I should be grateful that this past month, with the Capital drowning in the rains and the fury of the Yamuna in spate, I am able to enjoy the relative luxury of working from home. “It’s a lucky thing,” I tell my wife over images on television of crowded metro coaches and buses ploughing through roads waist-deep under water, “that I don’t have to worry about going out in this weather.” “You can count your blessings later,” she retorts, “first go collect your daughter from college, before which you can pick up the grocery, and don’t forget the clothes that need to be taken to the tailor’s for mending.” “Why can’t the driver do it?” I ask, irritated at being treated like an errand boy when I’m grappling with errant wi-fi networks and poor mobile networks. “I need him on standby,” she snaps, “for when I go for lunch from this block to the next.”
“How wonderful to be able to stay at home and have pakoras while it rains outside,” a colleague sighs over the phone. I don’t correct her: who’s to believe that spending the whole day poring over the computer screen is inconsistent with my wife’s idea of work, so she’s tasked me with cleaning out the loft. “But I have these mails to send,” I protest. “Right after you’ve been to the ATM,” she draws up a list of things she wants done, “so you can collect the glasses I ordered from the optician.” “But it’s raining,” I point out. “Are you afraid of getting wet,” she taunts me, “my teeny-weeny, wimpy baby?” Fortunately, the chemist is next to the optician’s, so I take along a previous prescription for a cold, knowing that a soaking is bound to bring on the sniffles.
I tell the cook to keep the decoction ready for filter coffee for when I’m expecting a few people to drop by for a meeting. “We’re all at his beck and call,” my wife gripes on the phone to her sister, “he wants to be waited on like an emperor while he sits around doing nothing the whole day.” “Don’t let him get used to it,” my sister-in-law cautions my wife, “or next thing you know, he’ll be telling you how to run your house.” “You want coffee,” my wife turns to me to say, “you can go to Café Coffee Day in the market. “This is a home, not a five-star hotel where you to snap your fingers and demand service at any time.”
When I power the laptop, she takes it over to check her Facebook status. When I make calls, she signals for silence, so I go out into the balcony where the rain causes the phone to jam up, and it needs a hairdryer to start, causing her to complain about how everything in the house is being used as an office aid. When I spread out my papers on the dining table to work, she calls her sometimes best friend to whine that she is has no space at home, at which Sarla asks to speak to me to tick me off, but instead says my wife is hysterical and I’d be better off working from my office, so why am I at home anyway?
It’s a good question, so I brave the weather to go to the office for an update on how long it will be before the renovations are done. “For another month,” says the administrator, “you can let your wife pamper you at home.” “Another month,” moans my wife, “maybe you can supervise the painting of the flat and polishing of the furniture.” I think I’m going to demand to be allowed to work out of my boss’s home instead.