The attrition of your happiness began the moment you entered the musty, tube-lit premises of the branch. On one side, there were snaking queues leading to the glassed-in counters. These lines moved so slowly you wondered why there weren’t cobwebs growing between the waiting customers. From the withdrawal counter the teller would dispense money with the reluctance of someone parting with their family jewellery. At the deposit counter the aversion to taking the cash and providing proof of receipt was, if anything, even more pronounced, as though the smallest wodge of notes was a stake through the bank’s heart.
At the other side was a low wooden barrier of the kind you saw in courtroom scenes in Hindi films. It felt as though you could only cross this barrier when summoned by one of the officers sitting at a desk — though some people were confident enough to just go through and interrupt whichever official they needed to buttonhole. Often, an officer would call you to their desk, sit you down and then disappear for several minutes without explanation.
This meant there were some desks where orphaned customers sat facing empty officer chairs, while at others the bank karmacharis worked away facing empty customer chairs. Every now and then the withdrawal and deposit counters would also be left unmanned, the relevant queue snaking up in shuffling supplication to an absent god. As a customer, heaven forbid that you should lose your temper in any of these situations. The bank workers were an unforgiving lot and would make your life miserable with missing or slow-moving paper-work.
I was vividly reminded of these bank visits when I recently landed at London Heathrow’s Terminal 4. Getting off the plane I duly followed the familiar route with the signs to the immigration counters for non-British passports. Looking at the intestines made of standing humans, what I could make out was that two flights had landed in close succession to each other. This meant that there were about 600 foreign passport-holders presenting themselves for entry to Britain.
In T4, there were about 30 counters that I could see. Had about ten of these been manned, averaging one minute per non-problematic entrant, one could have hoped to be through to the baggage claim area in about an hour. As it was, a maximum of about four counters were active at any given time and usually it was closer to two. Officers would come, sit, ignite their computers, process four or five people and then get up and walk away, not to be seen for another half-an-hour or more.
Others of his majesty’s uniformed servants would just climb into the counter and sit, doing their mysterious sums, monk-like in their non-communication with the passengers. One counter intermittently, slowly, processed everyone in wheelchairs. Occasionally those with babies were given priority and sent through. For long periods at this seemingly Dena/UCO Bank branch on the Thames, there was absolutely no movement at all. Except for babies crying and trying to escape their parents through the forest of queuing legs and suitcases. After the two long flights from India to here, standing in queue for two-and-half hours, I could almost smell the small bottles of glue, almost feel the slightly rusted edges on the staplers of the desks of those bank officers in 1970s Calcutta.
