Kishore Singh: The ever-willing bartender

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Hoping to teach my son the co-relation between labour and wealth, I had trained him to serve drinks every time we had guests.

For each drink he'd make, he'd get a token sum which, totalled up every month, would add a tidy sum to his pocket money.

Things seemed to work well, though I wasn't always sure about his arithmetic. "Are you positive my friend had seven drinks?" I'd ask him, scanning the monthly tables, "Why, he and his wife Sarla had barely dropped by for a half-hour," I'd remonstrate with him. "That friend of yours is a sponge," my wife would castigate me, "always drinks more than he should, and then makes a nuisance of himself in front of other guests." "I wouldn't talk," I'd say to her, "because on average, it seems every time your friend Sarla has come by, she's consumed about nine drinks."

We started looking at our friends in a different light ever since the bookkeeping began. Did they really drink so heavily? "They must have hollow legs," suggested my wife. "It's a surprise they don't slur after that bingeing," I shared with her.

It seemed hardly surprising that our decadent friends appeared to be always complaining about their drinks. "Can you add a little more whisky to this?" they'd summon the ever-willing bartender. Or, "Hey, you skipped the vodka in the screwdriver pal, how about fetching us some?"

Later, when my friends learned that he was being paid per drink made, they murmured that I was exploiting the poor child, and suggested I should at least double his wages, causing a momentary hiccup in my son's employment when he went on strike, and I had to raise his level of compensation. But through it all, even as it seemed that they were drinking more than they should, the consumption in the bar at least seemed not to be increasing proportionately.

Things fell into place when I discovered that my son was charging twice for almost every drink served. "That's because your friend wanted more whisky, and more soda and ice," he'd justify, "which made it the equivalent of two drinks." He'd make deliberately small drinks so guests would either want them refreshed (therefore, billed as two drinks), or request refills faster "" services my son was more than willing to render. So, even as our guests only appeared to be drinking more, it was my son who was making money from their discomfiture.

"You've had five drinks," Sarla would snap at her husband, "do you have to match your host drink for drink?" Checking the ledger carefully, I discovered that not only had my son started billing me for the drinks he made for everyone twice over, he had begun to include drinks he was mixing for me "" also twice over. And in an attempt to fatten his wallet, he also appeared to spend considerable time in marketing purposes. "Why don't you drop by in the evening," he'd summon our friends, "my parents are alone at home and would love the company."

Having discovered that our sudden popularity came at a price, it was decided he would henceforth be paid monthly emoluments irrespective of how many drinks are served. Ever since, he's either not at home when the guests are, or is studying, and last heard, he was protesting about a maximum drinking limit for our friends.

But he has become more responsible about other work at home. He'll run errands to the market, provide his mother with computer printouts, zip across to the bank, carry receipts down to the housing society office, drop off cheques for the mobile phone "" all at a cost, of course, neatly calculated, month on month. Nothing in life, as he's told us, comes free.