Laugh Riot

Siba Prasad Maitra (c) in full dramatic flow

Nahid Khan (c) joins the merriment with a dying man joke

Siba Prasad Maitra was back in the Garden this morning. He was away for a week to be by his wife who has just got both her knees operated upon at Hinduja Hospital. “She was admitted on Thursday and returned home on Sunday,” said the ever-smiling Maitra, indicating that all has gone off well.
To many of us, including the Babanis, Boses, Kiran Prakash, Gita Latte and several others, Maitra’s periodic appearances in the Garden are no less than an event, essentially due to his jovial nature and off-the-cuff witticisms. Sure enough, he did not disappoint as he narrated a joke on extremes of competitive politesse and humility among people of different communities. Predictably, it led to the kind of toilet humor that is sidesplitting, yet within limits of decency.
Maitra then went on to quiz us on a peculiar brand of vodka suggestive of sugar and milk as its ingredients. The sugar is for energy and the milk is for strength, he explained. But what is the vodka for? “The vodka gives you an idea on what to do after you get the energy and the strength,” he clarified in reply to his question.
Before long, Nahid Khan joined the merriment with another laugh riot on a dying man extracting a bizarre promise from his wife. “Make sure you call the next door lady so that she can lipat-lipat ke cry over my dead body,” he directed his wife.
Much of these exchanges are spontaneous and unlike Santosh Tyagi’s joke narration, are not read from scraps of paper. And when enacted with dramatic flourish (as is Maitra’s forte), the humour gathers a raw energy of its own even as the joke, by itself, may not be new. More than anything else, the effect is infectious as Dilip Babani immediately took off lampooning a train traveler complaining of a sleepless night because he had been allotted the upper berth. “But you could have easily exchanged it with the person on the lower berth,” a sympathetic co-traveller suggested.
“How could I have exchanged?” the man lamented. “There was nobody in the lower berth!”