Kishore Singh: We're all like that only

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First, I went off for an appointment, photographer in tow, only to find myself at the wrong address in quite another part of the city. There was no way to make amends at short notice, and the person I was to interview was politely understanding about it "" at least over the phone and after she had got over her fit of giggles. Ah well, mistakes will happen, I explained to my wife who, though, wasn't listening to me "" she was busy looking for a pair of earrings in a shoebox kept in the drawer meant for storing stationery.

Next, I sent a colleague off for the launch of an international designer brand store two days early. Since she'd taken the trouble to alert others in her fraternity to the possibility, there was a bunch of hacks who arrived in some haste but, alas, there was no store yet. "I really must get help," I sighed to my wife, "my colleague has still to forgive me, and is going all over the office telling everyone about my 'senior moment'." "Um, err," said my wife, absorbed in trying to find the key to her safe, having already had the lock replaced three times this year on account of having lost the key and the spare key each time.

"Do you often make these mistakes?" asked a friend, to whom I'd confessed my Alzheimer moments. "You mean, like the time we went dressed for an engagement party, only it had already happened a day earlier," I asked her. "You did that!" exclaimed my friend. "Doesn't everyone," I was astounded. Why, the last time my aunt visited, she was a whole day late to the railway station to catch her connection to Guwahati, though I've always thought that was deliberate on her part.

And the first time I met the editor of the page on which this column appears, it was at a friend's anniversary party for which he had also arrived the previous week and had had to be turned out by the hosts who weren't in the mood to entertain 24x7 hours too early "" though they did offer him a drink half-heartedly, hoping he wouldn't stay on. (He did, they said; he didn't, he says.)

"I think," said my wife later that evening "" she actually spoke this to the cupboard where she was looking for a book she was reading which, for some reason, she seemed to have hidden behind a pile of shirts "" "that I might be getting forgetful." Since I had learned (through years of trial and error, I admit) to decipher what she was saying whether from the interiors of her wardrobe or from under the bed, I did a double-take: could she actually be admitting to being less than perfect? (She had, just the previous week, billeted her Airtel cheque to Vodafone, and vice versa. And locked herself out of her car three straight days in a row "" and then rung to yell at me for not affording her a driver!)

"It must be our age," she admitted, when I reminded her of these recent misdemeanours, and being in a forgiving mood, I restrained myself from repeating that she had been forgetful for at least as long as our marriage. "Besides," I said, "I am less forgetful than you are, even though I did mess up some appointments at work."

"How ungallant you are," she protested, "but I do not have the time to argue with you since I have to go buy a present for Sarla, who is five years older than I am." When I pointed out that only a couple of years separated them, she said tartly, "I wouldn't worry too much, dear, after all you're the one with the memory loss."