| When my wife visited my sister in Ahmedabad last week, she had her usual allergy cold "" something that has never put her out before. "I'm not feeling too well," she told my sister, however, "so I hope you won't mind if I rest a little." And so, while my sister cooked her gourmet meals and made her pots of tea, my wife rested and recuperated and returned to Delhi refreshed and raring to go. |
| "That sister of yours," she told me, "is sweet but," "" because by now I had come down with a viral infection, "I hope you don't want me to fetch and wait on you, like she did, because I have my work to do." I assured her that I would be a quiet and well-behaved patient and she needn't worry on my behalf, but I would appreciate it if she could find the time to spend a half-hour in the morning and evening to keep me company. She nodded distractedly, and was gone. My son, who has found himself a summer job, wanted to meet up with his friends post-work, and since my daughter's school has re-started, that left only the help at home to take care of me. |
| The cook thought I needed regular doses of hot water inhalation and would appear every other hour with a pot of boiling water and dunk my face in it. Our friendly neighbourhood contractor, who drops in daily for a cup of tea, tut-tutted at such negligence and took to dropping by to give me cold compresses with freezing cold water. "I think," I told my wife, "I ought to see a doctor." "For a silly little cold," she laughed, "I didn't know you were such a sissy." Because I wasn't getting any better after a few days, she decided we'd eat lunch together in the bedroom. I couldn't swallow beyond a few morsels of some tepid soup, but she seemed to make a neat job of chewing up a pile of chicken bones. When her phone rang, I had just had an attack of breathlessness and was wheezing like an asthmatic. "Can you keep that a little quiet please," my wife ordered me; "can't you see I'm on the phone?" |
| When my mother called to ask why I hadn't seen a doctor still, my wife said she had been trying to persuade me to go to the neighbourhood GP, but that I was being adamant. Half in delirium, I could make out my mother pulling me up for being childish "" and foolish. And so, the following day, I called up the doctor myself and had him come over. The doctor could find no reason for such high fever, but prescribed a fresh dose of medicines that proved even more debilitating than the illness itself. |
| Every evening, my son would look into the bedroom, make appropriately soothing noises, and then disappear, to resurface the following morning to check that I wasn't going to work. "In that case," he'd feign, "I should take your car to my office to keep it in running condition." "The least you can do, seeing as you're at home with no work," my wife would chide me, "is balance these accounts." |
| My daughter, though, would fetch me drinking water, feed me oranges, massage my head, even fill her mother's account ledgers because I couldn't. I'd try and make conversation with her for a few moments before succumbing to bouts of breathlessness. It had been a long week, but I realised I was on the road to recovery when I heard my wife say to a friend on the phone: "I've been so busy looking after my husband. I don't know how he'd have coped if I wasn't there to take care of him." |
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