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| "Lady" |
My dad was eyeing my old laptop for
quite some time. Just like me, it was sleek, efficient and fully functioning.
The laptop and I had a special bond, so much so that I came to affectionately
call it my “Lady” This led to a series of jokes among me and my friends about
me ‘spending too much time with my Lady’, or me ‘lying on the bed with my Lady
on my lap.’
Lady was over five years old and I felt
it was time for a change. As soon my new laptop arrived I decided to sell off
Lady.
Although the thought of my Lady being
used by my father caused me to cringe, I still gave him a right of first
refusal. He proudly pulled out a Rs. 2,000 note from his pocket and handed it
over to me. I looked back at him with utter indifference and walked away.
I logged on to an online classifieds
platform and created an advertisement for my laptop. For over ten days I was
pestered by people asking about the condition and features of this laptop. Some
of them made offers of one or two thousand rupees. Most, just abruptly ended
the conversation. One or two of them made offers above Rs. 2,000, but asked me
to throw in freebies like headphones.
Finally, after ten days of torture, I
finally closed a deal with somebody at Rs. 3,000/-. The buyer was a girl named ‘Aayesha’
and she had a cute display picture. I’ll be honest with my readers that the
prospect of hooking up with this cute buyer was an added incentive for which I
agreed to the low prices of Rs. 3,000/-. After a flirtatious chat, we decided
to meet at a small coffee shop in Goregaon, the coming Sunday morning.
Sunday morning I packed my laptop and
made my way to the coffee shop, which happened to be located in a pretty
isolated area. When I was just one minute away from the shop, a white van with
tainted windows swirled towards me and stopped next to me. The next thing I
knew, my head was in a black bag and was being taken away. About twenty minutes
later the van stopped and I was dragged till a chair. When the mask over my
head was pulled off, I realized I was in an abandoned wear-house and sitting in
front of a forty-year old bearded man.
“Who are you?”, I asked.
“Don’t you recognize me? I’m Aayesha.”,
he replied and exploded with laughter.
“What do you want?”
“Listen, take this phone and call your
father. Either your dad pays or you die.”
I dialed my dad’s number and returned
the phone to my kidnapper. The phone was on speaer mode.
“Hello?” my dad answered.
“Hey! I have your son. Transfer Ten
Lakh Rupees to my account in the next two hours or he dies.”
“What? Who is this? How do you have my
son?”
“I kidnapped him when he was on his way
to sell his laptop to me.”
“Oh! So you are the one my son is
selling his laptop to? Keep my son and keep his ‘Lady’!” Saying that my dad cut
the call.
“Hello? Hello?” my kidnapper looked at
me with sympathy and despair. He told me that he had a disappointment of a
father too. We bonded over our dad-stories for hours. By the end of the day he
finally let me go, realizing that I already had things going pretty bad
already.
I came home, tired. My friend Rohan
came to my house to meet me. I apprised him about what transpired. He pulled
out his phone and in 60 seconds he sold my laptop for Rs. 5,000/-. He used a website
called ‘Cashify'.
It was hassle-free and in a couple of days I got my money and my phone was
picked up from my house.
From now on I’m only going to use
Cashify for getting a good price and also to avoid getting “catfished”. Suggest you guys to #CleanUpCashOut too. Use coupon code CLEANCASH on Cashify to get an additional Rs.250 on the sale of your gadgets.
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