The grey Innova, crawling along in the peak morning traffic, surged forward as if it was suddenly administered a booster shot when it was looking elsewhere and rear-ended two auto-rickshaws. The latter bunch collided into a group of two-wheelers in front and took everyone into the path of the oncoming traffic, with a Volvo bus leading the parade. The Volvo driver braked hard and swerved, to avoid pulping those in its way and rammed into one, two, three, four cars and managed to distribute the damage further. A disturbed Bullet rode into the moving phalanx of bicycles, scooties and pedestrians on the opposite side of the road. The two traffic policemen manning the junction were part of the debris somewhere and could not extricate themselves to be immediately of any assistance to anyone. Miraculously, there was no fatality, the bullock-cart-like speed of the vehicles ensured that - a silver lining indeed!
Raghav was on his way from home to the service apartment where he had reluctantly parked his parents for the past two days, after his wife of 2 years, Anusha, served the oft-repeated `The choice is yours - between me and them' ultimatum, but with a finality that sounded, well, very final. His mother, had had ongoing run-ins with the daughter-in-law on various earth-shaking domestic issues ranging from the quantity of milk to be bought every day to the quality of the current domestic help who was brought in by Anusha as a replacement for the mother-in-law's candidate. Of course, the major bone of contention was the primary right of ownership of the domestic pet - that is, Raghav, himself. The fireworks, which commenced almost immediately after the wedding as the gentle rustle of the sparklers and flower pots had, over the months, obtained the explosive traits of bombs with immensely higher decibel effect. The women, all said and done, were both somewhat civilized and had so far refrained from going for leather at each other, with all limbs flailing.
While Anusha and her mother-in-law were the prime antagonists in the running battle, Raghav and his father fell foul of both sides because they repeatedly made the mistake of advocating to the ladies the desirability of somewhat rational behaviour and mutual accommodation. As things stood, Raghav's father had recently been silenced effectively by volleys of verbal onslaughts from his wife of 30 years and consigned to a dark corner in the house to practice the two head movements on which his future depended - one, up and down and the other side to side. Even with this limited repertoire in which to accomplish perfection over an extended period, Raghav's father got into trouble time and again, because he shook his head the wrong way in response to his wife's forceful demands for support on specific issues, accompanied by Kali-like glares. That was primarily because a minor disability prevented him from hearing properly any sound below a certain decibel level; and unfortunately, most of his wife's push for support came in the form of hissing noises, driven by her passion for sibilants. Chastened by recent punitive sanctions against him in the domestic arena, Raghav's father had decided on a brilliant, if somewhat suspect, strategy to minimize disasters with his wife. He would, in future, closely observe the head movements of that formidable woman as she menacingly urged him to stand by her and replicate the same movements with his own head. After all, he had searched through his memory bank for empirical evidence and concluded that there was no way she could be shaking her head up and down when she wanted him to say `no' and vice versa. For a man who invariably resembled a bleating goat, which was cruelly cornered and helpless, that was nothing short of a stroke of genius and he only hoped that his wife would not change her declamatory pattern without appropriate prior notice to him! The irony of his wife's demand that her son be more loyal to herself rather than fall into the `clutches' of her daughter-in-law, even as she herself had been relentlessly bludgeoning her own husband into submission for so many years, was not lost on the old man; but then, very early in wedded life he had embraced the tenet of Tennyson's The Light Brigade and passionately acknowledged that it was `not his to make reply or to reason why'. He chose to be a martyr-in-waiting!
