Kishore Singh: A potted history of pilferage

I misplaced my wife this morning - or rather she misplaced herself. By the time I got back from taking the dog for his constitutional, my wife had left to join our neighbour for their yoga class. My wife takes her yoga seriously. She has a pretty mat and matching tracks and shoes; she ties her hair into a jaunty ponytail; she has the cook serve her a tray that has one glass of warm water, another of lime water, a pot of first flush Darjeeling tea, dainty bowls of walnut kernels, lotus and flax seeds to which she helps herself throughout her regime.

They work out in the lawn when it's not raining, or indoors if the weather is wet. First, a flunkey trundles down with a yoga mat. Another follows with her shoes and a stool so she can lace up in comfort. The cook undertakes two trips with tray loads of victuals. She sips some water and begins her breathing exercises that my son rudely insists make her sound asthmatic. While our neighbour starts somewhat promptly, my wife pours herself a cup of tea, then rings the cook to say he forgot the honey, or lemon, or tea-strainer. By the time she is ready to begin, our neighbour is almost ready to finish, so they end up chatting instead.

It was a routine that used to go swimmingly till our neighbour decided to tweak the formula by suggesting a walk before starting on their yoga. The first day, my wife lagged behind our neighbour, who is a brisk walker, because she stopped to admire the flowers. Over the following days, strange pots started appearing in our balcony. When asked, my wife reported that she'd found them abandoned and had decided to adopt them from an altruistic point of view. Her generosity extended to bonsais and basins of ficus mimosa; shallow containers of blooming adeniums appeared one day, a philodendron the next.

The cook reported that madam had taken to calling him in the midst of his preparation of breakfast, summoning him with a glass of cold coffee and a pair of scissors. When he'd locate her on some inner colony road, she'd munch a sandwich while he was tasked with purloining saplings, or cuttings, to be carried away in a bag she carried in her pocket. Celery, parsley and basil, pinched fresh from garden patches, started appearing regularly on the dining table.

"Your wife walks very slowly," our neighbour complained, apparently unaware of the perfidy underfoot. Spotted during the day, pots started crowding our balcony under cover of darkness. But if my wife thought she was invisible, she proved mistaken, for soon, mugs of tea, abandoned in guilty haste on parapets and front walls, started being sent home with chowkidars - no doubt the work of home owners who'd spotted her prowling on their security cameras.

This morning, our neighbour called to say she'd lost my wife - again. "Has she come home?" "Not yet," I assured her, "though I've taken delivery of a lovely bougainvillea sent up by her." "I'm so happy," exclaimed my neighbour, "I'll tell Mrs Sharma I won." Hearing my mystified gasp, she explained, "All the wives on the road place a bet every morning on what's going to disappear next - and the vote, today, was on a pot of jade, but I suggested what you were missing on the terrace was a tub of bougainvillea."