Spice of Life: Dramatic twist, saving the punch for the end

In my youth, I was fond of detective stories. I liked the way the fictional detectives withheld threads of vital information up their sleeve and divulged it in the climactic punch lines with dramatic effect. A Sherlock Holmes or a Hercule Poirot appeared larger than life revealing the secrets at the end of the story, which they knew from the beginning but had kept close to their chests, just to let the audience have a dose of cliff-hanging suspense. And some Bollywood movies with whodunnit storylines are also my favourite where the protagonist, shown to be an associate of the gangster throughout the movie, flashes an I-card in the climax and claims to be a CID inspector.

In real life too, we come across people with this tendency of keeping things to themselves and throwing surprises in the end. But the effect is rarely dramatic. Most of the time, it is irritating or, sometimes, embarrassing.

Once I drove my uncle, a retired senior bureaucrat, to the Chandigarh airport for an early morning flight. We managed to reach there in the targeted time to find that the flight was late by an hour. My uncle wore a winning smile when he told me that he knew it already as he had checked it before starting. I was too exasperated to say anything. Being a late riser, I could steal a few more winks of sleep and would have started leisurely had he told me earlier.

In this context, another embarrassing episode from my university days comes to mind. I was travelling by bus from Chandigarh to Shimla with a friend. As we crossed Kalka and entered Himachal Pradesh, the bus was stopped by the side of the road. Three uniformed men climbed into the bus from the two doors followed by an elderly officious-looking fellow in a grey business suit.

“The flying squad for checking tickets,” my friend whispered into my ear. I was thinking about the delay this checking would entail. Strangely enough, the old man with a dismissive frown on his face was going to each seat to check the tickets single-handedly, while the three uniformed men followed him. My friend again confided to me in a hushed voice, “That man in the grey suit is the AGM. He does all the checking himself when he is leading a squad.”

“He seems to be finicky,” I said and piqued by the unnecessary delay this operation was causing, and heaped more adjectives on the officer while my friend kept smiling. “He must be a nuisance in his house too, I bet,” I remarked after some time.

“No, he is not,” my friend said in a composed voice, “He is a perfectly easy-going well-behaved gentleman at home.” I flashed a quizzical glance at his face asking how did he know.

“Because I live in that house with him. He happens to be my father,” he said with a Sherlock Holmesian smile. parmar.ranbir@gmail.com

The writer is a Shimla-based freelance contributor