Then came the books - fiction, memoirs, biographies, poetry, thrillers, humour, cookbooks, illustrated books, coffee table books - some of which she'd read, most of which she'd started but not got around to completing, others that now awaited her pleasure. So, instead of dusting them and placing them back in their shelves, she laid them out in places she normally spent her day - on chairs in the balcony, by the stove in the kitchen, in her clothes cupboards where they joined previously left and forgotten cups of tea, an opened bag of crisps and a half-eaten meal. When we got home from work that evening, the house resembled a library in which monkeys had run amok, but she insisted she'd soon have things organised and in place again.
The following day, while reading in the kitchen as the milk boiled over, she decided things needed tidying up there too, so out came the dishes and plates, the daily use crockery and the cutlery for parties, cut-glass tumblers, unused dinner sets and broken flasks, chipped platters, unmatched tea sets and bits and bobs of what purported to be kitchen implements but no one knew how to use them. There were steamers and slicers, choppers and grinders. Woks and pans came tumbling out, and because there was no place in the kitchen for them all, especially after the spices and viands, the dips and sauces, jams and jellies, herbs and spices (many of them long past their eat-by date), she had them packed into the bar. I came home that evening to find racks of plates in my clothes cupboard and pickles and relishes in the shoe shelf. Alice in Wonderland must have felt similarly disoriented; in any case, we had to send for dinner that night, and had breakfast in the office the following morning.
Which was just as well because by then she had decided to air out her wardrobe as well, so out came her saris and blouses from the dressing room, the coats and shawls she stored in our son's cupboards, her shoes and bags. And since she often nicks my daughter's clothes, she decided to sneak them back into her bedroom, where they sat in higgledy-piggledy piles. A tsunami of garments, some of which she hadn't seen in years, meant many exclamations of delight or disgust, and an array of clothes spread out over all the beds that night, so my son left in a huff for my brother's, my daughter decided she'd sleep over at a friend's, and with no choice in the matter, my wife and I checked into a hotel so she could sort things through at leisure. It's now been three days, my landlord is suspicious we're sneaking away without notice, and I've not had a change of clothes to wear to work.