Kishore Singh: Who broke the WC?

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It's no secret that our home has often felt (and looked) like a railway platform, with the coming and going of our various relatives. Over the years, we've learned to at least avoid the railway station or airport pick-ups and drops, and often manage our nights out without bothering about the guests at home. However, the one thing that's always been difficult to digest is the way things either disappear, are spoilt or broken beyond repair. "Your cousin," my wife will say, "has been filching the tea again." "Don't be silly," I'll reply, "it's probably just got over. Besides, I don't think my cousin is like your sister-in-law who pinched the towels the last time she visited."

The refrigerator compressor has been known to blow a fuse, the CD player misbehave, the airconditioner remotes disappear every time relatives have passed through. If a favourite eau de cologne is missing ("Your aunt," says my wife darkly), a bottle of whisky mysteriously diminish ("That brother of yours," I point back), or window panes crack ("All right, my first cousin," I concede), we've put it down to the cost of maintaining relationships.

But the greatest mystery of all was how, when my wife's parents came to visit, my mother-in-law managed to crack the WC in the guest bathroom. Though determined, she is a frail woman who is unlikely to mangle things with muscle power. "Perhaps she deliberately hit it with something heavy," I voiced my suspicions.

"Silly," said my wife, "if she wanted to hit something, it'd probably be your head."

Since there was some truth in that, we decided it must have been a mistake, but couldn't resolve what might have happened. "Maybe it was cracked earlier," my wife hesitated "" it was her mother after all. "Absolutely not," I said with conviction (it was my mother-in-law). "Maybe she was standing on it to clear the cobwebs from the ceiling, and it broke," my wife hazarded. The thought of my mother-in-law balancing on the WC was almost too comic to imagine; but however she inflicted the damage, it remained unsolved over the years, though I was only to happy to trot it out to score a victory every time my wife and I traded "your relatives did this" with "but your relatives did that", which was often.

This week, intermittently, my uncle who lives in Shillong, stayed with us in between trips out to other relatives in different parts of the country. The first time he was with us, he left behind an oily spot on the wall from resting his head there while sitting on the sofa and watching India thrash Sri Lanka in the one-day cricket match. (My children were fascinated that a man with such little hair should actually bother to oil it at all.)

The second day that he spent with us saw the TV go berserk, as a result of which we've had to call the service engineer, who thinks we'll be better off without our (almost new) TV, so the children are already checking out the latest models in the market. But the most bizarre thing occurred at the end of his third visit when he'd gone to have a bath, and came out to report that, uh, the WC in the guest bathroom seemed to have "broken" somehow. Certainly, a chunk of ceramic had dropped out. "Maybe," I suggested after he'd left, "it was cracked to begin with." "Or maybe he was arm-wrestling it," giggled my wife, happy to have the score settled as far as damaged WCs went.

For the second time we've had to order a replacement WC, but we'll be watching our visitors closely from now on "" it isn't every day that WCs detonate simply from having guests around.