My mom says I have been fooled, twice, in a month, at around same place. Gullibility by far has been one of the serious issues with me as per my mom.I have been fooled, felt like an utter fool many times. “You’re being stupid again”, reverberates inside my head before making any decision.

It all started on the way back from my work. I thought about walking two hours rather than getting into those tilted overloaded buses. On the way a woman called me and we started having a little chat. She was in her mid thirties probably and I liked her short frisky hair. Before our small talk gets over, she asked me for help. She lived in Gokarna and she was short of cash to get there. I smiled, went to a near shop, made a change of five hundred and handed her a hundred bucks. She smiled back and we parted our ways.

I kept thinking about her for days. As I am writing this I can still picture her parting haunting smile. I should have taken her number to know if she reached or not. Maybe someone abandoned her or she could have lost her way. But she seemed to be a mature woman. So, it can’t be it. All kinds of thoughts kept creeping to my mind that night. I wish I had talked more to her.

A week later I saw another woman lying on the road. Pulling the brakes of my scooter, I slowly walked to her not knowing if she was dead or alive.I took a deep breath when I felt her breathing and with it came the smell of bad liquor. Even after shaking her shoulders vigorously, she wouldn’t wake up. Several soft slaps on her cheeks and few drops of water magically blew life to her seemingly dead body.

Drunk talks are always interesting than the sober ones and more often hilarious. But she was not laying there unconsciously in broad daylight just because she was drunk for fun or drunk out of habit. The whites of her eyes were red not because she was intoxicated but because she had cried her eyes out. I gave her hundred bucks, consoled her that everything is going to be fine and asked her to go home. There was a moment of deja vu. She smiled at me and went to the nearby shop to get something to eat. I watched her for good five minutes from the other side of the road.

Well, coming back from work has always been interesting in many ways. As Paulo Coelho puts it, “Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.” So, I have saved a few hundred bucks in the small pocket of my bag in case, you know, if I could get “fooled” again.