Charlie and I - an impossible, enduring friendship

What is your relationship with money? Does it come and go and go and come and go, like Shibani Sharma Khanna writes, tracing her circular journey with money.

Listen to this candid and fun ride of a life story in your-favourite-RJ-voice of Shibani Sharma Khanna

I have an impossible friendship with Charlie. He comes and goes and comes and goes and comes and goes. He just doesn’t stay.

Each time he comes, he leaves little vestiges of himself behind. Somehow I strretttccchhhh them till his next arrival.

My earliest memories of money are of Mum counting hundred rupee notes in a silver leatherette wallet that had CHARLIE emblazoned on it. We were a single income family. My father was an F&B Manager with The Ashok Hotel, New Delhi’s iconic hotel in Chanakyapuri. He had turned a dull sit-down diner into one of the first and most popular nightclubs, the Supper Club. They had a happening live band and the drummer of the band, Charlie, had given that wallet to Papa as a gift.

The Ashok Hotel

Charlie’s weight loss through the month

Pa used to give his full salary to Mum in that wallet for ghar kharcha. Charlie would be stuffed at the beginning of the month, start depleting slowly and gradually, and would slim down towards the end of the month. Mum would gently take out a note for the Welfare Store run. The welfare store provided subsidised groceries and necessities to all the employees of public sector hotels. That's where she started buying BoroPlus for me. Even today, it has pride of place in my makeup kit next to Mac and Nykaa.

By the end of the month there were three or four notes left in Charlie. Mum would caress them, count them and somehow strretttccchhhh them. She always managed to put food on the table. My brother and I loved her anda parotha the most. We would be finishing our homework and she would holler at us, announcing the start of Chitrahaar on Wednesdays and The World This Week on Fridays.

A miraculous new equation

When I was seventeen, I auditioned for Yuva Vani, All India Radio’s youth channel. I was selected as a junior On-Air Presenter. After my training, I was asked to open a bank account. I clearly remember how proudly I went with my Pa to the Union Bank of India branch at Ashoka Hotel and opened what must have been a minor account.

AIR paid ₹150 per broadcast and we got three shows per slot every month. Some months we were lucky to get two slots each. Later, I began to change three buses to go to the UGC studios near Jamia Milia Islamia University to anchor their countrywide classroom programs. They paid us ₹750 per show and recorded upto six shows at a time.

Now that was a loot!

Somewhere around this time, I stopped taking my pocket money from Charlie. I began to sponsor my brother’s pocket money.

The All India Radio offices were located in Prasaran Bhawan

Abundance, a dream house and Lakshmi

The best phase of the relationship between Charlie and me was when I worked for almost 25 years with a big TV network, New Delhi Television. Loads came in every month. A raise every year. It was very real to see another zero added on one’s pay cheque. It felt unreal.

That's when Charlie helped us build my architect husband's dream house, brick by brick. Raised by his grandparents and his single Mum, Vinit has an almost reverential relationship with the protagonist of this story.

For the longest time, our hero Charlie became a highly contentious thing in our marriage. A few years ago, when I finally spent long days introspecting about my relationship with Charlie, I have been able to make peace with Vinit’s nazariya.

While building our dream home, Vinit and I were often down to our last notes. A thin Charlie flashed in my mind again. I could see Vinit talking to the workers on the site and telling them that we need to slow down for a while.

It was dark and I was sitting in the car, looking at Vinit and praying. There was a knock on the car window. It was Lakshmi, a daily wage labourer who worked on our site and used to have long chats with me under the tree about her alcoholic husband.

Lakshmi handed me a big wad of notes and said, “Didi please keep this for me. Give it to me when I go to the village next month. If I keep it in my jhuggi he will drink it away.” She thrust the money in my hands and went back to her home. I stared at Charlie for a while and then I counted. There were ten thousand rupees. Just what we needed to make payments that night. Next month when Lakshmi (yes, she was called Lakshmi!) was ready to go to her village, she got a huge amount of interest on her savings.

Spending, not saving, and running out of Charlie

We traveled all around the world. We thought it was our best investment. We didn't have an education fund for Ali, our first born son, always believing that by the time our boys go to college the ancestral property would be sold. The ancestral property still stands mired in cases and controversies. We had to take an education loan. Due to a technicality, it needed to be in our son's name.

Ali was upset. He could not figure out how his parents did not have the money to pay for his studies. My impossible ‘friend’ caused me a lot of pain in that phase. But, hallelujah! Our son paid off his student loan a few months into his first job. He has emerged as the most prudent, practical, best savings planner in the world of high-frequency trading! It helps that he lives in Amsterdam, where they believe in going ‘Dutch’.

In my current avatar as a media headhunter-wali, Charlie bobs up and down teasing me, telling me to keep helping people get jobs. So what if the pro-bono work is in abundance and the closures elusive?

Settling in with Charlie

Ali pointed it out this time when I was with him in Amsterdam. He said, “Somehow you always have enough.”

I guess it is not that impossible a friendship after all. Perhaps it just shows me the possibilities of life. Possibilities of abundance. It tells me that money IS all around us - we just have to learn how to access it. It just keeps going round and round. There is enough for everyone's need but not everyone's greed.

Didn’t Gandhi say that?

This essay was written by Shibani Sharma Khanna in response to the prompt, ‘An Impossible Friendship’ in the Memoir writing workshop facilitated by Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai.
About Shibani: Cricket mum - Coder mum.
Channelising her irrepressible energy into manifesting Good Times for everybody in her orbit.

Ochre Sky Stories showcases the transformative power of storytelling, featuring the most evocative writing from the Memoir writing workshops conducted by Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai.