The truth of the matter is that the American archeologists were so ‘busy trying to make quite sure it was the Poikile Stoa they had dug up, they hadn’t given a thought to the newspapers, which very few of them read anyway, or to the Greek authorities which, like all authorities everywhere, the less one has to do with the better. Also, the UPI reporter in question, having been an archeologist herself before entering the more glamorous world of the international wire services, was just carrying out a routine check, as she does at regular intervals with all her former colleagues, and was told:
“Yes, we do believe we have uncovered the Poikile Stoa.”
This little incident made me think that perhaps I should be doing some scouting among the various schools of archeology in Athens in the hope of turning up some serendipitous bonanza for The Athenian.
The first person who came to mind, in this respect, was my old friend B.L. Mulligatawny, B.A. (Bangalove), M.A. (Madras), D. Phil (failed, Oxon.), the famous Indian archeologist who discovered the perfectly-preserved egg of a dinosaur while digging in swampland near Calcutta, only to have it made into an omelet and eaten by his hungry workmen before he had· time even to photograph it.
Mulligatawny, as his name implies, is an excellent cook, besides being the head of the Indian School of Classical Studies in Athens. So much so, in fact, that in spite of his bitter disappointment at the ignoble fate of his dinosaur egg, he was . nevertheless able to chide his workmen for the even more heinous crime of overcooking the omelet.
So I half-expected him to invite me to dinner when I rang him up, and accepted with alacrity when he did. He told me, also, that he had a strange story to relate to me and that he was seriously thinking his initials ought not to stand for Bahadur Lakmi, as they did but for Bad Luck Mulligatawny.
When I called at his small apartment in Pangrati a couple of days later at the appointed time, I found the door open and the whole place reeking of those perfumed sticks Indians love to light on special occasions. Through the clouds of aromatic smoke, I dimly observed what I took to be my host standing in the middle of the living room and hastened towards him, my hand extended to shake his. Instead, however, I found myself grasping his right foot, for the simple reason that Mulligatawny was standing on his head.
He uprighted himself and apologized profusely for his odd stance. “I always do this to clear my sinuses before dinner,” he explained.
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Think nothing of it,” I said affably, surreptitiously wiping my hand on the brocade-covered couch he waved me to.
“I am dying to hear this strange story you have to tell me,” I said.
He smiled ruefully. “It is not only strange, but very sad as well. My father, who was a station-master in Madras, said he would send me to university and make me a man of culture. ‘Cultured people are never sad or frustrated,’ he would say, ‘because they do not have to worry if the 8.45 from New Delhi comes in at 9.20 and will surely crash into the 8.15 from Poridicherry if the signalman isn’t at his post and the engineer on the Pondicherry train isn’t chatting with his widowed sister-in-law who always rides with him in the cab on week-ends with her nine children.’ My father, God rest his soul, could never imagine that the life of a man of culture could be fraught with more disappointment and frustration than the Indian railway system could ever give rise to in all its long history and all its immensity.”
“Come, come,” I said, patting his shoulder, “it can’t be as bad as all that. After all, you didn’t break a leg at this summer’s digs, did you?”
He fixed me with a beady stare. “I didn’t break a leg,” he admitted, “but I lost a bloody femur, that’s what I did, danm it!”
He plunged his swarthy head into his hands and stifled a sob.
I looked at his white-trousered legs and his bare feet and wondered how he could still walk without a thigh-bone. The thought occurred to me that perhaps this was why he had been standing on his head earlier on in the evening.
He saw me looking at his legs and smiled wrily. “It isn’t my femur I lost,” he explained, “but let’s have dinner first and I’ll tell you all about it.”
He clapped his hand and two dark, bespectacled young men glided into the room.
“We shall eat now,” he said to them. They nodded gravely and glided out again.
“You’re very lucky to have servants in this day and age,” I remarked.
