Kishore Singh: Catering to her whims & fancies

Most men I know pamper their wives with an occasional trinket, or junket — a trip to the spa, a holiday in the Bahamas, a diamond bigger than their sister-in-law’s — enough to keep them in clover for the year. Unless the sister-in-law gets a still-larger rock, in which case the effort must resume again. But my wife insists on different iterations, and a little more frequently: not yearly, nor monthly or even weekly, but daily, and sometimes hourly. Because I had bought her tickets and asked her to accompany me on a trip to Mumbai, the weekend passed pleasantly enough. But no sooner were we back than my wife tasked me with a Dussehra list of “evil” she wanted vanquished from her life.

On Monday, she asked me to call Sarla, her now-bestie-now-beastie, to inform her that we were removing her name from our Diwali party list. Her offence? On a previous occasion she had hogged the limelight by telling risqué jokes, and being the party’s life and soul, despite my wife glaring at her, and even, for a while, locking her away in the bathroom. “As if I care,” retorted Sarla, when I apologised (quietly, away from my wife’s hearing), “I’ll have a bigger, better party to which I won’t invite her, but you can come.” “I wouldn’t dare,” I confessed to her, and we both giggled.

On Tuesday, my wife told my mother she could come visiting provided she kept to her room, kept her opinions to herself, and kept a low profile. My mother rang me to say she commiserated with my life and wanted to know when I thought I might be single again. “Was she asking you to divorce me,” my wife asked suspiciously. “No,” I replied truthfully, “but she did say she had alternative matrimonial matches in mind.”

On Wednesday, I had to sacrifice my car and driver to her “urgent” ministrations that required a trip to her stylist to check on her Diwali wardrobe, a tryst with her salon to get her hair coloured and set (on Thursday, she reminded me to never tell anyone she had her hair dyed), a tea party with her lady friends who fought when it came to splitting the bill, a shopping expedition to three separate malls, a wine tasting to which spouses were not invited, and, finally, dinner with some school buddies who had met over Facebook even though they hadn’t been friendly in school. Having dropped off her batchmates, whose names she had a problem remembering, she finally came home and informed me the driver was serving notice.

The following day, I rang up Sarla to tell her that my wife thought I was a cad for uninviting her to our party, and she could come, provided she was willing to host my mother for the duration of her stay in Delhi, so my wife would only have to meet her intermittently. (Sarla said something rude that I cannot report in a family newspaper, and hung up after telling me graphically what my wife could do with the party.) 

Currently, while my wife is “out on work”, I have been tasked with organising her cousin’s stay at home, ensuring the Diwali dinner is properly arranged, cleaning the house, training the staff on how the table ought to be laid, “just a little home stuff while I’m away — surely even you can manage that, silly”. All those men whose wives are content with a bauble or two, they have it easy.