For want of a mango...

Last weekend, I spotted an awesome sale on Manila mangoes at the Indian grocery store. Deciding to buy them was a no-brainer. S and me are die-hard mango-lovers. To our pleasant surprise, while nowhere close in taste to the divine banganapalli (sorry Alphonso lovers, banganapalli is the king of mangoes according to me), the mangoes were still pretty tasty. Needless to say, within a week, the substantial collection of mangoes we had brought home dwindled rapidly to zero.

This weekend, we went to the Indian store again, hoping to buy another box of mangoes. To our dismay, the store was out of Manila mangoes. Sigh! We did the rest of our shopping and were ready to go home when S said, "Hey, let's check out the other Indian grocery store nearby. Maybe they have Manila mangoes". We drove the short distance to the other store. I was too lazy to get out of the car, so S volunteered to go check by himself.

Within a couple of minutes, I got a call from S. He excitedly said, "Hey, they have Manila mangoes here. Come on to the store." So I grabbed my hand-bag, got out of the car, locked my door and was about to walk to the store when I spotted that the car-door was unlocked on S's side. How careless, I thought and very responsibly, opened the door, pushed down the lock and slammed it shut. In the split second before the car-door locked, I thought, "Oh, does S have the keys". SLAM. Oh well, too late.

I ran to the store and breathlessly asked S if he had the car keys. He stared at me and said that he had dropped the car-keys onto his car-seat right in front of me. Had he? Ooopz! Ladies and gentlemen, applause please: we were locked out of our car.

But - S in the presence of mangoes is a S engergized. He thrust a box of carefully selected mangoes into my hands and said, "Pay for them and wait near the car - I will go home and get the spare set of keys". Uh S, I don't want to stand in front of the car with a case of mangoes while it took you God-knows-how-long time to cover the 1.5 miles distance to our house and back. I would rather do the trip home with you. S brushed aside my arguments and I dutifully paid for the mangoes while S set off home.

I then settled myself down on the side-walk in front of our car with the box of mangoes beside me. All I needed was to coo a bit and I would have looked like a street mango-hawker. The next step obviously was to pull out my cell-phone to catch up with a friend. After a bit, I lost my awkwardness at my care-of-platform status and was yacking away busily when I saw someone running towards me. I looked up and saw in amazement that it was S! Hey, it had hardly been 10 minutes since he had left. I know he is super-fit and everything but covering 3 miles in 10 minutes seemed to be a sprint worthy of the Olympics!

He opened the car with the spare-key and we set off home. On the way, the secret of his speed came out. He had asked and gotten a ride from a Tamil couple who had been sweet enough to drive in the direction opposite to their home so that S could drop by our apartment and pick up the keys! Ah, okay, so I was not married to a sprinter after all :-D.

We reached home without any further incident. But the icing on the cake came when we parked and were unloading the groceries. S suddenly looked at me and said, "Don't you have a spare key for the car on the key-chain with the apartment keys?". And it all came rushing back to me. Anticipating this exact scenario, about a month or so ago, S had threaded one of the spare car keys onto my apartment-keys key-chain. So, all along, I had had a spare car-key right inside the hand-bag I was carrying. Too bad neither of us remembered that. Brilliant or what?

Picture from here.