The Hindu Business Line : Loves me, loves me not

Having myself learnt the lesson the hard way, I decided to make things simpler for her by telling her, beforehand, that predictability was important for me. She might bunk only one day in twelve for some reason or the other but, not knowing which day it would be, I would feel anxious everyday about the possibility that I might have to go hungry that night.

No problem she said, except on Friday evenings. Because that’s the day my husband gets his salary and gets drunk, and the day I get beaten.

Lest I misunderstand she went on to quickly add that “He loves me very much. After he has beaten me, he kisses the spots where it hurts the most, and insists that he won’t eat his dinner until I eat mine,”

On Valentines Day, after making a number of calls from my phone to say ‘I love you, Diya’, ‘I love you, Varsha’, and after having scolded me for not ringing up my wife to tell her that I loved her, she confided in me that the previous night, from midnight till about two, she had gone around visiting all the wine shops on Gandhi Road, because she was terribly worried that her husband might be “lying unconscious in some gutter, with no one to look after him.”

Her beloved, she said, finally turned up around three, after which, putting his arms gently around her, he explained that he had known that she would go around looking for him on Gandhi Road. So he had gone to Vijay Nagar, and got drunk there instead.