Raghav, being a resonable man, did not want to take sides and got punished for 'being the veritable, indecisive mamma's boy' by one party and 'a disappointingly spineless son whom the new wife was twirling around her eye-lashes', by the other. He was reaching the end of the tether in terms of patience and tolerance when, two days back the family's own Hiroshima occurred. He should have known when he sat down for dinner that there was an eerie calm, the kind that prevails when the warriors were busy choosing their weapons before the impending breakout of war. Being a man of peace and prompted by a good day at work, he was in a jolly mood and was trying to make light of things. Very juvenile of him, one should agreee; but he had no clue that he was way out of his depth as he tried some verbal jousting with his father first. That passed without anyone in the audience party displaying the slightest enthusiasm. You see, he was the only one who did not have the advantage of knowing what had preceded dinner. He had returned from office, had a quick wash and walked into trouble at the table. There had been a major skirmish for over half an hour between the women, as Anusha opened multiple fronts and ended with the issue of `excessive use of butter, ghee etc' by the mother-in-law, after which the antagonists had retreated to their quarters for some rest and recuperation and also to replenish their ammunition, should there be resumption of the war. When they re-assembled at the table, Raghav mistook the calm for nothing worse than the usual, tense atmosphere and he proceeded to spar a bit with people. Then he turned his attention to his plate and picked up the roti domiciled there. All he said was `Aha, this one looks and feels like its major constituent is rubber; dont we have any butter or ghee to mix with the dough to make softer rotis'? Innocuous, you would agree - only because it came from Raghav without the benefit of a life-saving flashback. But he was aghast at the fusillade of words that erupted from the women simultaneously and engulfed him; all the more so, because only a minute back his attempts at humour passed without extracting as much as a grunt. Anusha thought the mother-in-law had complained to Raghav about the earlier fight and went on a rampage with the usual accusations about him being under his mother's thumb etc. When her protestations did not help, the mother-in-law went on an over-drive, raking up all the insults she had suffered during the past few months in such a perfect chronological order that others suspected she had a separate tab in her diary for Insults by Anusha. Both the women left the table abruptly in a huff, but timing it well for simultaneous departures. Shakespeare would have noted `Exeunt ladies'! Being a perceptive observer and blessed with innate astuteness in matters affecting the stomach, Raghav's father stuffed a couple of rotis into his mouth in hurry and vanished. Would you blame him? He was very skeptical about the source and timing of the next meal, under the circumstances! Raghav was left in blissful isolation, to ponder over the exact meaning of the dozen or so catastrophic words he had uttered, which had triggered this nuclear fallout.
Raghav could hear phone conversations from the other rooms, which was customary after every seismic event in the household. His mother was talking to his sister, who was a marginally more sophisticated version of the termagant his mother was. True to the strict grooming and development efforts at the hands of her mother, the sister was a very capable long-distance advisor the mother leaned on whenever she, the mother, wanted to hear she was in the right, even when what she had done was totally bizarre! And, Anusha was getting some expert guidance from her own mother, who as a rule did her best to keep things on the boil for as long as possible, for want of any other pastime. Raghav was hungry anyway, so he proceeded to finish his dinner; tactically the wrong thing to do when the wife was sulking without touching food, but then his mental state was not conducive to rationalization of the situation. He then embarked on a search for the essential `truth', in order to determine the next step. The next hour of cajoling, begging, arguing and gently persuading yielded nothing from either his wife or mother. Both were well entrenched in their positions that they did not and could not do any wrong whatsoever. And that was when Anusha categorically told him that he needed to choose between herself and his parents.
He was initially disconcerted but eventually reconciled to the idea of transferring his parents to a small service the next morning, hoping to head off any further unseemly confrontation with Anusha. During the next two days, he had been going to the service apartment in the morning and evening on his way to and from work, to meet his parents and mull over the long term arrangement. In this period, there was very minimal meaningful communication amongst the dramatis personae in this story. Everyone was getting fidgety and irritable - Anusha because she realised that running a home added significant demands on her time and a lot more pressure, but was too proud to admit that she missed the support system provided by her parents-in-law. She was even more perturbed in the context of her own feeling that she was pregnant and with the new arrival soon, she would require all the help she could get. Her mother-in-law was at a loss in the alien environment and had already started worrying about the consequences, financial and otherwise, of setting up a separate home. Raghav's father found himself in the odd situation where he did not have to agree with his wife all the time, because his wife was too despondent to even talk. For once, silence reigned in her vicinity. Raghav had a nightmare of a time, shuttling among the office and two homes and was keen to end this all chaos soonest. He was on his Bullet, riding while wallowing in an ocean of self-pity, when the accident occurred.
Raghav felt a surge of pain on his ankle as he raised himself from among the clutter of cycles and two wheelers he was forced to plunge into. He wailed and collapsed in a heap. It was another half an hour before humans were separated from vehicles and other debris and some medical help became available. When Raghav opened his eyes again, he saw a pretty, young woman examining his ankle, while someone else was cleaning his bruises and wounds with dettol. He was groggy due to pain and was in some la-la-land with eyes half-closed; he could not see the woman properly nor could he hear her exclaiming `Oh, is that you Raghav? Do you recognize me'? No, he could not; actually he would not have recognized himself in a mirror, in that fuzzy state of excruciating pain. He relapsed into his la-la-land. When he came to, he was on a hospital bed, with his ankle heavily strapped and in a sling, just like his life was at that point of time, he thought bitterly. That was when that pretty doctor came in and he immediately recognized her as his high school class-mate, Swathi. They used to be part of the same group of boys and girls who hung out together for more than 4 years at various homes, malls, games etc He had not seen her in 10 years and had no idea she was also in Bangalore. After some chit-chat, she asked `Who is Anusha? And where is your mother? You were deliriously urging them through the night to stop fighting'. Raghav did not require too much stimulus to share his woes with Swathi. At the end, she said `you cannot use band-aid on such a fractured relationship as the one between your wife and mother; it is a case for surgery and has to mend slowly; I had the same problem in my life and had to deal with it firmly last year. Anyway, what do you want to do'? Raghav's response was simple. `I just want to buy peace at home'. They talked about options and arrived at a conclusion, after which Raghav asked for a phone to call Anusha and his parents to inform them of the accident and his whereabouts.
