It was just the other day, when the maid was busy in clean-up at our home and was uttering some stories about our neighbors. The maids are a great tool for social networking. You don't even need to sign-up to get the latest updates. A maid is like a walking news channel.
So, coming back to the story, the maid was uttering something which I typically ignore but somehow her reference to some numbers caught my attention. 303, 104, 406. Unconsciously, I started paying attention. She was mentioning that 201 was fighting with 301 and there was some trouble related to car parking area and 405 had punctured a tyre of the vehicle parked in his car park. It took me few minutes to figure out that with the numbers, she is actually referring to the apartment numbers. So, when 201 and 301 were fighting, it meant that Mrs Sharma and Mrs Kulkarni were at it. And 405 is same as Mr. Doshi.
I was amused at the simple nomenclature used by the maid. This naming convention has helped her reduce the complexity of remembering all the family names. With that, it struck me that when outside, the maid must be referring us as 303. So, when my daughter, Jui is playing, it would be referred as 303 is playing. When my wife goes out of town, the news channel would broadcast that 303 is out of town. So much effort we put in deciding name of our little one and here we are, re-learning the phrase - 'what's in a name?'
