Norman Cole, my former Scottish boss, was an Agatha Christie fan and no mean raconteur himself. An acknowledged authority on tea cultivation, he was the visiting agent for several tea estates around Munnar, having started his planting career in one of them. And he would sometimes regale me with stories about the past. In the 1940s, he once told me, a naive young Scottish lad fresh out of school joined a tea estate near Munnar as an assistant manager.
During his initiation into tea planting, out of curiosity, he once asked his crusty old British boss how wild elephants crossed the deep and extensive reservoir nearby. On being told that the jumbos swim, he was skeptical. He just couldn’t imagine such a bulky animal doing so. A week later he chanced upon an unusual sight in the reservoir. A periscope-like projection was slowly and silently moving through the choppy waters.The youngster stood transfixed, having seen strikingly similar images in newspapers back home in Scotland. Soon he was racing back to his boss, then lunching heartily and none too happy about his intrusion. “Sir,” he panted breathlessly, “I’ve just spotted what looks like the Loch Ness monster in the reservoir! Its neck is sticking high out of the water!”
The boss digested this glumly. “For heaven’s sake, don’t let your imagination run riot!” he snapped, dismissing him curtly. No cock-and-bull story was going to disrupt his post-lunch siesta! Undeterred, the resourceful youngster rushed to his bungalow, dug out a camera and hurried back to the reservoir. Sure enough, the long neck of the monster could still be seen heading back to the opposite bank. Needing solid proof to convince his boss, he clicked several pictures.
A few days later he triumphantly produced these. His boss turned scarlet-faced. “Look here!” he fumed, “You’ll make me the damned laughing stock among planters! Didn’t I tell you that elephants can swim? Well, let me now clarify that they swim with their bodies submerged, using their trunks as a snorkel to breathe. And what you saw and photographed is the trunk of a swimming elephant sticking out of the water—and not the blasted Loch Ness monster!” Then, in true Agatha Christie style, came the proverbial twist in the tale. The mortified young Scotsman, it turned out, was none other than my boss himself!
George N Netto
Email: gnettomunnar@rediffmail.com