Raghav was discharged the next day; he told Anusha curtly, as if he was not ready to brook any argument, he would spend the next week at the service apartment with his parents. He would require help to walk around and do his chores and she would not be able stay away from her work. Anusha was crestfallen but had no better suggestion to offer. Her pride militated against the idea of visiting the service apartment and meeting her mother-in-law; for the next week, she could not see her husband. Raghav petulantly made exaggerated shows of unhappiness about the state of affairs and ensured that both his mother and wife understood he was emotionally down in the dumps, thanks to their childish behaviour. He also reiterated time and again that the accident was entirely due to the pressure the two ladies put on him. By the end of the week, both Anusha and her mother-in-law were very remorseful, were malleable and ductile, ready to be hammered into final shape. They were in constant touch with their consultants to identify a dignified way out of the `guilt corner' they were both painted into. Dr.Swathi accentuated the feeling of guilt in the women by firmly indicating after an examination that Raghav may have to undergo surgery, even after which he may have a permanent limp - all concocted to help reach the desired climax. Raghav piled the misery on to his shattered mother and wife, by directly holding them responsible for the sadly limping life he was going to lead for ever. These bombardments had the desired effect. The erstwhile antagonists sat down, talked rapprochement, decided to sink all differences and live happily under one roof. They went together with this resolution to Raghav, who promptly shot it down, to their utter bewilderment. He grandly announced that he would not commit hara-kiri by restoring status-quo-ante and revisit Kurukshetra. He was bent upon finding a smaller apartment nearby to house his parents and they all could visit each other, whenever they wanted. Of course, there would be stressful additional financial burden on the family, but he said he was ready to pay any exorbitant price for buying long term peace at home.
Last heard, Raghav was fighting a two-pronged battle with his mother and wife, against the idea of reunion. Ironically, the ladies were pushing their case with new-found fervour, standing on a common platform. Raghav's father was unable to cope up with the demands for support from not only the two ladies, but also his son. He was reported to have developed a permanent crick in the neck and had ceased all movements of the head and neck. But would you believe it, he seemed ecstatic about this disability!!
Raghav was on his way from home to the service apartment where he had reluctantly parked his parents for the past two days, after his wife of 2 years, Anusha, served the oft-repeated `The choice is yours - between me and them' ultimatum, but with a finality that sounded, well, very final. His mother, had had ongoing run-ins with the daughter-in-law on various earth-shaking domestic issues ranging from the quantity of milk to be bought every day to the quality of the current domestic help who was brought in by Anusha as a replacement for the mother-in-law's candidate. Of course, the major bone of contention was the primary right of ownership of the domestic pet - that is, Raghav, himself. The fireworks, which commenced almost immediately after the wedding as the gentle rustle of the sparklers and flower pots had, over the months, obtained the explosive traits of bombs with immensely higher decibel effect. The women, all said and done, were both somewhat civilized and had so far refrained from going for leather at each other, with all limbs flailing.
While Anusha and her mother-in-law were the prime antagonists in the running battle, Raghav and his father fell foul of both sides because they repeatedly made the mistake of advocating to the ladies the desirability of somewhat rational behaviour and mutual accommodation. As things stood, Raghav's father had recently been silenced effectively by volleys of verbal onslaughts from his wife of 30 years and consigned to a dark corner in the house to practice the two head movements on which his future depended - one, up and down and the other side to side. Even with this limited repertoire in which to accomplish perfection over an extended period, Raghav's father got into trouble time and again, because he shook his head the wrong way in response to his wife's forceful demands for support on specific issues, accompanied by Kali-like glares. That was primarily because a minor disability prevented him from hearing properly any sound below a certain decibel level; and unfortunately, most of his wife's push for support came in the form of hissing noises, driven by her passion for sibilants. Chastened by recent punitive sanctions against him in the domestic arena, Raghav's father had decided on a brilliant, if somewhat suspect, strategy to minimize disasters with his wife. He would, in future, closely observe the head movements of that formidable woman as she menacingly urged him to stand by her and replicate the same movements with his own head. After all, he had searched through his memory bank for empirical evidence and concluded that there was no way she could be shaking her head up and down when she wanted him to say `no' and vice versa. For a man who invariably resembled a bleating goat, which was cruelly cornered and helpless, that was nothing short of a stroke of genius and he only hoped that his wife would not change her declamatory pattern without appropriate prior notice to him! The irony of his wife's demand that her son be more loyal to herself rather than fall into the `clutches' of her daughter-in-law, even as she herself had been relentlessly bludgeoning her own husband into submission for so many years, was not lost on the old man; but then, very early in wedded life he had embraced the tenet of Tennyson's The Light Brigade and passionately acknowledged that it was `not his to make reply or to reason why'. He chose to be a martyr-in-waiting!
