THE STORE STORY

Being the junior-most officer on station, and still under training to boot, I was always being singled out for tasks that were either considered too menial, or too monotonous. One such duty entrusted to me was to carry out an inventory of the stores of the Division, an exercise that had not been conducted for over ten years, although it was mandatory to do so every year. A certificate was required to be recorded in the Stores Register that all the items listed therein had been checked and verified. This task was not only tiresome and boring, but also sometimes dangerous as the ‘Store’ was essentially a garage below the Range Office, with the doors allowing easy access to whatever creepy crawly wanted to make its home amongst the stored items. It was this Augean stable that my boss one day ordered me to inspect and clean up. Like Hercules, I too flinched at the thought of not only getting dirty and filthy, but also the prospect of getting stung and bitten by every type of creature that had made the store its home. Fortunately, I was allowed to take the assistance of the Range staff, and whatever casual labourers I needed. “One week,” said the DFO, “One week is all you have … starting tomorrow!” Seeing no way out, I had no option but to get going.

The first task was to locate the Stores Register. It was supposed to be in the Division Record Room but, search as we might, it was nowhere to be found. The Storekeeper claimed that he had never seen the Register during the entire five years that he had been posted at Rajgarh. A search for the missing register was launched forthwith. The Storekeeper and I went to each room in the office, opened each bundle of files and registers, but the Register, it seemed, did not want to be found. The Division staff looked on in amusement as I emerged from the Record Room in the evening, with my hair covered with cobwebs, and my hands coated with grime.  As a last resort, I ordered the only room not yet inspected, the coal store, to be opened. The coal store was normally opened only during the winter season, when ‘angithis’ would need to be lit to provide warmth in the offices. Come spring, the remaining coal would be weighed, stacked and the store locked till next winter. As light flooded into the store, and my eyes adjusted to the dark interior, I spotted a narrow shelf on the far wall and, on it, what looked like a register. Brimming with hope, I gingerly stepped towards the shelf, taking care not to stir up too much dust, and picked up the book and dusted it. Lo and behold – what should I find but the missing Stores Register! Standing there, I felt like Prince Charming must have done on finding the foot to fit the glass slipper! The storekeeper, however, was not quite so thrilled. It was later revealed that he had been the last one to lock the coal store in March that year, and had absent mindedly left the Stores Register inside, thereafter conveniently forgetting all about it! Anyway … now we could get on with the inventory!

The Big day dawned. I put on my most faded pair of jeans, the ones I had almost decided to throw away, my least liked shirt, ankle boots, and marched to the dreaded Store. The Store Clerk, attired similarly, was already there, as were a pair of daily waged labourers who had been engaged for this purpose alone. Since the Division office was also about to open, sundry employees on their way to work also stopped by to observe proceedings. A key strung on a piece of string was produced, and the Clerk proceeded to open the rusty lock which, initially refused to cooperate. A few drops of oil from the Rest House kitchen did the trick, however, and the lock ultimately yielded to our ministrations. The storekeeper gingerly opened the gates of the store, and a puff of stale warm air greeted us as soon as the doors were opened. Looking into the dim interior, one could spy the legs of a few chairs placed upside down, a lawn mower leaning against a wall, and a couple of old broken down cupboards.

It was a warm, sunny day and soon we had most of the contents of the store laid out in orderly fashion in the open space outside. In the process of emptying the store, we encountered only one sleepy little rat snake, a few dazed scorpions and a family of rats who had made their nest in the drawer of one of the desks kept in the store preparatory to being written off. In addition to an assortment of desks, chairs, cupboards, old electric geysers, some moldy carpets and curtains, we found dozens of containers of paint, phenyl, varnish and the like, with their contents totally dried up or evaporated. Since no inventory had been conducted for almost a decade, it appeared certain that these items had been lost sight of, and new goods purchased – a colossal waste of public money! Similarly, we found hundreds of tools for resin tapping, old hammers for marking trees, old tea sets, damaged typewriters, old waste paper baskets, old broken furniture, a rusted wheelbarrow and – a wooden ruler (scale). What was a perfectly good footrule doing in the store, I wondered.

As I went through the Store Register, checking each item present with its entry in the register, I consciously kept an eye out for the entry for the ruler. I could find no such entry but what I did find was a ‘roller’, of which there was no physical trace in the store. Intrigued, I questioned the staff, asking where the ‘roller’ had gone. My inquiries bore fruit as an old gardener volunteered that there had indeed been a heavy metal roller available in the past, used for rolling and levelling the newly constructed roads in the campus. He had not seen it for over a decade, however. It seemed that either the ‘roller’ had been lost in the forests, or had been loaned to someone (and not returned) or, the worst case scenario, been misappropriated by some official – replaced by the twelve inch long wooden ‘Ruler’! Quite an imaginative piece of work, I thought! Despite my best efforts, I could not find any old records to show when the replacement had occurred so we had no option but to write off the ‘roller’ … and also the ’ruler’, which was returned to its rightful place in the Map Section!