A drop too much

In the mid-’60s, many of the directors in our organisation were still British. We briefly had one from Scotland who ran the Madras branch with a fist tighter than the grip of a bench vice. The word “spend” was not close to his heart, and “splurge” was taboo. He viewed the small slips for expenses that waited for his scrawled initials like ugly scorpions found on his green-baize table. While his paper cutter had possibly been used by Robert Clive, the stubby pencil he wrote with was past its written value. He drove his Humber himself. That way, he felt, the petrol wouldn’t be siphoned from his tank.

Cell phones, faxes or telexes were unheard of then. The Bell’s instrument that we used then weighed a millstone and cost the earth for its audio services. My boss preferred the prepaid telegrams that gave the option to condense the text to save money. Trunk calls were post-paid and so had the potential to shock when the monthly bills arrived. With this in mind, he edited my telegraph texts, slashing redundant words. A person who enjoyed his nightly cap of just one peg, he would mutter, “A drop too much here,” while cutting a superfluous word or two from my drafts.

During a winter evening, a London acquaintance of his with the surname Lake was passing through Madras. His friend wanted to lubricate his throat. My boss had to leave for Bezwada to attend to some urgent work, and so entrusted Mr Lake to me with instructions that I contact his photojournalist friend — who wrote interestingly about anything from dinosaurs to devdasis — and get him his favourite tipple. When I went to receive him at the journalist’s club to drop him at Hotel Connemara, he was not blotto but nearly so. My instructions were to dispatch a cryptic telegram — using not more than five words — to my boss saying that things had gone off well, and Mr Lake had had his fill. With my boss’s thrift for words having rubbed off on me, I finalised the text not with five but merely three words. It read, “Lake is full.”