Raghav, being a resonable man, did not want to take sides and got punished for 'being the veritable, indecisive mamma's boy' by one party and 'a disappointingly spineless son whom the new wife was twirling around her eye-lashes', by the other. He was reaching the end of the tether in terms of patience and tolerance when, two days back the family's own Hiroshima occurred. He should have known when he sat down for dinner that there was an eerie calm, the kind that prevails when the warriors were busy choosing their weapons before the impending breakout of war. Being a man of peace and prompted by a good day at work, he was in a jolly mood and was trying to make light of things. Very juvenile of him, one should agreee; but he had no clue that he was way out of his depth as he tried some verbal jousting with his father first. That passed without anyone in the audience party displaying the slightest enthusiasm. You see, he was the only one who did not have the advantage of knowing what had preceded dinner. He had returned from office, had a quick wash and walked into trouble at the table. There had been a major skirmish for over half an hour between the women, as Anusha opened multiple fronts and ended with the issue of `excessive use of butter, ghee etc' by the mother-in-law, after which the antagonists had retreated to their quarters for some rest and recuperation and also to replenish their ammunition, should there be resumption of the war. When they re-assembled at the table, Raghav mistook the calm for nothing worse than the usual, tense atmosphere and he proceeded to spar a bit with people. Then he turned his attention to his plate and picked up the roti domiciled there. All he said was `Aha, this one looks and feels like its major constituent is rubber; dont we have any butter or ghee to mix with the dough to make softer rotis'? Innocuous, you would agree - only because it came from Raghav without the benefit of a life-saving flashback. But he was aghast at the fusillade of words that erupted from the women simultaneously and engulfed him; all the more so, because only a minute back his attempts at humour passed without extracting as much as a grunt. Anusha thought the mother-in-law had complained to Raghav about the earlier fight and went on a rampage with the usual accusations about him being under his mother's thumb etc. When her protestations did not help, the mother-in-law went on an over-drive, raking up all the insults she had suffered during the past few months in such a perfect chronological order that others suspected she had a separate tab in her diary for Insults by Anusha. Both the women left the table abruptly in a huff, but timing it well for simultaneous departures. Shakespeare would have noted `Exeunt ladies'! Being a perceptive observer and blessed with innate astuteness in matters affecting the stomach, Raghav's father stuffed a couple of rotis into his mouth in hurry and vanished. Would you blame him? He was very skeptical about the source and timing of the next meal, under the circumstances! Raghav was left in blissful isolation, to ponder over the exact meaning of the dozen or so catastrophic words he had uttered, which had triggered this nuclear fallout.
Raghav could hear phone conversations from the other rooms, which was customary after every seismic event in the household. His mother was talking to his sister, who was a marginally more sophisticated version of the termagant his mother was. True to the strict grooming and development efforts at the hands of her mother, the sister was a very capable long-distance advisor the mother leaned on whenever she, the mother, wanted to hear she was in the right, even when what she had done was totally bizarre! And, Anusha was getting some expert guidance from her own mother, who as a rule did her best to keep things on the boil for as long as possible, for want of any other pastime. Raghav was hungry anyway, so he proceeded to finish his dinner; tactically the wrong thing to do when the wife was sulking without touching food, but then his mental state was not conducive to rationalization of the situation. He then embarked on a search for the essential `truth', in order to determine the next step. The next hour of cajoling, begging, arguing and gently persuading yielded nothing from either his wife or mother. Both were well entrenched in their positions that they did not and could not do any wrong whatsoever. And that was when Anusha categorically told him that he needed to choose between herself and his parents.
