Surviving London

My first salary as a journalist evoked a response that has remained in my memory. "Oh dear, that is how much I pay my maid in London," a former classmate's aunt visiting from the land of the strong pound had screeched from the sofa. I tolerated the aunt and, in time, burnt the salary. Though the other way round too would have been fine with me.
Seven years later, on my maiden trip to London, when I gleefully exchanged rupees -- ten times more than my first wage -- for pounds, I was reminded of that encounter.Time, it seems, had changed nothing.
I was rupee-rich but the conversion had left me as pound-poor as I was when that aunt was on the sofa. With a great Indian resolve, my travelling companions and I vowed to scrimp and save whatever we could to ensure a reasonably comfortable trip with enough left over for the mandatory shopping on the high-end Oxford Street.
After much budgeting, scratching and counting, the friend with a head for numbers declared that the grub allowance per day was three pounds. In rupee terms it was generous.
But in England, it meant hard times ahead. We could not increase the food allowance because we gave higher priority to the more durable Gap, Zara, Pierre Cardin and Tommy Hilfiger. At Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer, we discovered that the sandwiches on the racks would be marked down by 50% to 75% after a particular hour.
We tore our eyes from the more exotic menus outside the cafes lining Covent Garden, and settled for 99-pence bacon cheeseburgers, and 55-pence chocolate and hazelnut mousse. Probably because food was so much on our minds, we called all the hot Englishmen "muffins".
Once you decide to be cheap, London shows the way. It lets groups of three or more avail of discounted day travelcards for use on the tube and bus.
The travelcard also led us to sights for half the entry fee. On the days we hailed a cab to our hosts' home from the station, the driver did not flinch when we tipped him just 50 pence. Nor did the waiters flinch when we asked for doggy bags.
We did not go unnoticed for long though. Slowly but surely the snooty Briton caught up with us. At The Three Tuns, a pub on the London School of Economics campus near Holborn, an unshaven beer drinker pointed to our Primark bags and asked, "So I have heard that the Primark stores are really cheap. But I haven't seen any in the city.
I believe they are all in the suburbs?" Primark is a chain of budget-end stores in the UK, Ireland and Spain, a branch of which we had ransacked that afternoon.
We tried to help this native and proceeded to give him the location of the store. It was only later that we realised that he was actually making fun of us, the cheapskate.
Far less subtle was the bespectacled dour theatre ticket-seller at Leicester Square. As soon as he digested that it was the half price play tickets we were interested in and not the Dress Circle ones, he huffed, puffed and tut-tutted in a way that would seem that we asked him to carry us up the four steep flights to our seats instead.
But the coldest comment was from a little black girl who was asleep next to her brother on the tube. Our hustling bustling entry into the coach disturbed her slumber.
While we were busy handling our shopping bags containing the latest DKNY, Sarah Jessica Parker and Calvin Klein perfumes with care, she said waving a hand in front of her nose, "Oh, they are stinking!"