Kishore Singh: My wife, the killer!

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If there are some things I don't tell everyone about my wife, it's because I think she has a right to her privacy. That is the reason not many people know:

That she has a Lady Macbeth complex and will sometimes get up in the middle of the night to wash clothes (I'd rather have champagne in bed but not, if you know what I mean, with a dhoban).

That she'll worry about a misplaced five-rupee coin after having gone on a huge shopping binge; (sometimes I'll just leave a few coins lying around for her to find, so she can finally go to sleep).

Of course, if she manages to fall asleep, I can't (because she snores).

That she pinches money from my wallet but will deny it unless caught in the act (when she'll say she's checking to see if I keep an account of the notes in my wallet).

That she'll sometimes eat the cook's dinner, believing it to be tastier than our own (but the rest of us aren't allowed to have it for fear we may prefer it too).

 

More recently though, she's been so busy that she hasn't had the time to catch up on the washing (the last time she did the laundry was when we were on holiday, which wasn't a lot of fun for the rest of us because we had to hang it out to dry, collect it, give it for ironing and put it away in different cupboards) or for much sleeping either. And all because her best friend Sarla got her an electric mosquito killer.

For those of you who haven't seen one yet, this is a peculiar gadget that resembles a badminton racket and is addled with buttons and switches "" one to flick it on, another to plug it into a socket, yet another to switch on the torch with which presumably, and with the slide of another button, one can go searching for mosquitoes to zap. It's quite a nasty device, really, but has caught my wife's fancy so she will wave it about like a maniac as mosquitoes caught in its swing sizzle spectacularly to death.

Our house, usually sterile of mosquitoes thanks to repellants and coils and sprays, has had an infestation because my wife now chooses to leave the doors and windows open, literally luring the poor creatures to their death. Under beds, behind drapes and in the bath, hiding behind bookshelves and crouching under the dining table, she waits to pounce on her helpless winged victims as they are nuked into nothingness. And when the house is rid of them, she'll stand outside the front door as the gadget sparkles like a phooljari on Diwali night. She'll get them by day, she'll strike them by evening, but it is at night, when the rest of the family has turned in, that she comes into her own, a killer on the prowl, bloodthirsty as she traps her victims. One minute all is quiet and the next there's the crackle of mosquitoes singed to a cinder.

Nothing stands in her way, not my son whose room lights up in celestial bursts as mosquitoes meet their doom, or my daughter who pleads for respite because she has to wake up early. "Don't you," I dared to ask, as I had once foolishly pleaded when she was merely an obsessive compulsive washer of clothes, "want to get to bed?" "Not before I've nabbed a few more," she said, swiping dangerously, so the racket landed on my hand with a deadly shower of sparks.

Maybe sleeping next to a killer isn't such a good idea after all.