The Key Planet

Based on real-life incidents that happened in Dec 2003

Chala ja raha tha main jhoomta hua
Kisi ke khayalon mein khoya hua
Movie dekhne ka plan tha bana hua
Ghar pahunchna hai jaldi yeh taya tha hua

“What do you mean, you don’t have tickets for Saturday? I want to watch the movie on the weekend.”
“Sorry sir, the first available ticket is Tuesday”
“Tuesday?”
“Sir, rear stall will do?”
“How many times do I have to tell you I want Balcony only?”
“Sorry Sir.”
“OK, give me two tickets for Tuesday 6:30 show.”
“OK Sir. Sir, your address and telephone no.?”
I gave him the required details and asked him when he will deliver the tickets.
“Monday morning, Sir.”
“Sure?”
“Sure, Sir. Don’t worry at all, Sir”

The tickets finally got delivered Tuesday afternoon to my home. My wife called me up to inform me that though the tickets have arrived late, I must arrive home in time.
“Don’t worry, darling. Today the workload is less. I will be on time”
“I’ll believe it only when it happens”, my wife said.

Surprisingly, I was actually able to finish my work by 4:30 that day and nothing new landed up in my mailbox. At 4:45, I left my seat. As I was passing by a colleague’s seat, I offered him a lift till Silk Board. He also came with me.

Approaching the car, I started fumbling my pockets for the keys. They were not there. At least, not in the pockets. They were there hanging peacefully inside the car, and the car was properly locked.

“Shucks! What do we do now?”
My colleague said, “Don’t worry, this is a Maruti. All we need to open this is a metal scale.”

Of course there was no metal scale available. After running around for some time and checking with our building guards, we finally went to gate no. 5 and told them our plight.
“Sir, we have this file. See if it helps.”

It did not help.

“Sir, there is a bike servicing shop near Chandana Hotel. They would have something.”

I told my colleague to go by the bus, while I started got out of the campus and started trudging towards Chandana.

The guard again. “Sir, ask someone for lift.”

So I requested a car exiting the campus for a lift and the car-owner agreed. It is not difficult to get a lift from a fellow Infoscion. I told him my story, to which he said that there is a service station 1k.m. down near the Electronics City Phase-2 entrance and they will be able to help. Great!

He dropped me at the service station. The service station guy agreed to come to Infosys, spent some time searching for tools, took out a battered car, which I am sure belonged to some other customer, and asked me to hop in. We reached Infosys, completed the formalities of gate-pass and all, and then reached the car.

The service station guy said, ‘Sir, this is Alto. New model. This will not open with a scale simply.”
My heart sank. “So then what should we do?”
He took out a bent looking rod triumphantly, put both the scale and that rod through the beading of the front door window, and done. The car was open.

Two things struck me immediately. First, it was so easy to open a locked car. Second, I can still make it to the movie. Its just 5:30.

“Thanks boss. How much for this?”
“A hundred rupees, Sir”
“What, a hundred rupees for such a small task?”
“Yes, sir”

As I had no time for a bargaining discussion, I handed him a hundred-rupee note and rushed towards my home. I did not even wait to give my wife a ring and tell her all this. As I was driving, I was cursing my decision to discontinue my mobile connection. I was also praying that there should not be a jam at Silk Board.

Such prayers are, I think, God’s way of telling that that he is not duty-bound to listen to anything we ask him. There was a jam. I reached home at 6:10, which without the jam should have been 5:50 at the maximum.

I wife was waiting, with an angry, questioning look on her face.
“Lets just go for now, we need to rush to the movie hall. I’ll tell you what happened on the way.”

On the way, I told my wife what happened, spicing it up a little with my plight at doing this entire running around, so her anger came down a little. We reached the hall exactly at 6:30 and rushed inside the hall. The movie was just about to start as we were being seated.

I fumbled through my pockets again.
“Now what happened? Did you again lock the keys inside the car?”
“No, dear. I was just checking. They are here, in my pocket”
“OK. Now give me my mobile. I need to put it on silent mode during the movie.”
“Mobile? What mobile? I don’t have any mobile”
“I gave my mobile to you to hold while I was locking the door”
“Oh yes! You did. I must have left it in the car”
“What?”
“OK, OK. Cool down. I’ll just run downstairs and get it.”

