Kishore Singh: Sweet departure

PEOPLE LIKE US

It is a rare occasion when departing guests from our home actually leave as scheduled. They misplace their tickets, head for the railway station on the wrong day or at the wrong time, or find their flights grounded because of fog. The long and short of it is that any pact we may have made for a guest to stay for, say, five days, ends up being stretched by a couple more days at the least.

Do we resent it? Consider the reality: kids being shunted out of their beds to make place for others (I've forgotten the number of times they or I have slept on the living room couch), extra clothes for washing, the kitchen doubling up as restaurant, the constant need for chatter and pleasantness "" and all this when they're probably on holiday and you must go to work.

Missed connections or lost tickets are the most difficult to deal with. Guests expect you to get them fresh reservations with the resourcefulness of a genie, and restore them the money lost on earlier transactions as though you were the lost-and-found office. Once back, they have a constant need for entertainment, and to be escorted on further shopping expeditions. They can't understand why you can't set aside a couple of days when they visit, which is frequently.

Therefore, when aunts and cousins leave, we view their departing backs with scepticism. My wife has certain rules that are stringently followed in all such cases: Don't change the bedsheets as soon as the guests have left for they'll probably be back.

Don't give the help the day off, if you don't want to do the dishes for your guests who have somehow managed to infiltrate their way back. Don't throw away the leftovers "" you'll probably need them to feed the hungry returnees.

Once, when she thought she could still fight such things, as soon as our guests had left (my in-laws in this case), we evacuated home to go out for dinner and gave the maid the night off. Only to come back to find an angry mother-in-law and an angrier father-in-law waiting at the door. They'd had a quarrel on the way and decided to come back to sort out things.

My own rules for guests tend to be as practical: I check tickets for flight timings (and the correct dates of departure), book them taxis, make sure they're woken up in time, ensure they have enough cash to pay for extra baggage "" but they still manage to manoeuver their way back.

While watching out for visiting family and friends, there's little time to check our own documents, such as the fresh passports that were received in the household one by one over a month (even though we'd submitted all our forms together), so it was hardly surprising that my wife and daughter, on their way to Bangkok, were turned away from immigration because my wife's passport said she required emigration clearance.

Red-faced with embarrassment, my wife summoned me back to the airport to pick them up "" hardly a new experience, but erring on the side of novelty because they were returning even before they'd left. "Let's pretend I've gone away," whispered my wife once we were back home, so when friends called to ask, I said she was not in town, and the following day when she did fly out, I heaved a sigh of relief.

Not so my wife's hostess in Bangkok, who must have found out about now that though her pact was to have my wife and daughter over for five days, when the new tickets were issued my wife had them stretched to five plus two. "It's tit for tat," she said at the airport. Revenge on the unsuspecting, I suppose, is sweet.