The Man I Live With :Act 4
Personal Essay
So the vegetable on the menu today is ‘gavaar’, cluster beans. I am not very fond of it and can stand the sight of it only in an ‘avial’, which is Malayali festival food. But the other two people in my house like it for some inexplicable reason.
I have been trying to inveigle the male section of our domestic set- up to cut them up for me, and he has steadfastly looked the other way, ably assisted in this ostrich-attitude by his mother, who remarked darkly, sotto voce, that ‘then she will also ask you to cook it.’
Therefore, today I clumped around like a gathering storm cloud, getting darker every minute, while the rest of the household walked on eggshells around me. I piled the sink high with unwashed vessels and then set about cutting the vegetable. The gentleman gingerly enters the kitchen: I can see by his face that he has armed himself with a joke. Or two. I hunch my back and turn away pointedly.
The moment he begins, I tell him that I need to wear my knee-compression socks and walk out. Which was not a pretense at all: thirty years of standing up and teaching and supervising three-hour-long written exams, have given me a lifelong case of varicose veins in both my knees. Standing for too long now hurts me.
By the time I returned, he had taken over knife and cutting board, and had gathered together half the beans in one great fist and started cutting them. His mother and I squeaked in dismay. ‘You have to remove the ends,” we caroled, in unison. “Why?” he asked, fixing a stern eye on both of us. “If we can eat the beans, what is wrong with the ends?” We were rendered speechless.
He had forgotten the joke in the meantime. With savage single-mindedness, he cut and chopped and mauled the beans and finished murdering them in ten minutes. Every one of the pieces was a different size. We stared at the pieces and at him in mute horror. Triumphantly he swaggered out. It was not often he could shut up mother and wife at the same time.
Sometime later, I had to tell him something, so I went back to the living room, knife in hand. Quick as thought, he whipped out his large handkerchief and covered his face with it, leaving only his eyes visible.
“What’s wrong?”, my mother-in-law asked, mystified. She usually walked around, keeping an eye on us. You never know what we could get up to if we were left alone.
“I am covering my face so she can’t see me. She has a knife in her hand,” he said deadly earnest.
I haven’t stopped giggling since then.
