‘FIR’st

Sometime ago, I was walking along the paved path skirting Eliots Beach, my favourite haunt, alongside other dandies and fops who were enjoying the breezy evening on the promenade, with my friend Manish(of NIT Trichi now placed in IBM). We were debating the finer points of IEEE protocol 802.11a ( don’t remember what we talking about and no way in a million thousand years it would have been this but to put pseud let us assume this is what we were talking about ). After going one up against him and comprehensively proving that the header format could only be four bytes large and it would take a mentally defective person to argue that two bytes were sufficient, I was about to say “Ha” when I realised with a sudden chill in my heart that in the process of verbally trouncing him, my mobile had fallen out of a small hole in the side of my pocket.

Frantically retracing my steps and calling from Manish’s mobile resulted in my inferring with Sherlock Holmes like accuracy that somebody had picked up the phone and switched it off ( if I had been less distraught, I probably would have deduced that the guy was five foot four; left handed ; came from Adambakkam and had a mole two inches below his neck but I guessed my analytical abilities took a holiday that day). Oh, and as I seem to have forgotten to mention it was Kaanum Pongal day ( the day the beach is most crowded).

At the police assisstance booth, I was told to lodge an FIR in the Police station. Enroute, I made another call to my mobile and to my surprise, a policewoman answered the phone and asked me to come to the booth pronto. There she asked me my phone model and colour and having more than convinced her it was my lawful property, she decided to look into my contacts lists and perform a final check. Now the fun starts.

I must digress here and explain to all those who don’t know me that I am a crossword puzzle maniac. So, all my contacts are stored as crossie clues with the starting letter being present to maintain names in alphabetical order.
eg. NSister finished=Nun done=nandan ;
Hrush=Hurry=hari ;
Amonth in articles is jan in an and a is anjana.

you get the funda I assume.And there are no names, only words like this. The first name was Aa joint hole(A knee rut =anirudh)

To resume, seeing this, the policewoman gave me a strange glance, stared at list and then gave me an even weirder glance.(One that seemed to say –how did these guys escape from Kilpauk) She asked me if these were all codewords and unable to tell her what it was I said yes, and with a doubtful look, she made me file an FIR (yay!I’ve filed an FIR) and then handed me my phone and warned me to be more careful in the future.

Moral of story –If you fill your phone with vague crossie clues,do not repeat do not show it to a police official.