There are many minuses and pluses to children moving out of the nest to fly on their own. The house suddenly feels empty and too quiet. There is no one to help search for my misplaced spectacles. If I drop the TV remote, I myself have to stoop to the floor to pick it up. A big plus is that because of those two extra rooms, my wife and I manage to keep out of each other’s hair. I now have a whole room as my study in which I pursue my hobbies! The missus has commandeered the other vacant bedroom for mysterious activities like power yoga and Zumba drops.
There is, however, one aspect of this broodless existence which is very distressing—and that is the absence of a beneficiary of my wife’s mothering instincts. She used to lavish tender loving care on the brats but, now that they are gone, I often become the hapless target of all the TLC. Please understand that my wife is hardly the Sati Savitri kind. You know the Sati Savitri I am referring to, don’t you? Sati Savitri is the six-sigma standard of virtue and devotion that all Hindu women are exhorted to achieve by becoming all-sacrificing, self-effacing, husband-caring creatures. But even as the missus pooh-poohs this concept of the ideal wife, she does not remain totally immune from the cultural influences of the ecosystem she lives in.
These compel her to fitfully stifle me with overwhelming affection and enforce random restrictions for my betterment. Thus, the command, “Never leave home without a cap in winter” is accompanied with the Hukum Nama to never use my cell phone in bed. And there are other fatwas. Don’t eat more than two eggs a week. No red meat. No samosas. No jalebis. No this. No that. And, above all, no medicinal nectar in the evening. And no salted peanuts!
To be honest, though I would never want the missus to know it, even with her bossy ways and recidivist maternal predilections, life with her is sufferable. But it becomes truly insufferable when I fall ill; as I did recently. It is then that her mothering instincts become all-powering smothering instincts.
For the six or seven days that I was laid up with fever, I had to suffer extreme care which only a wife can inflict on her husband. My dear missus is the brand ambassador for big pharma, as also the greatest practitioner of ayurveda this side of Kerala. She has mastered the Unani and homeopathic systems and could teach a trick or two about Tibetan medicine to HH the Dalai Lama’s personal physician. In addition, she has a compendium of home remedies as long as her arm. So, besides suffering the fever, body ache and the burning sensation in my eyes, I had to submit to whatever slings and arrows outrageous fortune and a multidisciplinary medical regimen threw at me. The different schools of medicine ultimately impinged upon my happiness in the form of a wide array of tablets, potions, unguents and miracle-rubs.
My wife also insisted on taking my temperature every 15 minutes and cast aspersions on the ancestry of the thermometer for refusing to show any decrease. So, she got one more thermometer to check the temperature in my armpit. She would have got yet another one, but I told her that there was no question of going further south to take my temperature as they do for infants.
The vilest treatment was the special concoction that the missus so carefully prepared according to some secret recipe. She called it ‘kadha’. I called it the witches’ own brew. It may not have had among its ingredients the traditional eye of newt, wool of bat and fillet of a fenny snake but it certainly tasted as if it did. For all seven days that I had fever, I was subjected to extreme care and attention and a six-hourly dose of ‘kadha’.
My wife’s ministrations included waking me up several times at night to inquire solicitously whether I was asleep.
“No, I am awake, now,” I would confess each time.
“Don’t you worry,” she would say. “You’ll be able to sleep soon. Sleep is the best medicine. Go to sleep!”
Sleep indeed worked its magic, and I have now been fit and fine for the past 10 days.
Fully recovered, I have taken up a new hobby. I have started keeping notes about techniques that I will use to look after the old girl when she is down with the flu or some other bug. So far, I have jotted down only a few random tips. One is to tell her that for a quick recovery she must keep silent from morning till evening. Another is waking her up in the middle of the night and asking if she would like a cup of tea. Yet another is to make her sit up all afternoon, breathing only through her mouth. I feel these remedies are good for starters. I am certain that by the time she next falls ill, I will have compiled many more adoring therapies that will be as effective as the ‘kadha’ she cured me with.
K.C. Verma is former chief of R&AW. kcverma345@gmail.com