Cockroaches:

Eeeekkks!!!!!!!!!

A scream woke me up from my slumber; I got up lazily put on a T-shirt and walked slowly towards the kitchen from where my wife was ceaselessly wailing and brawling. I know what you guys are thinking, why wear the T-shirt when someone could easily have been raping my wife and she needed my help? The answer is pretty simple, having married her for more than seven years now, I knew my wife. She would have preferred being battered by the rapist than be shattered on a stranger looking at my hairless bare body. I still have the mental scar of that warm February morning when I was frolicking in my towel and the maid had walked in. I had just wished her morning and had continued to ramble around in the hall. That was enough for my wife to banish me from my own bedroom and I had to stay on half rations and sleep with my son on the bunk bed with my legs dangling dangerously from above for an absolutely long time. That was four years ago and till today my body has no longer seen the sun and may be will never. Am sure she would buy an embroidered spotlessly white chikan kurta straight from the Manish Malhotra boutique to wrap me around when am laid in the pyre. Anyways, I walked to the kitchen half sleepy, to find me wife screaming silently in one corner at the cockroaches which had taken over my kitchen. Some of them were huge and some even smaller than houseflies; some old enough to be grannies with no strength even to move their whiskers and some born just the other day in the corner of the old pressure cooker; and all of them were rambling around like they were in some street Marathon waiting for some African to win the race while they were gleefully frolicking around complaining of roads and taxes. I took my slipper and started smacking these randomly without malice, without any preferences. I don’t even know how many I killed; I just rounded the dead after the massacre with my wife watching from a distance and then picked all of them together by their whiskers and threw them in the dustbin.

I walked back to my wife who had made some tea and we sipped the hot tea while I read the morning papers and she complaining about everything under the sun, particularly everything dealing with me, the way I had thrown my shirts on the chair in my bedroom, “Chairs are for the visitors who come to the bedroom, they cannot sit on the bed”. I hadn’t argued back, I had my inhibitions to visitors in my bedroom while we were on the bed, but then I had thought better and had kept all my doubts and queries to my heart. She had continued taking me to task about the way I had brushed and had dirtied the wash basin, the way Mrs. Singh looked at her when she found the toilet seat up, What she was doing with Madame Singh in the bathroom, I didn’t dare to ask. To speak frankly, it had stopped bothering me for long, I, after a pretty long training on surviving my wife, had become immune to everything about her. I snore and she raises a commotion even after her plunging a pillow in my mouth; she snores and I plunge the pillow on my ears. I said “yes” when she wanted anything, “very nice” when she ever wanted my opinions on something I cared or didn’t care about and “Amazing” to all queries on her looks, her professional life and her family, which obviously excluded me. But I think the last words were redundant, at least for all married men, they all know by rot that a family consists of the Wife, Her children, Her parents, Her siblings, Her in-laws in strictly that order followed by friends, colleagues, relatives and then maybe You standing very, very far away in terms of affection and love. I while nodding to my wife’s banter couldn’t help noticing a cockroach with huge whiskers sneaking around near the kettle without the slightest concern of me, the terminator, sitting nearby. It maybe had forgotten the bloodbath that had happened just minutes before, maybe had forgotten all the kith and kin, maybe family, maybe husband or wife or children dead in that tragedy, if that was a tragedy for it. People will laugh if I raise questions about a cockroach’s feelings, it has none they will scream and shut me up. Maybe they are stating facts, I personally have never seen a cockroach lighting candles at places where another cockroach had been killed, never seen it depressed and avoid food on another’s ill timed death. I had no choice but concur with the million others that cockroaches, unlike humans have no heart, they don’t care if their wife is dead, they don’t have a wife for that matter, they have sexual partners. They have children but they don’t rue the fact that the children are not doing well at school, or are boisterous and spoilt or have already abandoned them altogether. Their parents dead and rotting in some garbage dump and they care least about it. I smiled, I was human, I had feelings, and I cared for my family and the society. I cared if someone spoke ill of me, I fight back if I am hurt or so is my family. I love my wife and will have a tear even if she had a cough. I looked at her with the loving cum goofy smile still pasted on my face. She looked at me and asked me to cut off that smile, which she decided, was only there to irritate her and I was punished with the task of cleaning up the utensils. That moment washing those damned utensils how I wished to be a cockroach, carefree with least care and responsibility. A small cockroach winked from behind the dirty utensil, stroking its trimmed whiskers. A smack and the winking cockroach lay with eyes shut.

I had to get ready for my work or else my manager would have a field day pointing out my inefficiencies to whoever had ears. The clothes were neatly placed on the bed, no not mine, my wife’s; mine were still rumpled and I had to iron them which I did and ironed some undergarments that my wife had asked me to do with a smile and a kiss blown randomly. I had become good at ironing my wife’s cholis, seven years! I needed to have something to be a master at. I washed myself in the guest room, my wife occupied the main bathroom and she needed more time; obvious since she had to look good at work. No one cared of my looks, whoever noticed a man; that too married anyways. I don’t even know if my manager knew my name, it was always a “hey man!!” he greeted me with. Either it was because he wanted my gender being reaffirmed every time he saw me or he had forgotten my name. I, for obvious reasons, preferred the later to be true. My son had woken up and was doing his homework without being supervised; I went to him and gave him a sandwich, which my wife had prepared for breakfast. Yes, she does that, she thinks I am messy in the kitchen and am a horrible cook. I wish her views to remain that way for long.

