Day 1: No News Day
This is Delhi, the city to do and act, not Calcutta where a man could spend a whole day at the culvert with the fellas and insist that he spent the day in the useful pursuit of honing his intellect. I decided to join the city’s aspiration for good health and happiness with an invigorating walk in the park early in the morning. I dragged my feet back home, uninspired by fellow walkers, puffing hard to knock off flab and absently picked the fold of stacked newspapers at the gate. "You can’t do that," yelled the spouse, just in time, before grabbing the lot and leaving for the loo. Fine, news on Shankaracharya could wait, the Palestinians would not get back their land in a day and Rohit Bal’s party-hopping would appear next week too.
Meditation did not work for me. Retail therapy seemed a better option to ward off inactivity and boredom. A new Sony showroom beckoned at the high street. A crowd had gathered outside the shop window to watch a match on a giant TV. I am not Sehwag’s Ma and I hurried past it. I combed malls buying stuff I didn’t need. I returned home, listless and plagued with nagging thoughts. Could I afford a sneaky peep into the internet? I had a couple of deadlines to meet and some work-related mails coming in. I quashed the urge to check, but doubts lingered. I worried about calls regarding work and was concerned whether my father would keep well and mother could cope. (He didn’t—Outlook, you owe me). Would I miss phone calls from friends and family back home? There is also the problem of a personal quirk: I get edgy and jump when the phone rings. I have to rush to pick it up by the third ring. I have promised to analyse this someday. But for now there is only ennui and a wandering mind for company.
Supper was war. The TV was on, louder than usual and I had to rush inside and keep out the volume. The phone rang, it wasn’t mine, but spouse was talking animatedly about "the news". What? Who is it? I mouthed, dancing around. He left the room to keep me out of the conversation. Sleeping with the enemy ought to be easier than sleeping without TV.
Day 2: The Shining
Sundays, the day of stacks of newspapers and endless TV time, gave me cold turkey. My ears cocked to the rustle of newspapers being read in the other room and I found it pop up on the shelf in the loo, by the bedside, under a pillow, leftovers from a vociferous news reader at home. I empathised with Jack Nicholson’s claustrophobic mania in Shining.
I tried my hand at cooking. TV would have been a better teacher, I sighed, flipping over No Fuss Cooking before steaming woks. No satisfaction there, for I realised that I am most happy being a hack. It was just the time for the phone to ring. It was a shrill tinny ring. I had itched during the long wait, as the phone rang, and found myself getting edgy and then panicky, until the others dragged themselves in slow motion to attend it. The next ring on my mobile was worse. It was an unidentified number.It could have been an innocuous sales call asking, "Need an insurance policy with a microwave oven free, madam ji?", yet I didn’t like the suspense of a missed call.
I left home for an endless ritual of primping at a salon to keep myself in a stupor of inactivity. Three hours of goo on my face, cream on my toes and oil on my scalp, I was tired of the many hands tugging at me. Besides, I was overcome with the urgent need to phone to find if the home front was calm with my restless junior. Extra dribbles of oil on my head and cream up my ankles did not calm me down and I hurried back home, joyless at sensory massages.
Day 3: If Tomorrow Comes
Monday morning chores never seemed so sweet. I threw myself into packing suitcases for the forthcoming travel, smiled and lingered over all the bank clerks, checked for detergent prices like a diligent homemaker in more than three shops before buying them, stretching time and hanging around to sniff at all the blooms at the florist’s. It wasn’t until late afternoon that the urge to work the phones and dial the internet came on. The three-day stack of newspapers lay in wait, but tomorrow seemed such a long way off and yesterday’s news are like leftover idlis—stale. I dug weeds in my patch and paced, through late evening in my room, while the TV blared. Thankfully, the phone had been off the hook periodically to keep my nerves calm.
Postscript
The barometer for my happiness was skewed. I am not sure I felt unhappy being incommunicado. It was irritable, discomfiting and inconvenient. I scanned the newspapers to find out about a calamitous goof-up over a Bhopal news report and more skeletons from Kanchi math’s cupboards, bomb-lobbing continued in Gaza and sure enough, Rohit Bal had posed for photos at a do. Friends worried why I didn’t receive calls and one certified me as ill-mannered since I didn’t return calls. My inbox was choked with spam and messages breaking suspense on a family wedding gossip and censure from work over dragging deadlines and a pal announced a new arrival in his home—a pup named Hermit.
The phone rings. I jump to pick it up by the second ring. It’s mother. I feel like a yellow smiley.
