Kishore Singh: This too shall pass

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It has been some while since she came to visit "" and stay on, and on "" but having grown old in our marriage, my wife and I no longer trade insults about whose parent has stayed longer, or oftener. Instead, we just bow to the inevitable, and hope that this too shall pass.

But it isn't without its heartburn. She might look slight and gentle and harmless, but it takes little for my mother-in-law to bare her fangs, and since her daughter can grrr back as good as she gets, it is left to me to carry the burden of her grumpiness.

It doesn't help that she is quick to take slight, guarding the dubious reputation of the clan with a ferocity one would not suspect in someone so frail.

In some ways, I could be blamed for our current lack of affection. In a bid to shake her out of her depression to which she has been prone for some while, I thought to bond with her by sharing my relationship with her children. "Yah, sure!" said my wife sarcastically, which should have been warning enough, but fools go in where angels fear to tread.

I confided that no matter how much I cared for her elder son, was he perhaps a trifle selfish to my selflessness? I said I knew her elder daughter was very dear, but surely she was a megalomaniac. And her younger son, for all that he was a teetotaller, and vegetarian to boot, seemed to have a temper that would have put her late husband's to shame.

"Much that I care for you, son-in-law," said my mother-in-law, giving me, laughed my wife later, a taste of my own medicine, "you are a nasty old sod." Things only descended rapidly downhill after that.

Not that we ever had a cosy relationship. On her early visits, she was prone to ticking the servants off, selling off to the kabari the things I had spent a fortune buying from kabari shops in the first place, while berating my lack of ambition ("who else would be a journalist?").

She insisted her children were better educated (they weren't), that her only other son-in-law was god-like if not god himself, and that, if nothing else, her daughter deserved a husband who, if he didn't make more money, could at least have a fuller head of hair.

We argued long and loudly about everything and agreed on nothing. She took away my copper objets d'art, complaining that if I couldn't keep them shining, I had no right to keep them anyway.

She said I was lucky I had married not just any woman but a money-printing mint, just because she sometimes earned more than I did. She said, when I cooked her a special meal, that I had no right to such fine feasts that should, by right, have been her children's.

She'd sit looking innocent while hoping to trip me up all the while. She said I did not know my history because I could not tell her, without Googling the answer, how many wives Rana Pratap had.

She complained I had no control over my daughter (because I let her stay out late with friends) "" besides, why hadn't I given her daughter diamonds on her birthday just gone?

Finally, to escape the constant nagging "" something she clearly excelled in "" I sought to escape with a book by seeking refuge in the bathroom. Alas, there was no getting away from her even there: my mother-in-law had left her dentures inside to remind me of who lay balefully in wait on the other side of the door.

But those dentures, no matter how snappy they looked, were positively benign in comparison.