Lucky 13th

Urmila Sinha is 'coronated'
by Yusuf Rassiwala

It was Lucky Thursday for Urmila Sinha as she was formally inducted into Big Laaf first thing in the morning. Before we could start the exercises, Yusuf Rassiwala discreetly fished out a cap from his bag and performed the so-called ‘Coronation Ceremony’, welcoming her as a full-fledged member of the Club.
“I had a spare cap lying with me,” he explained, amid a round of applause.
The induction follows a near unanimous approval of the club’s Managing Committee yesterday, keeping in view Urmila’s exemplary track record during the past few months.

Shekhawat is amused

The common consensus was that she has all along been ‘more regular and punctual than most regular members’ and that she has also completed the requisite three months of attendance to qualify as a bona fide member.
However, a piquant situation arose when Urmila could not tell us when she was born and like Shekhawat (and Naseer Putani Shah) had to fall back on hearsay and family lore to put a date to her birth (for our record). “There was no system of birth certificates in our village those days,” she pleaded. “All I can say is that I ought to be in my sixties by now.”
Visibly amused, Shekhawat egged her to recall if a natural calamity had struck her village when she was born. “I was born in the year when our village was submerged in floods,” he prompted. “On that basis, my family elders had calculated my date of birth!”
Urmila’s face brightened instantly and she revealed that her village (near Dhanbad) reeled under unprecedented drought the year she was born. “My parents tell me the famine was so severe that they survived by peeling the bark of trees and boiling them for food,” she said.
Whatever that might mean, Siba Prasad Maitra had found his answer. “You were born on November 11, 1958,” he proclaimed, effectively conferring Urmila with a birthday (apart from the club cap) today. It is another matter there are no birthdays in the month of November in our Club calendar.

Lt Col Angad Singh (rtd):
Welcome, Urmila Sinha to the club. Hurrah for the coronation and the gift of a birth day. Now we have a member born in November!