So I ran back to the parking lot, got the mobile out of the car, rechecked that I had kept the car keys in my pocket, then locked the car and went again inside. Why the hell does she have to make calls during interval, for which she needs the mobile?

The movie was good, and after the movie, I took her to a good restaurant, so by the end of it, she was again her normal sweet self.

“Feeling tired. Lets go home now”

So we drove back home, taking the longer but low-traffic route, so that driving was fun.

On reaching our home, I told my wife to proceed upstairs and open the door while I cover the car with a cover.
“OK, give me the key”
I had a mood to say, “You have yours” but did not want to start an argument, so put my hands in my pocket to take out my key bunch, which contains both the car keys and house keys.

“Oh God!”
“What happened now?”
“I locked the car keys again inside the car.”


“Oh no”
“And all the service stations would be closed by now”
“So what do we do now?” My wife, the ever practical.
“I don’t know”
“You can’t do anything now, lets go in and sleep. We’ll do something in the morning.”
“I have to go to office in the morning.”
“You’ll have to go a bit late. There’s no duplicate key or metal scale and bent rod at home”

I went to the bed with a heavy heart. How can I become so forgetful that I do this twice in the same day? Have I gone crazy? What has happened to me? I was never so careless.

Got a fitful sleep and got up early morning. Unfortunately, the service station guys don’t have their car-keys looked inside their cars, so they did not open before 9. And when I contacted the ones near my home at 9, they said, “Sorry sir. We don’t know how to open an Alto. If it would have been a Maruti, then it was not a problem.”
“But this is a Maruti!”
“No sir, this is an Alto. Maruti is 800”. Poor Maruti, the Brand Managers of all medium and high end Maruti Cars would die if they hear this.

So finally, fed up, I gave a call to my regular service station, which is around 5 km from my house and told him that I had locked in the keys.
“No problem, Sir. I’ll send a person immediately. Give me the directions to your house.”

Finally, something happened as it should. The service station guy came, opened the lock with just a metal scale, took thirty rupees and went back, even saying “Thank you for calling us, Sir.”
“The thanks is all from my side, buddy.”

*******************
I would have put down the incident as one of the “forgetfulness” experiences and forgot about it, but it was not to be. Life, they say in Astrology, is governed by the position of planets and stars. If that is true, there must be some planet for Keys, or Key Planet that is in an unfavorable position for me.

The weekend following the car keys incident, my wife went to Patna for a month to meet her parents. On Wednesday, when I came home in the evening, I was feeling very tired and lonely. I lied down on the bed to rest and had almost gone off to sleep when I remembered that I had to pick up clothes from the clothesline on my terrace. So I went out to the terrace. Suddenly, there was a gust of wind and the door to the terrace closed behind my back.

“Hello”. This was to a middle aged man strolling on my neighbor’s terrace.
“Hello”
“I have locked myself out of my house.”
“What?”
“Yes. You see, the door to my terrace has a self-locking Godrej lock, and when I came out, a sudden gust of wind came and closed the door. So I am locked out”
“Oh I see”
“Actually, the door stopper is magnetic, so when I open the door fully, it remains open. But I think by mistake, I did not open it fully, so the stopper did not engage”. I could not bring myself to say that maybe the mistake happened because I was feeling sleepy. Anyway, all traces of sleep were far away from me at that moment.
“Isn’t any other door to the house open?”
“No. The main door is latched from inside, and now this door has closed itself which needs a key to open it.”
“Is there any other entrance to this terrace?”
“No, this terrace can be approached only through my house”
“Hmmm! So what do we do now?”
“Can you please tell my landlord? He stays on ground floor” My house is on second floor.
“No problem at all”

My landlord came out of his house onto the road in front of our house. Thankfully my terrace is road facing. I explained the whole problem to him.
“OK, I’ll see what I can do”

He came back with a set of keys.
“I have some keys here. See if any of them fits your locks.”

But there was apparently no way for me to take the keys from him. They say, necessity is the mother of invention. I immediately located an old clothesline lying discarded on one side of my terrace and dropped that to the landlord. He tied the bunch of keys to the clothesline and then I pulled it up.

Went to the door and tried all the keys, big, small, medium. No result.

