All the time that I thought my wife was disorganised, she was filing away bills and receipts along with documentary and photographic proof of our son’s expenses in the form of a stack of files. “How sweet,” I said, leafing through one, “you’ve kept an inventory of all his birthday parties.” “Just the menus,” she said, “and how much the cake cost, and what the magician we’d hired charged, and a list of the crockery the children broke, the expenditure to dry-clean the carpet, and the expense of his birthday clothes.” “That’s terrific,” I said, “but what do you intend to do with it now that he’s all grown up?” “To bill him,” she said, “naturally.”
I discovered that she had itemised bills for everything he had ever consumed, or wasted, or thrown away by way of meals. She’d calculated how much he’d had of eggs and meat, ice-cream and chocolates, imported cheeses and Tetrapaks of juices. She could tell at a glance how many times we’d gone out to eat as a family and what his contribution to the bill was. She’d billed him for beverages and for candies, for picnics and for treats.
A separate file included the cost of air tickets to and from college, holidays taken as a child, hospital visits for coughs and colds and inoculations against diseases. She’d pinned the dog on him too (and the dog food) because it was he who’d insisted on bringing the pup home, even though it had attached itself to my daughter from the start. She’d charged him for memberships to the library as well as gifts of books, for cinema tickets and entries to museums as well as theme parks. There were paid-up receipts for use of swimming pool and gym, and a rounded figure for how much he’d cost us in haircuts.
There were, of course, his considerable school and college fees and the cost of uniforms and shoes he’d worn thin. Schoolbags and tiffin boxes, stationery and winter blazers requiring two changes every season (because of his inclination to spend time on the cricket field instead of in classrooms, resulting in his elbows poking through the sleeves in no time at all) billed alongside tennis lessons, all of them meticulously toted up. No concessions were offered for the use of soap and shampoo, for deodorant and hair gel. Air-conditioner and television and laptop and mobile phone were all accounted for, socks and shoe laces, sheets and pillow slips listed.
It was an impressive feat, one I acknowledged, totalling up to a staggering number of zeros that I was unsure whether to count in lakhs or in crores. “You’re going to charge your own son for bringing him up?” I asked, appalled. “He’s an asset class like any other,” said my wife, “and it’s time now to cash him in.” With placements and potential job offers round the corner, “It’s payback time,” she insisted
“It might,” I suggested, “be illegal.” “It’s what he owes us,” dismissed my wife. “How about a little discount,” I suggested, “seeing that he’s our son?” “That’s what he suggested too,” said my wife, explaining that it was our son who’d first broached the subject. “He wanted to be paid for running errands to the market, carrying cheques to the drop-boxes, picking up medicines from the pharmacy and getting cash from the bank. He said he’d baby-sat his sister and walked the dog, and served at our parties, all of which required us to pay him a wage, which is why,” she sighed, “I squared up things fair and square.” “I think you might have missed accounting for his telephone calls,” I chipped in, “and perhaps he ought to be paying for his tuitions as well…”
