Darling,” I said to my wife, “when you are in London, I hope you will not visit He Who Must Not Be Named.” “Don’t be silly, sweetheart,” my wife responded, “you know I hate seeing movies alone.” “No, no,” I admonished her, “I don’t mind you watching the Harry Potter film, or chumming up with Lord Voldermort, or even Ralph Fiennes for that matter, but you mustn’t see, er, You Know Who.” “I don’t know why you’re talking in riddles,” my wife snapped back, “but if you don’t want me to meet your best friend from college who is no longer your friend at all, then I shan’t.”
She kept her end of the bargain — after a fashion. “Guess who I’m spending my next two days with,” she called excitedly from London, and since I did not have her schedule, but knew she had some family and a lot of friends in vilayat, I said I’d pass on the guessing game. “Your friend who’s no longer your best friend’s wife,” she said triumphantly before hanging up. It was fortuitous how the meeting turned out: she had accompanied her nephew to his friend’s house whose sister happened to be the spouse of the person she wasn’t supposed to meet, but since he wasn’t in town, she decided to camp in, and that was, well, that.
Travelling around the city with her eyes shut wide, she met friends, acquaintances and neighbours who weren’t on our hot-list back in New Delhi, and acquired others on a greet-and-junk basis. When she opted to spend part of a day at a grocer’s family home, I thought it high time to remonstrate about her state of intellectual decline, only to have her retort, “He may not have brains in his beanpole but he’s got a Jaguar in his garage.”
Travelling around the Lake District, she wound up in a luxury estate owned by a Gurgaon friend’s aunt and uncle who took her in, asking only that she cook them a nostalgically remembered Rajasthani meal. For that one feast, they drove her through the countryside, escorted her to the attractions, and took her out shopping and dining as they might have a cherished member of the family. Like a rag-bag lady, she moved homes for the month that she was there, taking cabs, buses or the underground to her next victim paying her way through with conversations and companionship — apparently a commodity she found in short supply on the island.
When it was time to come back, she had to do a tour of all the places and homes she’d camped in to collect bags and stuff she’d left behind. Already, visitors returning to the capital had been coaxed into carrying back cases with victuals – meats and cheeses and dressings for those of us who could not join her in her peregrinations – but now it appeared that she might have shopped more than was prudent and the airline allowed. Her solution was to buy a few more bags to leave behind at the mercy of those with returning relatives to ferry back to us.
Ahead of her arrival, and at the time of writing this, exotic looking packages are being delivered home – some fancily wrapped, others crudely tied in plastic and twine, still others consisting of locked cases for which presumably she has the keys – but they are not to be opened, we have been warned. We’ll just have to wait to get to the cheese and chocolate till she gets here — provided, that is, she decides to show up instead of opting to stay away at her friends en route from the airport.