Visiting Mother Learns Payment App, Requests $1 From Every Guest at Diwali Party

The Daily Rupee, from The IndiaPay Times satire desk. This is satire.

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FREMONT, CA. A visiting mother collected one dollar each from 23 guests at a pre-Diwali gathering on Saturday to confirm that her son’s payment app “works properly,” witnesses said.

“Only one dollar,” she told each guest, holding her phone out like a ticket inspector. “Just to check. I will send it back.”

The app had been installed on her phone nine days earlier. She has since used it zero times in a store, because, in her words, “nobody here has the little square.”

Back home, she pays the vegetable vendor, the auto driver, and the man who irons clothes by scanning a code and pressing one button. Since arriving in Fremont, she has asked “Where is the scanner?” at a farmers market, a dentist’s office, a pharmacy, and a parking garage, in a voice that carried in each.

Her son explained that here, the app needs the other person’s phone number or username. She asked why a username is needed when the person is standing right there. He said it was a good question. Family members described this as the first time he has conceded a point since 2019.

By 8 PM, she had returned all 23 dollars. Twenty-two came with the note “Received with thanks.” One, sent to a teenager, said “Beta, eat something.” She then sent her son one dollar “for the electricity.” He accepted it, he said, because declining would have taken longer.

“Once a person learns to pay in one second, every pause afterward feels like a personal insult from the economy,” said a senior researcher at an institute nobody could name. “We see it in visiting parents every year. It usually peaks around week six.”

Guests said the evening was otherwise uneventful. Someone brought a box of sweets. Someone else brought a second box of the same sweets. Two uncles briefly converted the price of the sweets into rupees, then stopped when they noticed her watching her phone.

At 9:30 PM, the host settled the caterer’s balance by writing a paper check at the kitchen counter, to be mailed on Monday. The mother observed him for the entire process.

“She did not say anything,” the host said. “She just looked at the pen for a long time.”

At press time, she had asked who in America still uses checks. Several people in the room gave the same answer: “Everyone’s landlord.”

Not satire: if your parents wire money and you send it with a tap, here is how money habits really differ across NRI generations. Our guide, NRI Money Habits Generations: My Dad Wires Money, I Venmo My Roommate, has the real numbers.

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