Full TP

Pot Luck!

Between the time I graduated and got a job, I lived with a cousin in Antop Hill.
His house was a haven for bachelors like me and others from my community. Married with two kids, he had turned his house into a mini-hostel. At any given point in time, there would be five young hopefuls sharing his 1BHK flat, that was rented from a central government employee.
We would sleep on mats in the living room, while he found a modicum of privacy with his wife and kids in the bedroom.
Every morning, even before brushing my teeth, I would pore over The Daily.
By The Daily I am not referring to those sheets of newsprint that feature the previous day's news. I couldn't have cared less whether Gorbachev's perestroika was working as well as Chandraswami's shenanigans.
The Daily I scrutinised every morning cost one rupee and featured only numbers. Numbers recommended by experts, dreamt up by people, numbers that were the flavour of the season (26 on Republic Day for instance), and numbers picked by astrologers.
The Daily was the Holy Book of matka punters. Among other things, it featured a 30-day list of prize-winning numbers announced by the five main bazaars.
Bazaars? A matka operation was called a bazaar. There were five then: Kalyan, Worli, Main, Morning Janata and Night Janata. The last two had a dubious record of being fixed and hardcore matka players usually preferred either or all of the first three.
There are three basic bets to a matka play: Single Number (odds 1:8), Bracket (odds 1:90), and Paana (odds 1:140). There are of course many variations like DP (Double Panna), Forecast, etc.
This is how it's supposed to work. Every bazaar announces two sets of numbers, called the Open and Close. How do they arrive at the numbers? According to hearsay, a top honcho of the bazaar draws three cards for the Open results. Let's assume he draws 3 (thiya), 6 (chakka) and 9 (nauvva). Then the winning Single Number is 8 (3+6+9=18). And 369 is the winning paana. This process is repeated after three hours to get the Close numbers. Let's say, our man draws 1 (Ikka), 2 (duva) and 10 (Mindi, for matka purposes 10 is considered zero). The single number is 3 and the Paana is 120. The Bracket is essentially a combination of the Open and Close single numbers, in this case 83. The bet gets its name from the way a day's matka results are written 369 (83) 120. Double paana is basically a paana with two identical numbers like 255 and a forecast is a combination of Open and Close paanas.
We used to place our bets at the local franchisee (they were there all over Mumbai). For your money, you would get brightly coloured chits with your numbers written on them. Usually, the Den my cousin frequented honoured all winning chits, though I heard horror stories of defaulters. Matka dens were great levellers. Homeless, drunken vagrants played 25p bets at the same counter as well-heeled gents placing 1000 rupee bets, and some of them even exchanged dreams and reccos. The expression on the faces of punters and the air of expectancy just before the results had to be seen to be believed.
Naive as I was then, I was told that matka numbers followed a pattern. To pick a winning paana you had to follow the cycles. Let's take 369. There are three possible cycles in this 36, 69, and 39. Cycles, according to the people in the know, were repeated weekly. If 369 was the winning panna in the Open last Wednesday, it was likely that one of the three cycles would be repeated this Wednesday. Numbers separated by five, like 3 and 8, were considered opposites. So if there was a 3 as a Single Number on a specific day of the week, then an 8 was likely on that day next week.
There were of course innumerable patterns. And spotting those patterns is what I would work on every morning. It's not that I hoped to win a few thousands (of course, I could have done with a lot more than a few thousands). The thrill was in cracking what I considered a mathematical problem. The thrill was in beating the system.
I failed hopelessly. And never managed to pick a single winning number. A cousin, who backed his dreams and hallucinations, not to mention the astrological predictions in The Daily, won a lot more.
Isn't life a bitch!