For a man, I, Abhilash, got this Women’s Day celebration off to a relatively good start when I wished my wife, Jaya and daughter, Sagarika a.k.a Sagu a ‘Happy Women’s Day’ at 12:47 am. As I was musing guiltily about having wished them 47 minutes too late, Jaya seemed extremely pleased that I had wished with only 47 minutes into the day, probably a personal best for me. Sagarika was happily wishing all her toys, mindless that some of them were male and others were not even human. Some did not even represent living things.
At the breakfast table, I wished my mother and Sagu’s nanny and proposed ordering lunch to celebrate. Everyone enthusiastically agreed, even though Jaya worried about the expense, after just having paid for our son Arihant a.k.a Ari’s school uniform for next year. She smartly tried to pass on the burden with a,
“Abhi’s going to treat us women.”
Struggling writers like me can’t really afford to do that. So, I replied equally smartly,
“Sure, with my wife’s money.”
This elicited hearty laughter from Jaya. If only everyone found me this funny, I might have been a rich comedy writer by now, treating all women who cared for it to a Women’s Day lunch.
I got ready hurriedly, so we could start ordering well before lunch time and marched into Jaya’s office, which is the day job of our bedroom, got my hands on her mobile and handing it to her, as she stood in front of the mirror, finishing combing her hair, asked,
“Shall we order?”
“What do you want to order?”
“I don’t know. It’s Women’s Day. You are the woman. What do you want to order?”
“Anything other than Chinese. I don’t like Chinese,” she said, accepting her mobile.
“Sure.”
She sat at the table and after a few minutes, she handed me the phone to add items I wanted, as I waited on the bed. She had added noodles, soup and dumpling. My love for Chinese cuisine blinded me at that time to her having just said she would order anything but Chinese and having ended up ordering Chinese, my favourite. I happily added a different soup, chicken lollipop, fried rice, chop suey and was feeling the stirrings of an ordering frenzy coming on, when I roused myself with the guilt of ordering more items than the woman on Women’s Day. I removed the soup from the cart, even though my choice of soup promised to be much better than hers. Two soups would also have been too much soup. The cost of her items was still lesser than mine. So, I removed the chop suey. I don’t have high expectations from restaurant chop suey, anyway. I ordered soda from a different app, so I could add some juice concentrate to it and create home-made soft drinks.
The last time I had regular soft drinks, I had just sat down for lunch after having dressed up a wound using an antiseptic solution, among other things. As I had sipped my soft drink, I had got a whiff of the same smell I had got when I had applied a little bit of the antiseptic solution to a cotton ball, to clean the wound. I smelled just my hand, to make sure it was indeed the soft drink that smelled and not my hand. I had finished the soft drink, trying my best to ignore the smell. I remember thinking that there may be something to people claiming that pesticides were added to soft drinks. I didn’t feel like ordering soft drinks again.
The soda arrived and so did the meal. I was unpacking the items, when my Mom asked,
“Are all items chicken?”
She was hinting that she didn’t eat meat today, a Tuesday. I didn’t know what else to say, but,
“Yes.”
Seeing that I didn’t seem to be getting it, she clarified,
“I don’t eat meat today.”
I didn’t know what else to do but nod sombrely. It seemed too late to fix things now and even if we had ordered veg items, what kind of a celebration would it be, for someone who was normally a meat eater, to eat veg food?
I set the table and called out to Ari to fetch Jaya for lunch. He called her and came down and he, my mom and I started eating, with mom making do with the vegetarian items left over from breakfast, coupled with some things she had cooked on the off chance that we didn’t order veg items. She likes to be on the safer side when it comes to having something for her to eat. Jaya came down with Sagu and the nanny and strapped Sagu into her high chair and gave her a dumpling, which she started eating with her usual relish. As Ari enjoyed the noodles and I the chicken lollipop, Jaya made to serve herself, when I jokingly complained to her on mom’s behalf that she had not ordered any vegetarian items for her, when it was clearly something both of us had missed. Jaya offered to order some veg items, which reminded her: even she didn’t eat meat on Tuesdays and neither did the nanny. It was ironical that the only people left celebrating were either too young or the wrong gender to be women and the only people not celebrating Women’s Day were the women.