He was initially disconcerted but eventually reconciled to the idea of transferring his parents to a small service the next morning, hoping to head off any further unseemly confrontation with Anusha. During the next two days, he had been going to the service apartment in the morning and evening on his way to and from work, to meet his parents and mull over the long term arrangement. In this period, there was very minimal meaningful communication amongst the dramatis personae in this story. Everyone was getting fidgety and irritable - Anusha because she realised that running a home added significant demands on her time and a lot more pressure, but was too proud to admit that she missed the support system provided by her parents-in-law. She was even more perturbed in the context of her own feeling that she was pregnant and with the new arrival soon, she would require all the help she could get. Her mother-in-law was at a loss in the alien environment and had already started worrying about the consequences, financial and otherwise, of setting up a separate home. Raghav's father found himself in the odd situation where he did not have to agree with his wife all the time, because his wife was too despondent to even talk. For once, silence reigned in her vicinity. Raghav had a nightmare of a time, shuttling among the office and two homes and was keen to end this all chaos soonest. He was on his Bullet, riding while wallowing in an ocean of self-pity, when the accident occurred.
Raghav felt a surge of pain on his ankle as he raised himself from among the clutter of cycles and two wheelers he was forced to plunge into. He wailed and collapsed in a heap. It was another half an hour before humans were separated from vehicles and other debris and some medical help became available. When Raghav opened his eyes again, he saw a pretty, young woman examining his ankle, while someone else was cleaning his bruises and wounds with dettol. He was groggy due to pain and was in some la-la-land with eyes half-closed; he could not see the woman properly nor could he hear her exclaiming `Oh, is that you Raghav? Do you recognize me'? No, he could not; actually he would not have recognized himself in a mirror, in that fuzzy state of excruciating pain. He relapsed into his la-la-land. When he came to, he was on a hospital bed, with his ankle heavily strapped and in a sling, just like his life was at that point of time, he thought bitterly. That was when that pretty doctor came in and he immediately recognized her as his high school class-mate, Swathi. They used to be part of the same group of boys and girls who hung out together for more than 4 years at various homes, malls, games etc He had not seen her in 10 years and had no idea she was also in Bangalore. After some chit-chat, she asked `Who is Anusha? And where is your mother? You were deliriously urging them through the night to stop fighting'. Raghav did not require too much stimulus to share his woes with Swathi. At the end, she said `you cannot use band-aid on such a fractured relationship as the one between your wife and mother; it is a case for surgery and has to mend slowly; I had the same problem in my life and had to deal with it firmly last year. Anyway, what do you want to do'? Raghav's response was simple. `I just want to buy peace at home'. They talked about options and arrived at a conclusion, after which Raghav asked for a phone to call Anusha and his parents to inform them of the accident and his whereabouts.
Raghav was discharged the next day; he told Anusha curtly, as if he was not ready to brook any argument, he would spend the next week at the service apartment with his parents. He would require help to walk around and do his chores and she would not be able stay away from her work. Anusha was crestfallen but had no better suggestion to offer. Her pride militated against the idea of visiting the service apartment and meeting her mother-in-law; for the next week, she could not see her husband. Raghav petulantly made exaggerated shows of unhappiness about the state of affairs and ensured that both his mother and wife understood he was emotionally down in the dumps, thanks to their childish behaviour. He also reiterated time and again that the accident was entirely due to the pressure the two ladies put on him. By the end of the week, both Anusha and her mother-in-law were very remorseful, were malleable and ductile, ready to be hammered into final shape. They were in constant touch with their consultants to identify a dignified way out of the `guilt corner' they were both painted into. Dr.Swathi accentuated the feeling of guilt in the women by firmly indicating after an examination that Raghav may have to undergo surgery, even after which he may have a permanent limp - all concocted to help reach the desired climax. Raghav piled the misery on to his shattered mother and wife, by directly holding them responsible for the sadly limping life he was going to lead for ever. These bombardments had the desired effect. The erstwhile antagonists sat down, talked rapprochement, decided to sink all differences and live happily under one roof. They went together with this resolution to Raghav, who promptly shot it down, to their utter bewilderment. He grandly announced that he would not commit hara-kiri by restoring status-quo-ante and revisit Kurukshetra. He was bent upon finding a smaller apartment nearby to house his parents and they all could visit each other, whenever they wanted. Of course, there would be stressful additional financial burden on the family, but he said he was ready to pay any exorbitant price for buying long term peace at home.
Last heard, Raghav was fighting a two-pronged battle with his mother and wife, against the idea of reunion. Ironically, the ladies were pushing their case with new-found fervour, standing on a common platform. Raghav's father was unable to cope up with the demands for support from not only the two ladies, but also his son. He was reported to have developed a permanent crick in the neck and had ceased all movements of the head and neck. But would you believe it, he seemed ecstatic about this disability!!
