His Highness’s champagne burra peg

When I was very young, two years old to be precise, we went to Bhopal to see my grandfather’s younger brother, Edgar, who was a civil engineer and also somewhat of an eccentric. One does not normally remember much of life at two, but the circumstances were so bizarre, they stuck in my memory. Uncle Edgar had constructed himself a small house and a guest house, way out in the middle of nowhere, at Tikhamgarh, many miles north of the city of Bhopal. The main house was rounded at one end and t