the leave application

Last night Ira asked me to write a leave application for her.

We were all up till late the previous night since the grandparents were coming into town. The kids had been very excited all evening. Initially, the consensus was that only I would go to pick them up at the airport because it was a school night. However, soon as I got ready to leave the girls also got into gear and insisted they too wanted to come to pick them up. So around 10 PM, which incidentally is way past their bedtime, we got out of the house to meet the flight. I sent a message ahead to my dad saying “The never-getting-hailed taxi coming your way” (a reference to a joke about how four guys start a taxi-hailing service but don’t get any customers because two of the men were always sitting up front and two in the back). Somehow we managed to fit the luggage in the boot and get home by 1:30 AM, kids awake and excited chatting 19 to a dozen with dadi and dadu all the time. Even at home, it was a bit of a struggle to get them all, kids and parents, tucked in and signed off for the night before 3:30 AM as they were too excited to listen to reason. As expected neither of the kids woke up at school time ergo the need to write an application.

Here’s what I wrote:

Respected madam,
My daughter Ira was unable to attend school yesterday, 24 September 2019, because she woke up late. She woke up late because she was up until 3 AM. She was up until 3 AM because she was excited about her grandparents’ visit. Usually, we try to avoid late outs on school nights however it does happen once in a while. I assure you this would be an exception and not the norm. Hoping you would agree and grant her leave for the one day that she skipped school.

I handed her the application, she read it and then facepalmed. After a second resurfaced and said, “you can’t write this the principal will get very angry…. ughhh see dadu what he has written”! So dadu took the application from her and read it. He came back with a “yes it is the truth and he has written it correctly. What would you rather prefer? That he make some untruthful excuse? He is stating the fact as it was and giving you a lesson in truthfulness. If anything the principal should be happy about a parent who says what really happened rather than make a false excuse.”…. then he went on to tell us of a similar incident from his life as a Railway officer before retirement.

In his words:

“Sometime in 1981 we bought the scooter. I was posted at Jodhpur at the time. Every day after coming back from office I would load the four of you onto the scooter and then we would all ride down to Umaid Bhawan Palace. People used to ask us why do you go there every day. Well, we just enjoyed the ride on those superlatively smooth roads, sat in the gardens at the palace for 15-20 minutes and then came back. However, a little later I received a transfer to Bikaner. Now Bikaner had pathetic roads. It was totally unusable in comparison to Jodhpur.

After just a few months at Bikaner, I sent a letter to my boss stating in clear language that Bikaner has no good roads and I am not able to take my family out for a ride every evening. You can please consider this as a formal request for transferring me to any part of the country outside of Bikaner. I am even willing to go the North East, which was considered a punishment posting by Railway officers at the time, just move me out of this Godforsaken place. While it is wrong to fret about a posting or refuse one, it is perfectly legitimate to inform your superiors about your exact situation. Who knows they might have a solution. The boss called me in and discussed all the issues I had raised including the bad roads-scooter part. After a discussion, he immediately called up his senior who at that time happened to be the Director Electrical at the Railway Board in New Delhi, Mr Buch. “I usually do not recommend this but there is this officer sitting in front of me who is perfect for RDSO (the Research, Design and Standards Organization, essentially the core of the Indian Railways, the place where all innovation in the Railways comes from) and the surprising thing is that this boy is asking for it (again RDSO meant a lifetime of research something that usually did not sit well with other officers as it did not afford them the fast growth path that the open line did). Mr Buch came back with a single liner “I will interview the bloke send him in”. I agreed to go meet him for his evaluation, not like I had a choice!

On the day, I arrived on time and went in to meet Mr Buch. He grilled me for two full hours emphasising upon the fact that only the best technical minds were ever admitted into the RDSO. Since I had been a thorough scholar throughout my educational life, having come top of the class in any exam that I ever took including the IRSEE, I had zero doubts about my technical abilities. Finally, after satisfying himself in all respects he said “OK I will come back to you in a weeks time”. Promptly at the end of a week, I called him directly “Sir, I am waiting for my orders, you had said it would take a weeks time”. Mr Buch was furious, I came to know that from my boss later. He was shaking with white-hot anger, “How dare a newly minted officer with barely 7 years of experience under his belt (newly minted by Railway standards) call me up directly to ask for a transfer order and that too for the frivolous reason of not liking the roads of Bikaner. Anyway, the orders came two days later.

Now there was another hurdle. The officer who was supposed to take over from me at Bikaner was posted at Delhi. Now officers posted in Delhi are rarely if ever willing to move out of Delhi. He was delaying his move to Bikaner and because of that, I could not relinquish charge at Bikaner to move to RDSO Lucknow. So I travelled to Delhi, knocked on his door and had a word with him. I explained to him about the long and circuitous route I had had to take to get this posting at RDSO and how I was in a fix now because of his delaying act and that he should most certainly come to Bikaner to honour the transfer order and settle in at the place. He agreed somehow and accompanied us (the kids and wife had also come with me to Delhi) in the official saloon to take over at Bikaner (this was a time when even Assistant officers traveled in style with a full retinue of supervisors and cook and helpers in their own saloon which was attached to the train going to wherever they needed to go, a time when the Twitterverse would not go up in flames over the family of a railway officer travelling with him in a saloon while he was on official duty…. a time before Twitterverse existed). On the way, I explained and answered each and every question that this gentleman had about Bikaner. He was very inquisitive and asked a lot of questions, it appeared as if he was convinced that he had Bikaner properly figured out by the time we reached.

So this was how we got out of Bikaner and reached RDSO Lucknow, on the 4th of September 1982, where we spent the next thirteen years of our lives. I learnt an important lesson in life from this experience. The direct and truthful approach is often times the most correct approach rather than beating around the bush and propping up half-truths, making excuses. Ask what you want and then give your all in justifying your choices.

Somehow listening to this story convinced Ira that the leave application I had written was actually OK and if the teacher or Principal had any problem with the application then I and if need be even my dad would go and have a word with them to explain the logic. Essentially, mischief managed!.