Having taken a fall that resulted in a bump on her forehead and another on the shin, and discomfited but also confined to bed as a consequence, my wife found herself with nothing to do and a phone at hand. “I’m all right now, it’s not much, but I could have died,” she rang up her sister in Jaipur to tell her, before saying the same thing in as many words to her brother in Mumbai. Random cousins were called, and with each telling the almost-tragic dimensions continued to grow. She was “lucky to survive”, “anything could have happened”, “it was a miracle” she said to them, the melodrama being repeated for the staff who spread the news in the neighbourhood, leading to a flood of sympathy calls and more re-tellings, each a little more exaggerated till it seemed as though she had come through a calamity. That she seemed remarkably unscathed was a source of minor embarrassment. “Not even the glasses broke,” she lamented to me, “nothing happened to the watch even.”
I should have been thankful that it didn’t keep her in bed long enough, for in that short time she displayed signs of the kind of patient she might grow into as she got older. “Bring me my medicine,” she ordered, “I need a banana before I have it though, or perhaps a cookie, you might want to make me a sandwich too just in case, where’s my tea, I need water for my medicines, no, I want a fresh cup of tea, this is old, where are you? I want my hair untangled, I need to change my sweater, the medicine fell down, I don’t like tea, I want coffee, why aren’t you listening to me?” I was listening, of course, and fetching and carrying, and doing my morning chores that included switching on the geyser, watching over the milk, answering the doorbell for everyone from the dhobi to the driver, organising my daughter’s breakfast, looking through the emails, and catching up with the newspaper headlines, but even so I could hardly be accused of lack of attention. “What a terrible patient you make,” I joked, hoping to lighten her mood, but it only resulted in her calling her extended clan to gripe about my lack of sympathy.
She wanted toast, she didn’t want eggs though but perhaps some ham, or not, was there any salami? She rejected the breakfast tray with a groan and said, “I only eat fruit for breakfast, don’t give me this rubbish.” She wanted cereal, no not cornflakes but muesli, oh gosh, she didn’t eat commercial muesli, couldn’t I put together the ingredients and make it fresh for her?
She wanted to wear socks to walk around the house, or closed shoes, or perhaps slippers for comfort, or one shoe with a heel and the other without to maintain balance and ensure she didn’t limp. Should she wear make-up and be cheerful, or not and look pale in case she had visitors dropping in? Should she read (“it might make my forehead ache,” she said), or watch television, or lie down, or sit on the sofa propped up with pillows? I was not to hang around and make her feel helpless, but was required to be at hand should she require help.
She set the alarm for some time past midnight before (finally!) going to bed at night, “to remind you to give me my medicine,” she said, but the real reason, it turned out, was somewhat different. Keeping different time zones in mind, she’d wanted to wake up to call her blissfully unaware brother in the States with her survivor’s tale. “Did you know…?” she began — it would be a long, late night for the poor bloke too.