I found a penny

Well, there are a couple of things that I want to talk of in this post.

1) What's so special about finding a penny lying on the road

2) Why it's extra special tonight to warrant a post... ;-)

Without even bending the norm, I'll start with the first...

My grandma is the most carefree soul in the world and one of the fondest memories that I have of my childhood is when "daadi" would take me to the railway station to watch, what she used to call "locomotives" (the huge steam engines of that time). Every now and then on a weekend she would tell my mom that she's gonna take me to the railway station. And both of us would have this charade in front of my mom & dad when she would ask me what I want to do on a saturday and I would say "Go see a 'locomotive'". And after my dad would give 10 Rs (or some such sum) to her to take me to the railway station and a warning from my mom to take care of "daadi" (which I used to take quite seriously) we would set off on our journey.

I still remember, literally dragging her to the bus stop and then running around here and there once we would reach the station. She would buy a platform ticket and off we would go on the lookout of the biggest locomotives. The biggest ones would usually be working with the goods trains and this search would normally take us away from the hulla balloo of the passenger platforms. No stray passengers waiting for their trains sleeping on the platforms, no beggars etc.

The goods trains usually have a separate platforms and we would go there and wait for the waiting train to depart. I still go to the railway station early when I am coming back to Pune and visit that platform where the station master's cabin is adjacent to a huge bougainvillea plant with pink flowers.

We would sometimes sit there for hours when she would buy all sort of stuff to eat like 'time pass moongfali' and never buy me the orange Popsicle from the platform vendor. "You would get meningitis", she used to stay whenever I asked her to buy me the orange one, "Its made of dirty water".

There were plenty of experiences that I had during such trips, from witnessing my first cop chase to seeing my first artellery tanks which still don't cease to fascinate me. I also learnt that there were two types of steam engines, ones which have conical noses and the ones with the flat fronted engines with a red dot encircled by a silver star, which were especially magestic to watch as they had huge number of bogies attached. She asked me to count the bogies aloud in english and it used to be fun when I could count over eleventy two.

On one such visits something happened that still sticks in my memory. We were going towards the waiting bench in the sun (I think it was winter time) and this huge locomotive was blowing its whistle ready to depart, so I was dragging her behind me to hurry up, othewise we would miss watching the "chuk chuk". But she suddenly stopped and started going towards the tree, where eventually she bent over and picked up a shining new 1 rupee coin. She later bought me a popsicle with that money (but not the same coin) and told me that finding money in such a fashion was lucky. Strange thing is that she would ask me to throw away the pencil sharpeners and pencils that I would bring home from school which I similarly found lying on the floor of my classroom, saying that I would fail the exam if I kept that pencil or the sharpener.

With this background its clearly established that I believe that finding money lying on the road is a good omen. :-)

Now to the second point.

Of late, I have been more superstitious than I normally am, and I have started believing that when people think; bad stuff do happen to you and vice versa. Not quite voo doo, but still who knows.. ;-) .

Now tonight the special thing is that while I was walking back from the office I had this feeling that someone is sure to be cursing me (I can't think of many but there are certainly a few, who would do that) as I had suddenly developed this strange ache in my leg. So... finding a penny while I was really hoping to be lucky if I didn't fall over is certainly a great omen, and a sign of better things to come. Hope its sooner than later.. :)