Kishore Singh: Creative inputs, any takers?

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When our friends were shifting into a new apartment, they asked me to give them suggestions on renovations so that the flat, when they moved into it, would look different from the one they had been occupying for several years. But any recommendations, I knew from years of experience, would probably not extend to compliance.

You might want to shift the TV corner, I suggested, change the placement of the sofas, move the bar, remove a somewhat silly-looking showcase, add new bookshelves, and so on. Each and every one of these was shot down by my friend's wife for no seeming reason at all. "But I thought you wanted some fairly path breaking suggestions," I complained to my friend, when his wife decided to cold-shoulder my attempts to change the way they had arranged their furniture (and their lives) for so many years. "You must understand," explained my friend awkwardly, "that if we shift things around as you want us to, it could indicate that you know some things better than us, which, of course, is not acceptable in certain quarters of the family, so..." he trailed off.

Since this followed fairly long discussions on how they wanted a dramatic turnaround in the look and feel of the apartment, and had followed long hours measuring things in the kitchen and the bedrooms, I felt somewhat foolish that, at the end, everything went into their apartment exactly as it had been in their previous home. You could walk in blindfolded and still find your way around without stumbling on anything that had been repositioned. Every bowl and jar in the kitchen and chair and footstool in the living room occupied exactly the same position as in their previous flat. Why, for all their talk of change, they might not have moved at all.

"I forbid you to do anything more for them," my wife ordered me later, when she found out that I seemed to have spent a good deal of time getting nowhere with their renovations, "they're an ungrateful lot and don't deserve us as friends." Which is why I couldn't tell her that they had asked me to help them display their artworks, and sneaked across to their apartment on the guise of leaving a little earlier than usual for work.

"Here," said my friend's wife, "take this pencil and mark the spot for the painting on this wall, and make sure to get it right in the centre." "Oh no," I reacted, "surely you don't mean to hang this here?" "When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it," she retorted, "now get on with it, and mind you don't dirty the wall."

For the next several hours, while she sat sipping tea at the dining table, and her husband made sporadic appearances, while her daughter (freshly finished with her board exams) kept insisting that I was holding the paintings either too high, or too low, or too much to the side, I toiled with lifting and fetching and holding less like a man with suggestions and more like hired help.

"Perhaps," I would suggest, "we can make a cluster of these drawings in this alcove," only to be rebuffed: "I think not." When my friend's wife disappeared briefly into the bedroom to speak on the phone, her husband stopped by to say he really appreciated the way I was helping with my "creative inputs". "But no one's listening to my suggestions at all," I protested. "I know," he sympathised, "but it's alright, you can continue trying."

Hours later, when I was through with the pounding and nailing and measuring and cleaning, my friend's wife said, "Really, everything looks much the same as before, which only proves that I knew I was right all along."