I don’t believe in the empty nest nonsense,” my wife told her best friend Sarla, “I’m too busy to notice the kids are gone,” and with that she was off, kicking her feet in an approximation of the paces her yoga trainer had put her through earlier that morning. But exercise wasn’t her top priority for the couple of weeks we were likely to be childless, as I discovered when I found her list of “to do” things in which she’d planned each day down to the last minute. The previous day, for instance, she’d listed “talking with irritating elder sister, 20 minutes; withdrawing cash from ATM machine, two minutes; rearranging cupboard, 25 minutes” — the contents of which, for the record, lie strewn on the floor of our bedroom — “ordering groceries over the phone, five minutes; shouting at cook for leaving the gas on and spilling the milk, two minutes every other hour; and oh, well, call and speak to irritating elder sister again till she hangs up the phone or a half-hour, whichever is longer”.
In the end, she ended up listening to her sister for two hours — trying to have a conversation would have immediately put paid to that call — and then with nothing else to do, she phoned Sarla, who was out at work, then Padma, who was too busy doing her nails to pick up the phone, and Lakshmi, who said she hadn’t forgotten how my wife had ignored her at Sarla’s party so she would not speak to her for another week. Next, my wife called the vet to order some more dog food (we were already oversupplied), then the hairdresser to ask her about the merits of some shampoo she didn’t even use, the security guard at the gates to ask if all was, well, secure, and the local courier office to check the rates of packets to various capitals of the world that, of course, she had no intention of sending.
“I have so many things to do,” she said to me, when I tried to commiserate, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and off she went for a day of pampering at the mall. She had her hair shampooed and blow-dried even though she’d washed it just that morning at home, she had a foot scrub, a back massage, then a facial, a manicure, and then, because she still had a few more hours to kill before picking me up from the office, she had her hair shampooed yet again, making it three times that day. “I hardly notice how the time flies,” she said to me later in the car, having arrived outside and waited without complaining till I was done.
It’s been a week since the children have been gone and she’s slowly settling down into a new domestic routine. The bed linen is now changed twice daily — don’t ask! — the towels are turned around on whimsy, she’ll ask for tea, then coffee, then tea again, the winter woollens have already been aired (and stored back), the bookshelves are rearranged every day (but her wardrobe hasn’t moved from the bedroom floor), and when she isn’t scrubbing something to a shine, she’s on the phone with the irritating elder sister whose own empty nest has driven her to invent the most innovative way to kill time — ripping open sari blouses and stitching them up again.
This morning, while my wife lined up and counted all the teaspoons for the eleventh time, I told her our son was now booked to come home in a fortnight’s time. “I know,” I said “how much you’re missing the children.” “Oh dear, the children,” she trilled, “I’m having such a wonderful time by myself, I’d forgotten all about them.”