“Oh, they’re not servants. They’re students who came out to our dig in the summer. We had twelve altogether. Ten of them went back to India in a Land Rover last week, but these two refused to travel on the Land Rover’s roof. So they’re staying with me until they can get a job on a Greek ship sailing from Piraeus to Bombay or Karachi. They could go as cooks. I’ve taught them the rudiments and all Greek sailors have ulcers anyway, so they should get by.”
After a splendid meal starting with a prawn curry and followed by brown rice and lamb with vegetables, green beans and tomato chutney and a splendid ‘beebeek’, a layered custard cake, impeccably served by the two Land Rover-shy students, we went back to the living room and Mulligatawny began his story.
“As you know, our dig is in southern Arcadia where, according to Pausanias, the Giants who were fighting against the gods of Olympus made their last stand. Hermes struck down Hippolytus, Artemis dispatched Gration, the Fates dealt with Agrius and Thoas and Ares, and Zeus, with the help of Heracles, accounted for the rest. The interesting part of the story as told by Pausanias is that ‘giants’ bones are still turned up by plowmen.’ Well, since nobody believes the Giants really existed, it would be natural to suppose that the bones turned up by the plowmen were the bones of prehistoric animals. And when I started on this dig, it was with the surreptitious hope that the gods,- whether those of Olympus or my own would favor me again with the discovery of another dinosaur’s egg.”
“Aha!” I said. “And did you find one?”
“No, but what we did find was a colossal, partly-fossilized femur measuring almost four feet from end to end. It had a pronounced curve to it and we could not make out what animal it could have belonged to.
Then, when the anthropologist on our team definitely pronounced it to be a human femur, there was no longer any doubt in our minds that we had made the sensational discovery of positive proof that the Giants of Greek mythology had actually existed.
Our anthropologist reckoned that the femur must have belonged to a bandy-legged Giant more than fourteen feet till.”
“Amazing,” I gasped. “And what did you do then?”
“Well, I had to be absolutely sure before making an announcement.
I needed a second opinion and I needed carbon-dating as well. I had to send the femur to the only man I could trust at the University of Madras, my old teacher and good friend Professor D.B. Singh. I decided also to send it to his home, by registered mail, in case it fell into the wrong hands at the University. So I wrote a long letter to Professor Singh and told him to expect the femur by parcel post and let me know his findings immediately upon receipt.”
Mulligatawny paused at this point and I became impatient.
“What happened then?” I urged him.
“You may well ask,” he replied glumly. “The parcel was delivered by mistake to another D.B.
Singh who lives on the same road but two blocks away from the Professor.
This man owns a souvenir shop and often receives parcels of ivory from poachers in East Africa. He has a workshop where skilled craftsmen turn the ivory into elephants, buddhas, replicas of the Taj Mahal and all the other junk you find in souvenir shops. He didn’t even open the parcel with the femur. He just handed it to his chief craftsman.”
“And the femur got turned into elephants and buddhas?” I asked, aghast.
“Actually, the chief craftsman found its shape so peculiar he patiently carved it into an ensemble of twenty elephants crossing a bridge with a miniature temple at each end.
By the time Professor Singh had finished raising hell at the post office and the parcel had been traced to the souvenir shop, the sculpted femur had been sold to a Japanese tourist and was gone forever.”
“Good grief!” I exclaimed.
“What rotten luck!”
“Now you know why I want to change my name to Bad Luck Mulligatawny”, my friend said. “And it keeps getting worse every time. At least, with the dinosaur egg, I got to eat a piece of the omelet, even if it was overcooked. Of the femur, I have nothing.”
“Look,” I said. “All is not lost yet. I’ll tell your story to the world. The Japanese tourist may hear about it and get in touch with you.”
Mulligatawny looked at me with a jaundiced eye. “What are the chances of my particular Japanese tourist reading The Athenian?” he asked.
“Just as many as you had finding a dinosaur’s egg and a Giant’s femur,” I replied.
“Cheer up, old chap!”