I was already late to office; the man-eater would be on his prowl. I climbed down into commotion, some one had died and there were fifty people discussing the saintliness of the man who had just departed. The dead man was a great guy who always had a smile and kind word for everyone, or so I heard Mr. Gupta say. Mr. Shrivastava seemed to agree violently giving instances of his kindness towards the dogs that used to nestle at the gate and bark all through the night. Both my neighbors concurred on the winning qualities of the dead person till the point I asked his name, Gupta thought it was the old man on the 4th floor while Shrivastava thought it was the watchman’s father. Anyways, the name was immaterial; the person who was dead had been a very kind man and that was established. Both of them mourned and I joined them. I actually least cared who had died; all I cared was the cadaver to be removed for my car to pass through. I called up my manager and informed of the situation. My manager seemed happy for some incomprehensible reasons, he condoled the loss without even asking, who it was who had died, persons dead were just dead anyways. He spoke some kind words of the unknown dead and signed off.

I had time to spare and I called my relatives spread all over India, I had to call them, it was a month and I hadn’t exchanged pleasantries. Their responses were typical and my reactions were straight from the book. Those residing in cities were either “fine” or were “great”; the people residing in towns were “surviving because of my blessings” and those in the villages were “just living” with “life going on”. The questions for me were on similar lines either querying about my wife’s health or my son’s new mischief. I couldn’t dare to say she was becoming fat or senile with growing age, which were both true to the core, for the fear of further repercussions. Her health had to be duly reported as good, the expected answer and then a dead end on that front. So as always, it was my son to the rescue and I giving wind to my fancies invented a few mischief s that I had attempted before, to keep the folks all over the country happy and excited. It was getting late and the neighbors, having buried the dead and their own feelings for him, had already receded to the background of their own personal desolate world called life and I drove to mine.

If you ask about the roads and the colors of the houses marking the roads, I may have to bluff. The roads and the passing fancies of the outside world had long ceased to interest me. I now shut myself in the air-conditioned car for the fear of dust and heat, the same way as my house is locked with burglarproof gadgets or my room in office with double locks. These personal spaces that I so create are spaces that are away from the inhospitable world although being part of it and these spaces are locked with care in the same way as the past fancies locked in some corner with the keys to it buried somewhere deep. As a child I had wished to be a train driver, the driver is still lurking somewhere, maybe with the guy who wanted to marry Juhi Chawla or the one who wanted to buy an island or escape to the mountains. I honked the horn, furiously gesticulating at the dreamy cyclist cutting my path and my space.

My office was in a corner of the city, some half an hour from my home, if I can call it so. The office was drab with people giving a smile that stunk of indifference and ill will. I gave a few similar smiles and hurried to my workplace to check some mails and plan some nuisance for those reporting to me. Today was like any other with my eyes glued to the monitor looking busy while I was preparing some reports about efficiency and performance. The hours passed as they had to and I with tea breaks, cigarette breaks, lunch, coffee and meetings whiled away my time. I had a few “one on ones” in which I tried convincing my teammates why they were worthless and had to put on more hours than the ten per day that they were already putting in. The clock ticked and I was on my way out of the place back into my car and to my house. My wife was already back and so had my son. My son smiled, my wife didn’t and I without a word went to my home and changed.

The TV was switched on with the same channels that we watched every other day. The news channels were reporting random deaths and equally random awards given to some nameless people. Some terrorist shot dead while some other politician found with crores of money. The news was no different from the one I had seen yesterday or maybe the day before or maybe the day before, but yes the names had changed. I crouched on the sofa eating whatever my wife had placed in front of me with my eyes still glued to the TV. It was no longer the drab news but some saas-bahu serial, which was in the same point that it, was some many years ago. My wife was softly sobbing and stopped for a second to rebuke me, “Eat slowly and chew the food properly” she said adding, “You are becoming a kid by the day”. Déjà vu, She had done the same thing two days back with a similar angry look as she did today while my son was playing on the carpeted bright floor with the train his uncle had brought him.

I was becoming nauseated with some strange sensations in my stomach. I gave a look of pain and help at my wife who did look concerned maybe partly because of the love for me and partly because of that tragedy in the serial, which had happened some years back. I burped loudly and a cockroach jumped from the inside of my mouth. It turned back, twitched its whiskers and ran away. I gave another loud burp and millions of cockroaches kept flying from my mouth, as I lay crouched on the sofa, with my wife, looking with disgust at me, shrunk far away in the opposite corner of the sofa and my son gleefully smacking away the cockroaches that piled in from myself.

My son, at the least, gave me hope.