Wife, Husband and Contradictions!

There are those male chauvinistic husbands who relentlessly exploit their bread-winner status, even in this day and age and imperiously order their wives around to perform menial chores for them.  Such husbands do not hesitate to use their anger as an instrument from time to time or all the time to browbeat the wives even in public, completely ignoring the embarrassment their childish behaviour causes all around.  Then there are wives who masquerade as women but are actually cast in the same mould as the aforesaid husbands or worse.  They do not even pretend to mask the hardness of their personality for the sake of appearances.  There are those wives, more subtle in their nuanced approach, who can exercise enormous control over every breath and pulse of their husbands, without so much as displaying any effort.  This they do with a nod here, a nudge there, an arched eye-brow (I am sure the husband is trained to interpret based on which eye-brow it is) or a stare that goes through the offender like a spear through fish.  No one except the skilled practitioner may even notice these fine signals; because he has undergone the rigours over the years to look for, spot and respond to these patented signals faithfully.  He knows the price of ignoring the silent edicts (this happens when the husband is dumb enough to get sozzled unintentionally) and recoils from the thought of going through with the consequences.  This is not about any of these types.  This is about all those couples who are normal folks who have their quirks and preferences, who do not think of consistency or predictability as virtues, who tend to spring surprises on each other and create situations for squabbles, when the natural flow in that stream is stemmed due to seasonal warmth and good sense.  But there should be no denying that a major contributor to this entire process is an inherent mismatch in likes and dislikes.

There is this husband, who will remain unidentified for security reasons (his, obviously), who was confronted by the wife one evening with a couple of highly priced tickets for a Shakespearean play and a rather brusque order to get dressed and march.  This chap is a bit weird in this respect because he defies known logic and he says does not like `watching' plays.  He would rather read them.  This, despite the fact that he was a student of English Literature (he insists it is precisely because of that), which minor qualification almost seems to load him with the unenviable responsibility to see every play visiting town.  The inevitable argument ensued, with the lady's taunt as to how anyone in his right senses could prefer to 'read' a play!  But her coaxing skills yet again won over the demurring husband (bad mistake!), who reluctantly was led by the nose.  In the theatre, the man made such a nuisance of himself to the lady and all the other play-watchers, whining about the seating arrangement and the poor lighting, which prevented him from seeing the emotions expressed on the faces of the artists; about the terrible audio system, which had the bass very high and so on.   Back home after a few hours, the wife launched into a tirade and reduced the chap to jelly, but he managed the final word edgeways - `that is why I prefer to read  plays; because the lighting, the audio and the distance from the stage do not matter!'  That was happily the last play they went together to.

Connoisseurs of travel would agree with this author that while it is easier to plan a long trip to a place farther away, the shorter ones (upto 350 kms, about 6 hours by road/train or 1 hour by flight) are always dicey.  Such short trips come upon you suddenly, almost unannounced when you are least prepared to cope with them, because of  this rather unsubstantiated belief that shorter trips are easier to plan and execute.  And there is this lady who revels in surprising her husband with short-fused requests for frequent short trips.  Obviously the chap goes first into a flutter and then a tizzy, trying to look for non-existent tickets, while the lady nonchalantly pirouettes and shimmers away, humming with satisfaction.  The husband has his reasons for feeling overwhelmed with frustration - the wife does not like travelling by car, which would have been the easiest and most logical alternative, given the short notice.  He suspects this is so because then he will not have to do any wasteful searching for tickets - which, the wife probably thinks is an undeservedly easy way out.  So, after spending the punishment period looking at trains, flights and whatever other means of transport, the husband formally arrives at the anticipated conclusion - that tickets are not available for trains and flight tickets are prohibitively expensive.  When these facts are communicated to the wife with the obvious remaining option of travel by car staring at her, she chooses to ask him if overnight bus service is available!!  For god's sake, why would somebody refuse the comfort of own car with your known exceptionally skilled and very well known driver and choose to travel in an overnight bus on the same road, knowing the latter's tendency end up in all sorts of crevices?   But experience has taught the husband not to seek logic in this situation, but to look for an overnight bus!!

What is good for the goose is never good for the gander between husbands and wives and any such assumption on the part of the husband will definitely be detrimental to his mental and, sometimes, physical well-being.  This middle aged man the author knows, is a hard-hitting snorer ( would have won any competition hands down, if based on consistently high decibel levels for longer periods without interruption) and is fully aware of his unique strength in this area.  So, he plots his sleeping (and snoring) time such that he commences after his wife is fast asleep.  Just so that she is not awake when his concert of guttural symphony gets under way.  Very honourable of him, I would think, to be charitable to the lady and to be applauded unstintingly.  But on the odd night when he hits the bed early and enters the blissful stage wherein `he that sleeps feels not the tooth-ache' (that state must be pretty close to being moribund?) as the bard goes, firing on all cylinders with his snore, his otherwise considerate behaviour does not help him.  The wife just cannot muffle the roar that assaults her in continuous waves and cannot help waking the thundering machine up and evict him from the room till she herself sleeps.  When the poor chap returns stealthily to take his rightful place in bed, what is the scene??  The female version of the same roaring snore, admittedly somewhat weaker (he triumphantly claims) than his fills the room.  But he knows that if he protests he would have to listen to a discourse for twenty minutes on the difference between good snoring and bad snoring (pretty much like the good and bad Taliban!).  He knows there is no scope for even a marginal victory there, so he maintains the dignified silence of a tolerant man!

Ever since the Fitbit mania has taken hold, another area of serious contradiction has opened up between some younger couples.  Earlier, during daily walks, if the sprightly wife pleaded for a ten minute extension of the walk to make up for some shortfall somewhere - real or imagined, the rather withered husband flatly refused, citing the distance already covered.  Now, the same husband looks at the Fitbit counter at the end of the walk and demands that they go for another 367 steps to meet his quota for the day.  It is a different matter that when done, he is that far away from home and has to retrace all those steps!!  Even if the daily walk is along the same roads within a gated community (and therefore the distance walked is public knowledge), the oracle inside Fitbit has to speak before the couples can retire with that smug satisfaction.  Hail, Fitbit!

Let us wind up with this story of a wife who makes fun of the husband for visiting the same restaurant for the past 25 years to have his idli-vada-pongal fix, with what he holds to be the best sambar in the world.  His take that the high quality of food in that restaurant has been unfalteringly maintained all through the years is always swatted aside by the wife.  He continues to be perpetually ribbed on this point, despite what seems to be reasonably sound justification.  When this couple visits another city, the wife forcibly drags the husband along some 30 kms, to a specific joint serving what she considers the best gol-gappa/paani-poori anywhere.  No quarters given for any argument or for innocuous teasing.

Now, this scribe knows what the  fall-out of this post will be.  Some friends and their wives are going to bristle and promptly call my dear wife (after reading this, assuming they do) and seek clarification on the identities of the couples written about.  There may even be subtle attempts to accuse this author of unauthorised disclosures and insinuate that the wife in some anecdotes is his own, just to introduce some tension in an otherwise blissfully happy family!!  All I ask is `Would I dare'?  She knows!!  For my part, let me only say that all the persons mentioned in this post are real and any resemblance my astute and knowledgeable readers may see to anyone they know, is probably true.