An incident outside the Lulu Mall

By Shevlin Sebastian

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I had just got out of the Lulu Mall, Kochi, with my daughter when a young woman, in a white mask, standing next to an auto-rickshaw nodded at me and said, “Would you have any change?”

She was holding a Rs 500 note in her hand. I checked my purse, and had only Rs 300. In these times of constant card usage, I carry little physical money. So I said that I didn’t have the change and walked away. Twenty metres away, I got an idea.

I returned and said, “How much is the fare?”

She said, “Rs 70.”

I gave her a Rs 100 note and said, “Pay the fare and you can return the money to me through Google Pay.”

She smiled gratefully, and that could only be seen in her eyes. So, the driver paid Rs 30 back to her, and she quickly took down my number.

And then I walked away.

Within a few minutes, my account was credited.

So that went off well.

In the evening, I was chatting with my sister June, who had come from Kottayam on a casual visit. So I recounted the incident with the girl at the auto-rickshaw. Through Google Pay, I realised her name was Rebecca Thomas (name changed).

When I mentioned this name, June immediately said, “I know of Rebecca Thomas.”

“What?” I exclaimed.

Quickly I mentioned, she has a middle name: ‘Susan’.

“Yes, it is the same,” she said. “She was my student in Pallikoodam.”

My sister was Principal and now Administrator of this school in Kottayam, which is run by Mary Roy, the mother of the Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy.

I found the coincidence astonishing.

I called Rebecca. But she seemed to have panicked, thinking I was one of those guys trying to get friendly, even though I met her along with my daughter. Her father picked up the phone. I passed the phone to my sister.

Soon Rebecca came on the line. And she was equally shocked at the coincidence.

She said many people said no when she asked for change, even though she was sure they had the money. It seemed it was instinctive for people to say no. Nobody wanted to do anything out of the way. So, she was glad I took the effort to solve her problem.

(An aside: sometime ago I came up with the idea that if a salesperson comes to the house, and most of the time we usually say no to them, because they sell plastic containers, cups and saucers, Britannica books or the Eureka Forbes vacuum cleaner, I plan to give Rs 100 and say, “This is for tea and biscuits.” The aim is to mitigate the sting of the no. Most of the time, these salespeople are young men and women in their first jobs.)

June and Rebecca spoke for a while and she informed my sister that she had graduated from the OP Jindal Global Law School at Sonipat and was working in a firm at Bangalore.

This incident made me ponder about coincidences. Like most people, I had read Deepak Chopra’s bestselling book, ‘Synchrodestiny: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence to Create Miracles’.

Here are some quotes from the book:

“I do not believe in meaningless coincidences. I believe every coincidence is a message, a clue about a particular facet of our lives that requires our attention.”

“We cannot even imagine the complex forces behind every event that occurs in our lives.”

“When you live with an appreciation of coincidences and their meanings, you connect with the underlying field of infinite possibilities.”

Of course, all of us have experienced coincidences all the time. You think of somebody and that person calls you up. You have a dream; something in the dream happens in actual life. You meet a stranger unexpectedly; that person changes your life.

But it is too early to say what is the meaning of this unexpected interaction with Rebecca.

The answer lies somewhere in the future.