Whenever there was an emergency, Grandfather happened to be in his bath. He was in his bath when a wild elephant smashed its way through the garden, trampling Grandmother's prize roses and sweet peas and bringing down the garden wall. He was in his bath when the roof of the house blew away in a cyclone. And he was in his bath when a visiting aunt went into hysterics because there was a baby python curled up on her dressing table. On all these occasions he expressed surprise that anything could have happened during the twenty minutes he was in his bathtub; by the time he had dressed everything was overwild elephant had gone trumpeting on its way, cyclonic storm had passed, and baby python had been removed by young master Rakesh who had put it there in the first place.