Once he gave me a few pointers on recognizing a fake 500/ - rupee note, knowing taht I had been duped a few times. Shiraz also told me that any transaction involving the teller and a customer in a bank involves essentially three things: The currency notes, the number of currency notes and the entry.

Generally faults arousing out of a wrong entry are to a great extent detected during tallying done at the end of each day. But if a teller accepts a counterfeit note or a wrong count of the wad, then, he pays from his own pocket.

last week, late night I got a call from Shiraz's flatmate asking for his where abouts. I reassured him that shiraz must have gone out for a late film show but when by 2 am there was no news I panicked. Shiraz's cell was also out of reach but then it usually is becase signals do not reach his cubicle. Anyway, since he lived in the next lane I went to his place. His flatmate, Saurabh told me that Shiraz was still at work and that all calls to the bank are were met with 'He is working and will be back in an hour.'

Finally he came - at 2:30am. He marched straight towards the couch and slumped. Loosening the knot around his tie, he started mouthing invectives at all the cheats in the world. A few minutes later, when he had cooled down he told us that how during the tallying when manual counting of notes was taking place, the verifier found four counterfeit five hundred rupee notes.

Although the bank had issued strict guidelines to all the tellers asking them to look for security features like paper quality, engraving techniques, watermarks, numberings, latent image, micro text, signature and dates, see through features, security strips, and threads in paper, shadow image and invisible florescent printing, Shiraz said thet when one is dealing with a large impatient crowd eager to deposit hard currency worth crores it becomes difficult to ascertain the genuineness of each and every note.

Anyways, he resolved to become more alert in future and thwart any eventuality regarding fake notes. With that he went to bed and slept.

I hung around for a while, shared a beer with Saurabh and jogged home. However the incident kept preying on my mind. i was thinking of how notions like authentic and forge get build around and circulate in our lived experiences. moreover the importance of words like, attribute, feature, profile, aspect, characteristics, facet, hallmark, trait, quality, peculiarity and mark, for example, help in shaping the discourse around the fiction of authenticity and the fact of forgery.

Stories where strangers play a central role get noticed, are picked up and circulated. Word images of the imposter, fraud, cheat, con man, deceiver, crook, decoy, bluffer, masquerader, mountebank, phony, pretender, play actor, poser, stool pigeon, swindler, trickster, whited sepulcher, smooth operator, scammer, confidence man, double dealer and four-flusher, sketch a disconcerting canvass of encounters with the unknown in the city.

The figure of Jalli Insaan in conjunction to the Jalli Note emerges as an important point of reference with respect to our encounters with the unknown, the unverified, and the unauthenticated.

What does it take to make a 'jaali insaan'?