Kishore Singh: With you, for you ? never

PEOPLE LIKE US

"" moaned my sister morosely, "we don't do much except sit around home and..." "Crib?" I asked her. "No," she snapped back, "watch everyone else do better than us."

She might have been echoing my wife's best friend Sarla who is always complaining that everyone else is more successful than she and her husband, even though she makes pots of money and employs over a hundred people in her service industry. "We've been left behind," Sarla sighs every time a friend gets a promotion, or moves into a corner office. And now my sister from Ahmedabad could have been echoing her. "You and I," she moped, "have been left behind."

The tirade had been brought about because I had told her that her elder sister-in-law, who is my wife, and younger sister-in-law, who is also my sister-in-law, were packing their bags to travel to different parts of the world, almost as if on whim. I thought she might sympathise with me because I was to be left behind to look after our daughter, while supervising my son's medication as he occupied a bed in hospital in Pune with probably measles (the spots causing him no little embarrassment), but she was clearly in a mood to be self-indulgent.

"My sons," she cried, "are never at home, the elder one is always mooning over that silly girlfriend of his, and the younger one trying to exchange one silly gadget for another." "It's a fact," I said, "that children grow up, but at least you have your husband." "Baloney," she almost shouted back, "the only time he is home is when he needs his golfing clothes washed. The rest of the time, he seems to live on the golf course!"

I could have pointed out that he seemed to spend as much time at the officer's club propping up the bar, but that might not have endeared me further, so I kept my own council. Instead, I called up my kid brother for a little fraternal bonding. For some strange reason, he seemed to lack his usual cheerfulness. "My wife," he said, "has just bought herself a new SUV" "" which I discovered was some form of car "" "but I'm still driving my old truck." I told him his "truck" was actually quite nice, but he wasn't consoled: "She jets around the world," he said in a voice of despair, "while I sit around looking after our son."

I cluck-clucked with him, and said it was true, our wives were getting around when all we seemed to do was baby-sit, but he didn't seem to think that we had all that much in common. "It's alright for you to sit at home," he said in a rude reference to my age, "but I need to be out and around." It took a great deal of reserve to keep me from hanging up on him abruptly.

My mother at least, I thought, might be sympathetic to my woes, but she had a litany of her own, on account of my father being away in Kolkata. "It's so boring being alone," she complained, "no one seems to bother about how I spend my day." I said goodbye somewhat hastily. My mother-in-law couldn't speak fast enough about how, now that her sons had abandoned her and moved away to the States, there was no one who cared for her and her husband. "I'm always there for you," I said, full of goodness. "Well," she paused, "what good is that?"

I called back my sister. "It's true," I told her, "that no one seems to have time for us, but at least we have each other." "Get a life, buster," she snarled back, "I have my husband's washing to take care of."