped a beat. Memories came gushing by, I was seated in a huge auditorium waiting for my formal admission to NIT Trichy, with my dad. The numbers were assigned in the order in which we arrived at the venue.
- At one point, I got teary-eyed waiting for my turn in the bank. I was operating this account after years and had run from pillar to post to transfer this account from Trichy to Bangalore, when I landed in the city after starting my job. As I started thinking about that and looked at the dates stamped, it felt like I was letting a part of myself go. This was one of the existing links from my dad. He had helped me open this account after completing the admission process in Trichy. I still remember the scene - I was standing at the gates of my hostel, he walked away ready to depart from the campus, turned around and looked at me. His face was all red, I knew he was crying, but he was too stoic to show his emotions.
- I was looking at the different visitors in the bank that day. People from all class had come with their agendas. There were 2 young women, in their early 20s, who caught my attention. These young women were going from counter to counter, trying to get their work done. I commented to my husband that the younger generation is so smart and responsible to be handling these things on their own so early when he reminded me that I must have done the same too. His comment brought back memories from 20 years ago, me visiting this branch on the weekends, waiting for my turn, sometimes scorned and turned back for not knowing the rules and regulations wasting hours but showing up the week after none the less. My admiration and gratitude (I owe a lot to her) for that young lady's determination and resilience was renewed.