“Uncle, none of the keys fit”
“OK. Wait”

He went inside his house and got another set of keys. None of them worked. He went inside his house again, leaving me wondering about the peculiarity of my situation. I was trapped in my own terrace, with no access to my own house, in shorts and without even slippers. And was dependent on some key from somewhere fitting the terrace door lock. Why the hell has this landlord put self-locking locks on terrace doors?

“OK. Here’s the last bunch of keys. Try this. I just spoke to my son and he says that one of these keys should work”

Of course none of them worked. But my landlord is one sprightly old man. From somewhere, he got a wooden ladder and used that to climb onto my terrace.

“Give me the keys. Let me try. You, young generation, are good for nothing”

I handed over the keys to him. He also tried all the keys, none of them worked.

“OK. So this is not working. We’ll have to call a locksmith”. He turned away.

Then he suddenly turned back. “Let me have one more try”.

He tried all the keys again, this time turning them a bit harder, with force. None of them was working.

“So this is the last key. If this does not work, we need to call a locksmith”
“We won’t even get a locksmith. Its already late evening”
Suddenly there was a click. The door was open. The key worked.

I heaved a sigh of relief.
The story has not ended yet. If the planets were able to influence only one or two events, nobody would bother about them, right? They have to show their effect multiple times to prove their power.
That sigh of relief lasted only till Saturday. I went to a locksmith in the morning to make a duplicate key for my main door. As the Key Planet ensured, this duplicate key did not work, so I went back to the locksmith.

“Sir, I will need to see the lock”
“OK. Come with me to my home”
“Sure, I’ll send my boy with you”

I left him at my main door and went inside the house to get some water. When I came back, I saw that he had opened up the whole lock, and all the levers were lying by the side of the lock.

“What is this?” I shouted.
He said something in Kannada, which I had no way of understanding. Thankfully, the maid was around, and she speaks both Hindi and Kannada. So the rest of the conversation was through her as an interpreter.
“Ask him what has he done”
“He is saying that he is trying to fit to make a duplicate key”
“I know that. Why does he have to open the lock for that?”
“He says he was trying to make the duplicate key work”
“Just ask him to put the lock back in place and ensure that at least the original key works”

The guy nodded his head and started putting the levers back in the lock, testing it with the key after putting every lever. The key was not turning after he put in the fourth lever. He again took all the levers out and started putting them back again. I realized that he has forgotten the sequence of the levers.

Then, after trying several permutations and combinations and failing consistently, he suddenly picked up my key (the one which I had given him to copy) and started hammering and filing it. I shouted at him to stop.

The maid came, hearing my shouting.
“What happened?”
“Ask him what has happened?”
“He is saying he will put in the levers and make the key for that”
“What?” The guy was actually planning to change the lock and the key. My landlord is going to kill me for this, and more importantly, my wife when she comes and trying opening the house with her key.
I told the maid, “Just ask him to leave all his tools here, and go and get his elder brother”

The guy went away, and his elder brother came after some ten minutes.
“What happened, sir?”
Thankfully, I will not need and interpreter with this guy.
I explained the whole situation to him.
“Sir, don’t worry. I’ll put it right in a moment”
After ten minutes, he was also nowhere.
“Sir, your key is also a duplicate one. Can I get the original key?”
“No, you can’t. Your brother has spoilt my key also and now you’ll spoil the original also”
“No sir, don’t worry. Anyway, I can’t do anything without it”

I went to my landlord, asked him for the original key. He took it out and gave it to me, giving me a weird look, probably thinking, “What kind of a man is this? Some problem with the key or other.” Perhaps he does not know about my Key Planet

I took the original key to the locksmith.
“Sir, see. The key that you gave me does not match this original key properly. It was a bad duplicate”
“Boss, it was working”
He had nothing to say. Anyway, he took another five minutes, and put the lock in place with the original key working. And he made minor alterations to my key and made it work. Then he made another copy (which was the job he had been brought in for anyway) and ensured that it worked.

I gave him a weary thanks and he went away. I went to return the original key to the landlord. He again gave me that weary look and asked me, “Got the work done?”
“Yes. Thank You”

As I was climbing the stairs to my house, the only thought in my mind was, where is the Key Planet going to strike next?