This is what the ayurvedic doctor told me. “You are vata-dominant, you like to take decisions.” This is what my wife said to me, “You’re a bully, even the doctor agrees.” This is what my daughter explained to her brother, “Dad’s bossy, some dude in a coat said so.”
We were spending a weekend at a spa and consultations with the head of the facility had been set up before we could be given our regulation deep tissue therapies. “I’m no alpha male,” I objected to my consultant, at which he assured me that my pita was almost equally balanced, though I was lacking in the kapha department — which, in plain speak, meant I wasn’t the calm, serene, uncomplicated person I’d thought I was, or as my wife was to tell her brother all the way in America, I was apparently “cunning and manipulative, sparse with the truth”, but also, alas, “predictable”.
And to think I’d arranged the outing as a surprise. “The therapist said I’m creative,” I pointed out to her. “Creative-shreative, liar-shiar, same thing,” she said, flouncing her freshly blow-dried hair as we headed home. “What’re we going to eat?” my daughter intervened to ask. “Well,” I offered tentatively, “I could make you a salad.” “Regrettably,” said my wife, “I do not wish to eat salad, especially not salad made by you, so please do not try and organise our lives with your dictatorial ways.” “Maybe you, not I, should have had your dosha checked,” I suggested to my wife. “I’m just fine,” she screeched, “it’s you, he said, who is the control freak.”
The next morning she told her yoga trainer, “I’m worried about my husband’s health, he’s domineering and officious, and needs to be kept calm.” “You should get him to meditate,” the trainer suggested, but I baulked at sitting cross-legged and spouting mumbo-jumbo. So she told the cook to give me only “cooling foods” that seemed to consist entirely of variations of yoghurt and rice. “I need some normal food,” I griped to my wife. “Blame it on your vata, darling,” she said, placing a bowl of rice crispies and curd in front of me.
“I suppose I’ll just have to tame him,” she whispered on the phone to her brother, who wasn’t to know that she’d forbidden me from joining my friends any more for a drink (though our son went out with his pals every night), nor could I read in bed (while our daughter sat glued to Facebook on hers) or watch television (so the cook had free rein on the remote). I shouted at the cook and the driver because I was upset, and she told them they’d have to put up with it because of my “medical condition”. I sulked when visitors came home, and she said she was worried because I was “always in a rage”. “I’m upset because I have nothing to do,” I said. “Calm down,” she told me, “or I’ll have to prescribe a course of tranquilisers for you.”
At my gym the following morning, the manager of the in-house spa gave me an envelope to hand over to my wife. It turns out my wife had come in for a facial, and for a lark had consulted the visiting ayurveda specialist who read her pulse and had declared her “100 per cent vata, no pita, no kapha — you should be Sonia Gandhi”. These days, therefore, we’re tiptoeing around the house — blaming her dosha is very well, but living with the consequence could be life-threatening.