Kishore Singh: A 'quiet' evening home

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Despite a colleague accusing me of being a dinosaur like her mother-in-law (!), I cannot stop grinning from ear to ear because, yesterday, I used my ATM card for the first time ever. Or, at least, I was accompanied by my son (straight out of bed, in his boxers, so I know now how he goes around on his own in Pune) who instructed me on the rituals of insert-and-grab to avoid the machine chewing up what was my money. If I'd known it was that simple, I'd have renounced cheques years ago.

A couple of days ago, I ventured even further afoot to order a movie on Tata-Sky to watch uninterrupted, drink by one hand, a bag of chips in front, the air-con at full blast...a hard day's night. When the mobile buzzed, I instructed my son to take all calls and say I was not at home. Three lies later (sorry Amit, Pankaj, Himanshu), the movie was just coming on, when the landline buzzed, and my son said his mother was on the line. "Speak to her," I said grandly, "I'm busy."

My wife, my son explained, had come out of her friend's home to find her car locked, but she did not have the keys about her. "Probably in the ignition," I muttered unsympathetically "" the movie had barely started. "It isn't in the ignition, she's checked," my son said. "Tell her to look around with a torch," I bellowed instructions.

He'd hardly put the phone down when the doorbell rang "" could I clear the milkman's bill? "Tomorrow morning," I insisted, but it seemed that everyone wanted their payments that evening "" from the neighbourhood kirana to the presswallah, and could they have it right then, please?

I'd barely got back to the neglected movie when the phone buzzed again "" my wife hadn't located the key, so maybe it had fallen down inside the car: Was there a way she could unlock it? "Use a ruler and slide it down the window," my son advised. Where could she find a ruler? "At the home of the people you were visiting," he said.

It transpired she did find a ruler, but it was too small to reach the lock. Could we fetch her the long steel ruler from home? "You go," I hissed to my son, "I'm watching the movie." "Maybe your friend's neighbours will have a long ruler..." my son whined into the phone, so I had to pump up the volume to drown out his voice.

Things were quiet for a while, I poured myself a second drink, and the movie got past the intermission when my wife called to say she'd gone back to the people she was visiting, and had found the car keys where they'd been lying all the while "" on the sofa "" and that she was coming home.

That was nice since I had a movie to watch, and so when a neighbour called to ask if he could drop by for a tete-a-tete, I said I was busy with some office work, so perhaps we could meet the next day, literally hustling him off the intercom.

Another neighbour, a talkative one, had to be restrained from sitting down when she stepped by to ask if we had an electric bulb to spare. We did. The next-door lady, meanwhile, had locked herself out of her home and wanted to use our phone to summon resources. I hid in the bedroom till she had gone lest I be summoned to help.

When my wife got back, the barely-watched movie was ending, but of course, we had forgotten to instruct the cook what he was to make for dinner. "What a selfish lot you are," she screamed at us "" and all because we'd been busy minding home.