We’ve been missing two kids for some time now, children who lived at home, replaced instead by two adult strangers we’re a little scared of. Yet, they seem to have taken over the establishment in a quiet coup. “Can I have my breakfast?” I ask Mary, our cook. “Later, later,” she gestures, she has to cater to the person formerly known as our son but now the new sahib of the house who must have his proteins after he’s been to the gym, and then his power breakfast before leaving for his internship, for which she will pack his lunch in the better tiffin-case, while saving only leftovers for me.
“Can you,” I ask the general factotum, “find me the charger for my mobile phone?” “I’m busy,” he tells me: The new boss’s shoes must be polished, his jacket creases ironed, his bath water drawn, his laptop loaded into its case, the belt buckle shined, his room tidied. While all the while my son sits with a remote in one hand, a mobile in the other, complaining, “Why does everything in this house take so long to get done?”
The young woman in the other bedroom who I thought was my daughter is a perfectionist guaranteed to have a fit a day because she heard a spoon drop in the kitchen, or the curtains in her room were not drawn to within an inch of her preference, or because the music of her choice can only be played at a level at which the deaf might regain their hearing. She’s the new memsahib of the house whose room you cannot enter without her permission, and then only as an indulgence and for a few moments.
Between them, they’ve commandeered the house, the servants and our cars. The day’s menus are set to their taste, the help revolve around their whims, and on the days they acknowledge us, it is with a sense of condescension. “Bring the kiddies,” friends from the past who surface occasionally are prone to say, but, of course, there are no kids at home, only stony-faced grown-ups who want everything their way, and that includes, specifically, not mingling with our friends. “I have nothing to say to them,” my son complains. “They’re so boring,” adds my daughter, the two then storming off into their rooms with a slamming of doors.
Not that they limit themselves to their rooms. My daughter’s clothes are stacked in piles in all the rooms, my son’s shoes lie abandoned under sofas and chairs and tables, their films and music have taken over every organic and inorganic space, he insists on his clothes being tidied up, she’s liable to snap if anyone so much as touches hers. He has friends who are constantly being fed and watered at home, hers come for sleepovers, and we’re constantly reminded that parents might be seen but must never be heard.
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“Coffee?” I request the cook, but she insists I finish my son’s leftover cold coffee instead. My wife gets my daughter’s hand-me-down boots with a sense of gratitude — they’re new, after all. At night we’re not allowed TV because the sound drives them crazy, so we confine ourselves to our room, reading quietly. They’ve confiscated our mobiles because our calls aren’t important and they don’t want to exhaust their balances. Phrases such as “please” and “thank you” have not been part of their lexicon for longer than we can remember.
Because of an earlier hostile takeover, I have not resisted the changeover in regime, but my wife is not enjoying her new status as underdog. “Who are these people?” she gasped this morning, “What did they do to our children?” “We’ll have our revenge,” I calmed her down, “when they have children of their own.”