Raghu and I were in the same hostel 1985-1989. That is 40 years back!! The last time I had seen him was in 1989 when we graduated. I have kept up with him over the phone but never had a chance to meet him.

Alu (also from the same hostel) and his family joined Raghu and his family and myself at a nice Indian restaurant. Which reminded me of the Yamuna hotel on Mount Road (in Madras) that Raghu and I used to frequent often during our engineering days.

Do you remember the story of the young waitress who had come back with a memorable response to my “A million dollars would help” when she had asked if we wanted anything else after serving us? Or the other time when another waitress actually came back after drawing a million dollar bill on a piece of paper?

Well, we had another great one today.

We had docked the boat and walked up to Fish Tales to catch some food and drinks. Aidan was the young and very friendly gentleman who was helping us. After the four of us had finished, he came and asked if it was going to be one check.

There were four of us. To throw him off balance, I said “No, we will split evenly – five ways”!! Usually, that gets a laughter all around and creates some bon homie. And Aidan laughed his heart out too.

After about a few minutes, he showed up. With 5 checks neatly clipped to five clipboards and five pens.

I was totally confused.

“Wait, Aidan. What are you doing? I was kidding.”

And then he laughed more. There was really one check. He had simply printed out four more copies of the check to fool me.

He had me good there.

Made it a memorable dinner. I need to go back there again!!