She has this dress

She has this dress that needs to be altered and so we went the other day to one of those little Indian shops on University Avenue. The shop itself was a random selection, chosen for its proximity to our parking spot. And as we walked in, I immediately slipped into a mild Indian accent, hoping that this would give me some sort of leverage when it came time to discuss price. But it turned out that the shop couldn't do the alteration we wanted and the man behind the counter (who, for some reason, was convinced that the dress hadn't been purchased in India when indeed it had) directed us to a different location.

"Take the opposite footpath and walk down to the Vick Copy," he said in an accent much thicker than mine. "Go around the back and you'll find it." And so off we went, across the street to the opposite "footpath" and down to the Vick Copy where we walked around to the back but didn't find anything. Confused, we stepped inside the Vick Copy to ask for directions. Within a minute or two, one of the clerks spotted us with the dress and suddenly we were ushered through a short maze of back rooms until we were at the desk of one of Berkeley's little known secrets: the Indian tailor.

It was a bit like those movies in which the lead characters are swept through a series of back rooms in a hot nightclub until they come to the desk of some mob boss surrounded by his thick-necked cronies, but not really. This mob boss had a brightly-lit room that smelled a bit like yesterday's naan and the various folding tables were covered in hundreds of little spindles of colorful thread. "Yes," he said in a barely audible voice after looking the dress over and taking some measurements. Then he picked up a hand-made business card and wrote the following on it: Sunday. $10.

That was about it, really. He said some things in Hindi that I pretended to understand, but mostly we just nodded and smiled at the fact that we had just found a seemingly good Indian tailor in the back of a Vick Copy. What did we do that was deserving of this inside tip? Was it the adopted accent, our lucky day, or simply a standard business referral? Who knows? In any case, the dress will be ready next Sunday. We hope.