Located in the Queen of suburbs (Bandra) in Mumbai, facing the Arabian Sea is one of the popular clubs frequented by middle aged people of all communities. It had an outstanding coffee shop which apart from serving your choicest beverage, offered a plethora of Mumbai’s street food – Bhel Puri, Pani Puri, Vada Pav, Mishal – name it and you could get it. The coffee shop was a regular weekend meeting place for many young and middle class working people. One had to reach the club early to get a nice sea facing seat and spend a couple of hours shooting the breeze.
Prabha, Kaushik, Padma and Kingo were a regular at the club every Sunday. Barring an unplanned activity, come 3:59 PM of a Sunday, the foursome would take the seat with the best possible sea view and where sea breeze was mild. A strong sea breeze posed a problem for Prabha and Padma as the breeze used to mess up their hair-do. All four of them were engineering graduates and had done post-graduation in Management. The common factor amongst all four of them was that they all learnt Bridge in college and were reasonable middle level players and played for a team called Drunken Square (PK)
Prabha was a local Mumbaikar and very helpful in nature. She got accommodation for the other 3 people as they were all from outside Mumbai. Prabha introduced all people to this club and come rain or high water, they would meet at the club without fail. Prabha was a team player who used to control the discussions and ensured that the debates did not get out of hand. She used to ensure that friendship was more important whatever happens at the Bridge table.
Kaushik came from Kolkata and had difficulties in getting used to the travel in local train and the fast paced life of Mumbai. He struggled for the first six months but has now become a staunch Mumbaikar and is recommending people to come to Mumbai. He had read most of the popular Bridge books and was considered to be the best player in the team. Whenever they had a problem on a bidding sequence or play, the mantra was ask Kaushik.
Padma had spent all her life in Chennai and wanted to come to Mumbai and see how people lived outside Chennai. She was a Quality Analyst and believed in collecting data and analysing it to ensure the error does not happen again. She believed in documenting systems and maintaining a record of all scores and errors made by people with the objective of performance improvement of the team.
Kingo (Nobody calls him by his real name – Kansal) was his nick name he got in his college days in Delhi. He got the nick-name because of his royal behaviour – supremely confident, loud voice. Majestic in his talks and a person who could narrate an error as a well-executed play by him but luck was not on his side. Kingo was the motivator of the team when they had a bad game.
