By most standards, I wake early enough, but I’ve always enjoyed my mornings somewhat selfishly while the household takes care of itself. Someone provides a pot of tea; there are newspapers to be glanced through; books to be read; perhaps a little light music to listen to; a leisurely breakfast to be had. And so this wonderful world might have continued undisturbed if both servants, through force of circumstance, hadn’t taken off together, leaving us, said my wife cheerfully, a little “family time for a few weeks”.
Now, I’m all for family time provided it doesn’t invade my space, but this fortnight I’ve seen it up close — and it’s frightening. Initially, the help’s absence didn’t seem much to cope with, especially since my daughter leaves for college in the morning, and with my wife having already announced that her yoga hour from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning is sacrosanct — thereby also solving the mystery, for me, of why she had seemed absent on so many mornings — what could go wrong?
What I hadn’t realised was that my wife’s yoga hour coincided fortunately for her, but regrettably for me, with peak hour for the household. I had to wake our daughter — no easy task — and then take the dog down for his constitutional, which he delayed as long as possible to defer having to return to the apartment. Neighbours walking their dogs downstairs wanted, annoyingly for me then, to engage in drawn-out conversations when all I wanted was to return, not because I had tea waiting for me — alas, there was no one to set the tray, or pour me a cup — but because invariably my daughter would be having a tantrum. “Can’t anyone make me a cold coffee?” she’d shout from the shower, or “Not toast again, isn’t there anything nice for breakfast — ever?”
Nice or not, the toast burns because the front door bell rings with alarming regularity. The dhobi wants to collect the bundle of clothes for ironing and his previous day’s hisaab. The car-cleaner wants to collect the bucket with soap water and gripe that the driver is purposefully driving over all the city’s cow pats. The driver wants the car keys, and to fill his bottle of water, and to take a swipe at the cleaner, saying he leaves smudges across all the windows. The grocer’s boy cribs that I take too long to get to the door, that he has more errands to run, and why I can’t keep change handy instead of paying for a loaf of bread with a Rs 500 currency note.
The dog, having had his walk, wants his meal. My daughter wants to know if I can iron the creases from her shirt because she’s running late and still has her hair to do. A concerned acquaintance calls to ask whether I’ve signed the petition to the chief minister asking for her intervention to put a stop to the colony’s mosquito menace. The man who comes weekly to clean the fans says he doesn’t have the whole day to wait for me to hold up the ladder for him. The part-timer can’t find the brooms and swabs — and my son calls from Pune to say I must transfer money to his account “right now, just now”, he’s all cleaned out.
By 8:30, almost miraculously, all errands have been run, my daughter has left for college taking with her the cribbing driver, the bell has stopped ringing, and there’s blessed quiet. It’s the cue for my wife to walk in. “I suppose I can’t expect you to make even a cup of tea,” she says sadly, heading for the kitchen. And, a little while later, “You must try yoga, it’ll help you overcome your laziness.”