1Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 6 July 1887.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 3 (28/3, p. 131) and Scrapbook 4 (28/4, p. 192).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: This is one of the series of articles attributed to one ‘Smith’, a civil servant who writes of his domestic affairs and whose voice we hear in this piece (see also ‘A Rather More Fishy Case’). The series gently mocks the Public Services Commission, then at work. The Smith articles were first collected in an unauthorised edition, called The Smith Administration, published in 1891 in Allahabad and then suppressed at RK's demand. In 1899 RK published a slightly different selection of the stories as The Smith Administration in From Sea to Sea. Neither selection includes ‘The Case of Adamah’.

Reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, iii, 1609– 10.

The name of the packer, as “this paper” sets forth, is Adamah; and there is no fault to be found with the cheroots. My friends deny this; vowing that, though excellent to me, the smoker, the smell of the black, rank, little twists is poisonous and annoying to all within nose-range. But this is a frivolous objection, and my mind is full of larger issues.

I see reflected on the two square inches of “this paper” the whole of the mighty administration of India whereof I am a small part – a cog in a wheel or, having regard to weather at present, a heated bearing. “If any fault be found with the packing or contents of this box.” Why should R———— and Co. be so anxious for me to find fault, and why do they thrust the name of the packer, Adamah, under my nose? Even supposing that he had filled the box, for his own profit, with half-smoked stubs, do R———— and Co. suppose that I, seventeen hundred miles away, shall strike at Adamah, demanding his head per V.P.P. in the next consignment of coconadas? What concern have I with that distant Tamil? I would fain answer “none whatever,” but that my conscience tells me Adamah and I are in the same boat – or box, if you please.