Kishore Singh: Home improvement

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This morning, as I was leaving for work, my wife sighed exasperatedly, “Do you know where my car keys are?” “On the key rack,” I pointed out, having recently put them there. “What fool hung my keys on the rack,” she exploded, “when everyone knows I keep them in the tissue box behind the deodorants in the bathroom!”

I wasn’t going to own up to the responsibility, having just been ticked off for replacing her reading glasses in her bedside drawer, instead of the medicine chest on the sideboard, which is where, for some inconvenient reason, she keeps them. I’d also found that she preferred to store perfumes in the refrigerator, my liquor bar was where you were likely to find the guest towels, the linen cupboard held our emergency food rations, and for some unfathomable reason her footwear was lined up next to the flour bin in the kitchen.

I’d also found cartons full of knitting needles and pattern books, though she hadn’t knitted in at least two decades; there were odd bits like the children’s first water sipper (chewed through when they got their teeth — unless it was rats); snips of their baby hair; oh, and bundles and more bundles of clothes that had either never been worn, or were now too small to fit. “I’m going on a diet,” my wife snapped, when I grumbled that she was using up all the storage space for useless clothes, “when I won’t fit into all the clothes I wear now, which I’ll store away for when I put back all the weight again because, of course, everyone knows that the weight you lose when you diet always comes back.”

What had started it all was my suggestion that perhaps we could spring-clean our apartment before our son returned for his autumn break. “I think it is a very good idea,” said my wife, “and if you will help just a little, the servants and I will take care of the rest.” That was on Monday, when I pulled out all the books from all the rooms, intending to stack them by subject, or author, or both. It was also the day my wife said she was busy, but I should at least get started. When I suggested the servants pitch in, she said she intended to take our handyman with her, and that the cook was allergic to paper dust.

On Tuesday, I emptied out our box beds (finding suits I hadn’t worn for years, and though my son says he’d rather die than wear them, I’ve kept them in storage hoping perhaps our grandchildren might want them for sentimental reasons), but was admonished by my wife for hanging her clothes in the cupboard, which is her exclusive preserve for her purses and bags, so I had to start all over again.

On Wednesday, I tackled my daughter’s bedroom but was equally at a loss to understand why she kept her boots in the study table, and her course material in the dresser drawers, while her (somewhat excessive) make-up paraphernalia occupied the sideboard next to the dining table. Oh, and she explained that I was not to remove the iron from the bathroom because, d-uh, didn’t I know she uses it to iron her hair?

On Thursday, I upset the cook because I asked her why she kept the condiments in the shelf for utensils, the groceries where the crockery should be, and why the silver was used for the storage of ginger and garlic? And on Friday, when I’d finished hours of backbreaking cleaning, my wife called Sarla on the phone to cancel lunch, saying, “Darling, I’ve got to put things back again, my husband has been messing around the house!”