Home Alone

The other day Bunny dropped a bombshell by saying she was leaving me. Not permanently; only for five days. To go to Pune where she'd been invited to attend a painting exhibition and write about them. Bunny's announcement precipitated a major domestic crisis: namely, what to do with me during her absence.

Over the years, i've got used to Bunny running not just house (see the bills are paid, the laundry done, the bedsheets changed) but also me. It’s Bunny who makes sure that i’m fed; that the shirt i’ve put on matches the trousers and vice versa; that my reading glasses are found for me each time i misplace them, which on an average is half-a-dozen times a day.

But all this is mere nuts-and-bolts, mechanical stuff which any halfway competent domestic help could replicate. What Bunny really does, and what no one else can, is to figure out what i’m thinking before i actually think it. The result of course is that, this great onus having been taken off me, i’ve let her do my thinking for me before i’ve thunk it for myself. What sort of thinking? Well, like thinking for me what book i want to read and where it is (and my reading glasses with it too, mind). And thinking for me what DVD movie i want to see, or music i want to hear, or social get-together i want to go to. Bunny does the cogito, for my ergo sum.

Take the last time she left town without me for a few days. I picked up a book, a murder mystery, to read (after an hour's search having found my reading glasses unaccountably in the fridge where they’d got to by some mysterious mode of propulsion peculiar to reading glasses) only to discover i couldn’t for the life of me decide whether i’d already read it or not, so i turned to the last page to see if that offered a clue, where i not only found out that i hadn’t in fact read it but also found out who the murderer was, so there was now no point in reading it anyway. To heck with it. I’d watch a movie on the DVD player instead.

So i punched the buttons on the remote control, and punched them some more, a regular Mohammad Ali of the digital world, but the bloody thing wouldn’t come on, and i began to get hot and cold flushes, and wondered if it was viral flu or incipient male menopause, only to learn much later (on Bunny’s return) that the remote i'd been punching, Ali-like, was the remote not for the DVD but for the AC. Sod it, i said, and went to a dinner i'd been invited to, to find out that the dinner had been yesterday and i was too late for today’s breakfast.

So you see why i get into a pother when Bunny notifies her impending absence. The only one more frazzled by Bunny's leaving is Brindle, around whose furry paw the whole household revolves. Brindle woofs a dismayed 'Woof!' and thumps her tail agitatedly. She learnt that trick the last time Bunny was away.

Bunny had taught me how to take Brindle’s favourite soul food of chicken bones out of the freezer, thaw them in the micro (one of the few gadgets in the house that i know how to operate) and put them in Brindle's feeding bowl. OK, so maybe i mistimed the micro a bit. And the chicken got charred somewhat. So that it looked like that Indo-US reprocessed fuel that’s got everyone in tizz. Chicken a la Strontium 90. That's when Brindle started thumping her tail. It took me a while to make out it was Morse, addressed to Bunny, wherever she was.

And it went SOS, SOS, SOS... So when Brindle heard that Bunny was off again, the tail began to go like a telegraph operator Thump — Thumpthumpthump. In the event, Bunny cancelled her trip, to all-round relief. Brindle’s tail is thumping again. But this time it’s not going SOS. It’s going Thank God!

And if i had a tail, i’d like to thump as well