SARTORIAL PROPRIETY

I was undergoing Head Office training – the last lap of the induction of a Probationary Officer into the Bank. As many would testify, this is the best part of one's life – no grappling with the ledgers and books, no balancing to do, no responsibility, no accountability. All you have to do is to thumb through the files maintained in the different departments and learn what you can about procedure and correspondence.

Thus it was that I chanced upon a file with the label 'Surprise Inspection Reports of One-man Branches'. For the uninitiated, establishment of one-man branch was an experiment that banks toyed with in the days of Social Control (pre-Nationalisation). Set up in unbanked areas, these branches would undertake limited transactions – deposits and small loans. To keep the overheads low, it was decided that there would be no joint custodian for the cash and valuables. The officer-in-charge himself would handle cash and the gold pledged as security.

This arrangement made it necessary to have more frequent inspections of these units because the credo of bankers is ‘Trust, but verify’. Free from the fetters of joint custodianship, the officer-in-charge could play with Bank’s cash and land both in trouble. Therefore surprise inspections were prescribed. It was also stipulated that not more than a fortnight should elapse between two inspections.

I went through many such reports. The verification had exposed nothing untoward on the official front, but a sentence in one of the reports cried out aloud for attention: ‘The officer-in-charge is advised to be properly attired while in the branch during non-banking hours.’

I was intrigued.

I located the signatory of the report. He was a middle level officer then (a few years senior to me). I button-holed him and asked him the circumstances in which the comment was made.

“It was a one-man branch located in a suburban coastal village. Looks like my boss has forgotten that a surprise inspection was due because the fortnight was ending that day. It suddenly dawned on him that if inspection was not done on that day, there would be violation of the stipulation of fortnightly inspections.

“So he called me in the afternoon, assigned me the task of surprise verification and asked me to rush to the branch.

“It was past banking hours when he reached the branch. That was the time the officer-in-charge was to write up the accounts for the day. "When I went in, he was seated in his chair, legs resting on the table, wearing a thin towel around his midriff and anointing himself liberally with balaaguluchyaadi oil."