THERE’S ALWAYS A FEMALE!
Humour in Uniform
There are umpteen ways to get into trouble for a young officer in the army, especially in the cavalry. At least it was so in the 1960s and 70s. I don’t think it could have changed much since, because the army is tradition-bound and traditions don’t change in a blink. One of the sure ways of doing it was to let your hair down after a couple of drinks and indulge in a friendly chat with a senior. That was essentially a gross violation of the accepted norm that a young officer was supposed to be ‘only seen and not heard.’ But then booze always gives you that extra bit of courage to say hell with the norms and take a ‘pankha’!
So it was that I bought myself a load of trouble during one of those powwows in the officers’ mess. The Regiment being in a field area, we, young officers had to put up with the overbearing presence of the whole complement of senior officers, including the CO, in our midst during the evenings. Although, the rigid formality of the dinner nights was absent on normal evenings, we youngsters had to endure the gup shup and ha-has of the seniors in painful silence, often having to keep an ear-to-ear smile until your cheeks hurt, even when you found most of the ‘jokes’ cracked a damp squib.
Among our seniors, we had this genial gentleman – a major, let’s call him ‘Phulana Singh’ for the sake of this story – who was always full of travel tales. Those days, there was no air-conditioning in trains and we, officers, travelled by the now-extinct non-AC First Class. The first-class compartments were all of four berths, with a few two-berth ‘coupe-s’. Whenever and wherever Phulana Singhji boarded a train, and he seemed to be doing it all the time, he would end up having a female fellow passenger, often even a couple of them. And they were all young and pretty invariably. The story always began something like this: “You see, I had boarded the train from Ambala and there was this female in the compartment………”. Then he would strike up a conversation with her. None of his such female, fellow passengers were ever escorted by a male, rendering the situation convenient for him to proceed. Of course, nothing consequential ever happened from these interactions, but they took twists and turns suggestive of a twinkle of romance. No matter what their destinations were, Phulana Singhji’s story would end with the female promising to meet again or go on a date. Since there were no sequels to his stories, the rest was anyone’s guess.
His stories were just benign yarns expected to be guffawed at and forgotten, but booze-inspired, I chose to chip in with my two cents worth one evening, while he had just about opened a fresh yarn with his entry into a coupe. “And there was this female…….” I blurted out as if filling a gap. There was laughter all around, and then silence with disapproving glances from some stiff-necked seniors burning me. The joke was lost on Phulana Singhji for a moment. “How do you know that?” he impulsively uttered before checking himself. I couldn’t restrain myself even if I wanted to. “Eh, ah, there’s aways a female in your compartment, Sir”. I let fly to another round of laughter and slid off out of sight lest I got roasted. Of course, apart from a dressing-down by the senior subaltern the next day, I came to no harm from the indiscretion. Neither did Phulana Singhji take it to heart, because his rail episodes continued unimpeded.
