Kishore Singh: Royally yours

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At first it was just another laughing matter "" Mayo-studied Rajput cousin comes to town, gets into an auto-rickshaw, takes out a knife, orders the driver to bring him to us forthwith "without getting funny". In what has since become family lore, my Kota cousin has assumed mythic proportions for the martial race's legendary denseness. The fare was less than Rs 50, the driver demanded and was paid Rs 150 by my cousin who thought the threat of the knife had kept the auto-driver on the straight and narrow.

"I paid so little," he crowed at home, twirling the knife with one hand and patting a flourishing moustache with another. "You fool," said my wife, deflating his ego, "you paid thrice the regular fare."

He has since come to visit often, even staying with us a couple of months, and later on visits between the tea plantation in the east where he works and his ancestral home in Kota. It's easy to tell when he's headed towards the tea plantation by his alcohol breath, even as early as six in the morning. He never tells us he's coming though, so we only learn about it when he presses urgently on the doorbell, woozy with sleep.

No sooner is he in, he heads for the nearest bed and is lost to us for the next few hours, by when, of course, the children have left for school and I for work. The return journey is nearly as dramatic because, of course, he's forgotten to inform us of his arrival, but since he usually comes in during office hours, he is met staunchly by the cook, who does not approve of him. "I need a chilled beer," he tells her. "I will give you nimbu-pani," she says fiercely. "Ring for a pizza," he orders her, but because he has never tipped her, she says, "There is food at home, you can eat that." "Where is the gin?" he wants to know, so the cook says, "The bar is locked and I do not have the keys." It's another matter that the bar has no lock at all.

Should he spend the day (and night) with us though, there's no escaping his braggart ways. He laughs about his exploits in the tea garden (first drink), his trips to Phuntsholing in Bhutan (second drink), his conquest of girls there (third drink), his royal roots (fourth drink), wealth (fifth drink), how Rajputs should never demean themselves living in city apartments (sixth drink) ... by which time we're wearing thin and go off to sleep, while he says he'll help himself to dinner, he just wants another drink, thank you.

He sniggers at us because we aren't "Rajput enough" for his liking, pointing out that the only way to solve a problem is by getting a revolver to do the talking. He's certainly not alone in that belief, if an aunt who walks around with a bullet lodged in her brain, and another who took potshots at a gardener lopping off the branches of a tree in the garden, are anything to go by.

Still, with all that bravado, he never quite manages to make the journey home without mishap. Despite having stayed with us and paid enough visits to know every pothole on the way home, last week he told the taxi driver to drive him "without getting funny" to an address the driver insisted didn't exist. My cousin's instructions had him crisscross the city till the exasperated driver drove up to a public phone booth from where he called us "" and found out he was 20 km astray. "I sorted out the driver," he said with grim satisfaction when he finally made it home, refusing to admit the Rajput in him had been at fault all along.