There are times in everyone's life when the lure of winning a lottery ignites dreams of loads of money and sends one daydreaming about the possibilities of the things that one can do with the truckloads of money that the lottery will provide!! This feeling is all the more intense in these hard times, where any money is difficult to come by!!
I also had the same vision - I have won a lottery - the crudely printed lottery ticket at some tacky printing press with the Goddess of wealth benignly smiling from it, seemed to be my passport to the land of riches, wiping of my mortgage and all other debts in one stroke of luck. That I had never been lucky with anything in my life did not matter to me at all - isn't there a first time for everything? While my logical self was asking me to focus on the next mortgage repayment, my heart was already planning to by the next luxury condo in Mumbai after paying off my current mortgage. The thought that I need to buy a fancier car was also high on the list of priorities!! Oh! By the way, I was also planning to keep a substantial amount aside for my daughter's education in a US university, cock a snook at my office colleagues, quit work and start a gourmet restaurant in Goa with a fraction of money that I will win. A quick calculation showed that there still will be enough and more left for an occasional vacation to Greece or Trinidad!!
It all started very innocuously - or that is how it seemed. Stuck in a traffic jam in central Mumbai in a steaming hot oven on wheels that was supposed to be my taxi, I was cursing the weather, the traffic, the crowds, the politicians, bollywood stars and the TV soaps for bringing this pitiable state of affairs to this city. Suddenly, this young guy selling lottery tickets materialized out of thin air, trying to peddle some outlandish looking lottery tickets that seemed to promise a shower of gold on the winners!!
Now the decision to not buy a lottery ticket has never been a difficult one for me!! I attract bad luck the way a potential bombing target attracts the taliban! The lottery guy was persistent but I was not going to give him my 50 bucks to party. So this smart guy realized the futility of trying to convince me and decided to con some other gullible customer!! I went back to my ranting and getting roasted in the oven. Suddenly, I realized that one of the lottery tickets had fallen at my feet. Smug at my victory over the lottery guy and not wanting to cause him any further loss, I called him back and handed the ticket over to him. I thought “there goes my good deed for the day” and I basking again in the glow of my honest and moral behaviour!!
As was expected, the guy thanked me profusely for saving him from potential loss and was about to go. Suddenly, he turned back and said" Sir in my five years of selling tickets, this is the first time something like this has happened. Goddess Lakshmi wants to come to you - and that is why this ticket fell out of the bunch. Please do not refuse the goddess!! Please take this ticket." I immediately had this vision of my proverbial bad luck getting over and was seeing myself rolling in cash - quite like a tacky bollywood potboiler!! If the goddess herself was bestowing her blessings on me, who was I to let go of this opportunity?!! So I bought the ticket and checked the date when the results will be declared. The lottery guy also told me that i should check the results in local Marathi dailies and not in English ones as they might not carry the results.
So there I was - waiting for the weekend to check the Marathi papers that would bring in the news of my riches and change in times!! A lot of things happened - and the gist of all those things is that I could not check the winning numbers of my lottery and would keep on castigating myself mentally about letting another opportunity to turn over a new leaf go by!!
Last evening, at another busy junction in the city, I made a serendipitous discovery. I saw a familiar scene being enacted on the streets - there was a lottery guy trying to sell the tickets to 2 women seated in an autorickshaw and they had all sorts of excuses for not buying the tickets. So this guy started moving to the next vehicle to try his luck over there. suddenly, these women in the autorickshaw called out him - a ticket from his bunch had fallen in the auto. This lottery seller was extremely thankful to these women for returning the ticket and then turned around and said" You know madam - in my four years of selling tickets, this is the first time this .............". In a flash, I realized that I had fallen for an oldest con!! On the filp side, I do feel less guilty about not checking the winning numbers though!!
