I set out early on Tuesday morning and headed to Putney High Street for an inexpensive sauté pan. I entered a small Pakistani corner shop. Even though it was tiny, everything was there and on display, including tools, gadgets, sweets, bottles of water, garbage bags, crockery and cutlery, cleaning products, Tupperware, varmint control, stationery—you name it, it was available and on display! We did not have Asian shops like this in Austria. They might have existed in big towns, but there was nothing similar where we lived.
As soon as I pulled out my dictionary, I was eager to start searching for a word I could use to negotiate and push the price down from £3.50 to £2. I had faith in my bargaining skills—skills I had honed to absolute perfection since the tender age of ten. To this very day, I am running an eBay business, collecting junk from street corners and selling it happily. “One man’s garbage is another’s treasure!” I had gathered items like bikes, 80s-style handheld video games, and walkie-talkies from countless recycling centres and drop-off areas in the suburbs of South Vienna, which I then flogged to my mates and school companions.
Clearly, I could wear Baichnay Wala out and push him down on the price. I distinctly remember that the best word I could find in that small dictionary, which made sense and I could justify combining with my ever-so-empty arsenal of vocabulary, was “favour.”
I tried desperately and unsuccessfully to build a sentence. However, the best sentence I could come up with was, “Can you me favour this £2?”—but I battled with a persistent problem because I kept forgetting the word “favour” every time I approached the till and had to wait a minute or two until other customers were served. It was gone. I could not remember it. So I had to rewind, rush back to the corner where no one could see me, and look it up in the dictionary again.
Poor eyesight, touched-up greasy glasses, small printed letters, and my being dyslexic were a rather disturbing combination! I did not even know the alphabet correctly—and still don’t—so I had to run through all the pages. I did that three times until I got furious with myself and remembered my electro-technical teaching professor, Riedl Philip, repeatedly saying: “If you do not have it in your brain, you have it in your feet or fingers.”
So I grabbed a Biro and tried to stick the word on my wrist. The cheap Chinese Biro struggled to print it on a sweaty wrist, so by the time I finished engraving the word, letter by letter and with force, I knew it by heart. I have never forgotten it since, nor have I misspelled it. That was the first English word I learned in London, and I could spell it in my sleep.
Finally, my big moment came! I prepared a two-pound coin and held it visibly in my left hand because when merchants of all kinds see cash, they usually crack. I kept the pan in my right hand and turned it onto its side, which did not display the price tag. However, before I approached the till, I did some major work on that tag so that it could have been any price; it was completely open to one’s imagination.
As Nilaam Karnay Wala turned the pan over to scan the price, I slowly pushed the £2 coin towards him and said, “Can you me favour this £2?” He looked at me rather strangely and shouted something in Urdu across the shop floor, holding up the pan in the air and swinging it like a lollipop lady in front of a school at the zebra crossing. He released a torrent of sentences that sounded like questions, but I could not figure out what he was asking.
Did he want to ask his young helper to measure the thickness of that third-class, ultra-thin non-stick coating with a toy ruler cast out of low-density polyethylene, deduct the weight of the layer, and subtract it from the original price of the item? Most of the punters clearly understood him.
The reason for my suspicion was the fact that everybody in the shop looked at me. The women adjusted their hijabs, revealing a small amount of hair. The people in burqas pushed their sunglasses onto their noses and moved their heads up and down, scanning me from head to toe and back again. They seemed relieved and assured by his words, which simultaneously informed them that there was no sign of British morality police present anywhere in the area, let alone nearby, most definitely not in the dukaan.
All the men looked at me too, which was not flattering, moving their heads from left to right while pulling on the black fibre cord of their tribal silver prayer boxes, just as if they were picking a tambur. I was utterly confused about the events there.
After the sales associate received a response—some small nuggets of mumbling—he wrote in Arabic numbers, “£3.50,” on a piece of paper next to the till. I took a pound coin from my pocket and said, “My pound finish.” He looked at me in disgust and pulled a Pacific blue-coloured plastic throwaway bag over the Atlantic blue-painted sauté pan.
I left the establishment, which read “EST 1956” on its auditorium, with the heavily reduced ware in hand. I was not overly happy, but I comforted myself with the fact that yesterday, the 1 kg of value rice I had snapped up was 49p. Since I had secured a price reduction of 50p on the pan, the rice was theoretically free. I made a 1p profit on it, plus I gained some looks from people I had never seen in my life—definitely not in such a density within a few square feet.
I made my first profit of 1p, and if I thought about it rationally in front of a mirror, it doubled!
On the way home, I found a 2p coin next to the gutter, which I examined carefully because I had never come across one before. Nearby, next to a bench, submerged in a sea of unidentifiable green substance, lay a bent 1p coin, which I fished out with a matchstick and cleaned off with a fallen horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) leaf.
So I started making money while walking the streets of Putney and Wandsworth. I also checked every single car park meter on my way back to Nic’s, though without success.