S.M.Singru
Recently, Vajapyee sahib first neatly placed a bombshell under the chairs of his colleagues sitting on the dais of the BJP’s national meeting, coolly allowed it to explode, and when the colleagues came running to him with their faces covered by soot, he said he was only joking. I liked it. We all must cut jokes, more the merrier. After all, there is too much of misery in life, and a little joking would certainly make the whole thing bearable.
Unfortunately, for doubting Thomases like me, it raises several questions. Basically, my foremost problem is that my sense of humour does not always click with that of the object of my joking. Thus, as a junior officer in the Indian Railways, one day we gave a big party to one of our Railway Board bosses. It was clear that he relished the food, and by the time the sweet dish came, he was pretty full. He looked agonizingly and longingly at the sweet dish and said, “My God, now where can I keep this sweet dish?” The malefic stars in my horoscope prompted me to give a look at his well-formed tummy and suggest that the best place would be his stomach. Although he laughed at that moment along with others, next day he phoned me from New Delhi and accused me of being rude to him in public. I sincerely denied this and said I had no intention of being rude either to him or his tummy. This seemed to infuriate him even more and I could get out of the situation only by spluttering a total apology to him, copy to my local boss.
This unnerved me for several weeks, but not longer. My General Manager’s daughter got married, and we all knew that the bridegroom was a great philanderer. What happened was that I went up the stage to congratulate the young couple, and with the innocent intent of being humorous, I pumped the hands of the bridegroom and said, “Many Happy Returns, hee, hee!” I could not understand the stony silence all around me till my better half gave me a talk later, the chief theme of which was that I should rather shut up than try my humour on such occasions. I protested that I merely meant to be joking, but this did not prevent me from having to spend that night in the drawing room.
Then, much later in life, there was this incident of my daughter’s would be in-laws visiting us for dinner. In advance, my wife had admonished me to be tactful and polite and “not say anything foolish”. When she gave me the job of wrapping up the gift in a nice paper, I recollected that my prospective relations seemed to have baldness as a family trait. So I thought it would not be out of place to add a bottle of the latest hair tonic in the gift parcel, with a message, “It’s not your fault really, it’s the genes!” The consequence was that till this day, my wife accuses me that I was the reason for those nice would-be in laws turning into would-have-been in-laws.
A particularly obnoxious and frequent guest of ours had the habit of telling jokes, which he considered to be funny. At his last visit, he took generous measures from my drink, and when I mentioned that he would probably get drunk, he insisted upon telling us the story of the colonel in a cantonment, which was infested with mosquitoes. It seems when the orderly of this colonel was asked by someone how the colonel slept soundly in spite of the mosquitoes, the former replied that up to midnight the colonel was too drunk to notice the mosquitoes and afterwards, the mosquitoes were too drunk to bite the colonel. Upon hearing this story an idea struck me. While my guest reeled off another infernal joke to the hapless audience, I went to the bedroom which was meant for the guest, opened up the mosquito curtain for some time and after ensuring that a decent number of mosquitoes had gone inside, I closed the net. By the time the guest went inside the curtain, he was too inebriated to suspect foul play. A great battle ensued during the night. The next morning, our guest appeared bleary-eyed and complained that he had mosquito bites all over him. When I pointed out that obviously, the story of the colonel, which he had narrated to us the previous night, was not true, he flew in a rage and vowed never again to visit us.
We were glad he kept his vow.