Silence is Golden

Bijoy Gupta(r) takes a pick of Bangkok Kit-Kat from Nahid Siddiqui

In what has become his trademark humor, Bijoy Gupta set the tone of the morning by questioning everyone for coming to the Garden before him. Turning up late as always, Shekhawat was to chastise him for “not coming on time”, only to be treated to the classic Gupta riposte: “I am on time. Who tells you people to come early?”
That did it. With no reply

Arun Patil: Deafening silence

to this one – but a burst of laughter -- the silence of the exercises was thus broken by routine babbling and sporadic laughter. But Arun ‘Disciplinarian’ Patil was unnaturally quiet today. He did not reprimand anyone or even attempt to pull up Razia Khan, his pet peeve who was conducting the exercises this morning. Shekhawat tried to provoke him by addressing him as “Mr Tokam Toki”, but to no avail.
Clearly, Arun was sulking. “What is the point of telling you people anything

Banoo Apa hugs Khatoon Baig(r)

when my advice is not taken in the right spirit?” he grumbled.
Of all the people, this hurt Razia most. Unable to bear the deafening

Razia Khan

silence of her persecutor, she pleaded desperately: “Arun-bhai, kuchch toh boliye.” Say something. This was worse than tempting the devil. For soon after, when Yusuf Rassiwala took to the middle for the second laughter round, Arun broke his silence. “Better conduct the exercises properly!” he growled.
In all this, we had clean forgotten about Khatoon Baig, who has always been a regular and punctual for the exercises. She met with a minor accident a couple of days back while leaving the Garden after the exercises. She lost her balance and stumbled, falling flat on the ground and hurting herself. There has been no news of her since.
Today she called up to inform that she did not incur any major injury, except for blood clots on her lower leg due to the impact of her fall. With timely intervention of her doctor, the clots have now disappeared and so has the pain.
“I feel fine now,” she said cheerfully. “From tomorrow I shall be at the Garden on time. Actually I could have come earlier, but I am a bit shy about drawing attention to myself. Please forgive me.”