The book reveals “the secret histories of the corps diplomatic/And who buried which skeletons in what attic” in 260-odd pages written in iambic pentameter. “The diplomatic world is, at one level, extremely serious but at another it is also very funny. In fact, the government of India is very hilarious in its own way,” says Doshi, who has represented India in the US, Pakistan, Ireland, Libya, Malta, Kenya, Slovenia, and Vienna.

Diplomatic Tales — Mani Shankar Aiyar will launch it on Monday — comes almost a decade after Doshi’s first book Birds of Passage, written in humorous prose. He started working on Diplomatic Tales after retiring from the Department of Atomic Energy in 2004, having quit the foreign services in 1997. The new title is structured as four types experiences, all peppered with a large degree of suspense — what happens when a leader from a small country arrives in India in the middle of an Indo-Pak cricket Test match, how the love affair of a middle-aged bureaucrat (called Nawab of Khwab) helps avert a war between India and another country, the travails of a young officer posted to a “booze-free country” and, lastly, the story of a man with little physical courage being awarded the National Award for Bravery.

Doshi dodges questions on how much fact is there in “these chronicles of diplomats and sirens on the run/ (that) are well researched, authoritative — but mostly? Great fun”. There is a verse about a prime minister who “was used to wetting/Every forty-two minutes, on the dot/If not the bowl, his dhoti, or whatnot” and a tiny snippet about how a picture in The Indian Express results in a cricket-crazy 23-year-old landing a job in the civil services. 

The poems are a cross between PG Wodehouse and Lawrence Durrell’s Esprit de Corps, the wry humour often cloaking serious issues between the lines. “In my experience, the tragic frequently has a comic side to it and vice-versa,” Doshi says.

His best posting? Islamabad, where “Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had a ready laughter. He was also a past master at lying. Zia-ul-Haq was more grim and, unlike Bhutto, quite villainous.”