It is a cloudy morning. Really lazy weather – when you wake up from sleep, get your cup of tea/coffee, stretch out on your couch and read your newspaper. It is a morning when you do not think of work. And to top it, it is a Saturday morning. But the poor (financially and otherwise) resident in the poor (nothing financial about it!) hospital doesn’t have the Saturday off. So the wife decides she doesn’t want to work and being entitled to a compensatory off she really has no troubles. Afterall she earned it by working on the last public holiday that people enjoyed. So what does the poor (again f&o) husband do? Change into his bright livery, pack his bag and drag himself to work and sick people while the wife sits back unhappily because she no longer has company on this beautiful morning and no one to nag?
But what does our eternally conflicted and perennially confused hero actually do? He calls his boss, comes up with some classic excuse, chucks his bag into the dark recesses of the cupboard his wife’s been nagging him to clean and puts his feet up to enjoy the weather and the undescribable pleasure of time stolen from work when he realises that his wife has that look on her face! Now for the benefit of the unmarried or the uninitiated or that non-existent brand of creatures who have never experienced ‘that look’ from the wife let us digress and attempt to do what no man has ever done, to boldly go where no man has ever gone before, or atleast returned back sane after going there. Lets go into the psyche of the woman, lets talk about ‘that look.’ What we are talking about here is a sudden change in the body language of a woman. You can never pinpoint what/where this change is. Is it the eyes? Do they have a special effervescence in them all of a sudden? Or is it the colour in her face which suddenly seems brighter? Or is it just the spring in her step and all else that she may be doing? Whatever it is, it is something that is perceptibly there and can be felt by even the most amateur of men. So she seems happy! Then wherein lies the problem? It lies at the cause of this ‘look’(or was it that look?) because not even the most experienced of men can honestly claim to know what that cause might be? Initially when the woman is a new concept to the boy-man this look causes him the greatest excitement. It sends a surge of pure joy through his sinews to see his woman in a state that he in his inexperience can attribute only to pleasure. He tries to find the cause for it and rejoices in its discovery. He wishes for this state to last forever, for this joy to be all pervading so much so that he believes that he may have found something that can put an end to all misery in this world. Some may even send their nominations for the nobel prize (esp. considering the way its handed out on a platter these days). And once our nobel hero has found this cause, which on most occasions is some of kind of longing on the behalf of his fair maiden, he sets out on a voyage to get it for her. The dangers that this enterprise may be fraught with he doesn’t care for, the price(again f&o) he may have to pay for it is inconsequential, all that matters is ‘that look’ in his lady’s eye. It is the same look that engulfed Paris, that set sail to a thousand ships and that led to the ultimate destruction of Troy. But in that carnage it gave fame to many – to Helen, to Achilles and to Homer.
But with time everything will rot! [There are the ones who will argue that with time wine matures but eventually what it actually does is rotting or fermenting or whatever (potato/potaato)]. The boy-man who has rotted/matured into the man now is well versed with this look. He has learnt, with the slightest of glances, to recognise it and his instincts have taught him to keep his eyes off it. But it is ‘that look’! The one that has changed the course of history so many times that history itself has lost count. It is ‘that look’ which cannot be ignored, one that should not (actually cannot) be named. So despite the little sane man in his head crying danger and ringing all kinds of bells he eventually looks and he does not stop at that. He enquires! All the time the alarm bells ringing louder! And although the foolhardiness of his once-upon-a-time nobel aspirations are by now clear to him he still finds the cause, all the while knowing that the consequences are more likely than not, to be troublesome. And whence the cause is found, still most likely a longing from the now not-as-fair maiden, he sets out on a voyage to get it for her. The dangers that this enterprise may be fraught with he now knows but still doesn’t care for, the price(again f&o) he may have to pay for it is no longer inconsequential but still all that matters is ‘that look’ in his lady’s eye. Because with time he has now realized that ‘that look’ too rots. And nothing speeds up the rot like inaction on the part of our gallant knight! What this by now famous look rots into is something best left for a later date. For now just trust our hero’s setting out on his tedious enterprise despite the clanging of his instinctual alarm bells as enough proof of its horror.
