Had Phulwanti, our maid, not taken leave, I would never have known that I am a kleptomaniac! Yes, I do look so innocent, but kleptomaniacs don’t necessarily have to look like thugs, do they? The shameful discovery that I am a klepto came about with events that started on Monday morning. When the missus opened my wardrobe, she saw three square pieces of black cloth lurking among the handkerchiefs. She let out a scream and dropped the two shirts she was about to place inside. I rushed from the study and found her standing transfixed, mutely pointing to the evil black patches.
“Where did these come from?”she asked in a frightened whisper. I looked at the black pieces of cloth. Each measured about four inches by four inches, with a neatly stitched border. They looked quite harmless to me, but the little woman was alarmed. “Where did these come from?”she repeated. I did not have the foggiest and said so. The missus feared that some voodoo skulduggery was afoot—an effort by my enemies to put a hex on me. I proudly declared that I had no enemies, but that cut no ice. She grabbed the three bits of black and warned me not to move. She then did some mumbo-jumbo around my head with a worn-out slipper and a broom. I ridiculed her belief in all this evil eye stuff, but she said, “Shush”, and I had to shush.
In the afternoon, she called a pandit to perform something called a maha mrityunjay jaap and also a shaman to do more jhaad phoonk. I was astonished when I heard what they would charge for their services, but the little woman had made up her mind. “We can’t be too careful in such matters, can we? Is money more important than our wellbeing?”
The pandit soon started his chanting and the witchdoctor made elaborate preparations. “Do you have a chicken that I could slaughter?”he asked. That charlatan claimed that sprinkling the blood of a freshly slaughtered chicken around the house acted like a wide spectrum antibiotic against evil. Now my wife is a Gandhian, a pacifist and a true believer in nonviolence (except of course when it comes to lizards). But so great is her dread of black magic that she almost acquiesced to the bizarre proposal. I, however, stubbornly opposed the idea till the rogue conceded that sacrificing a pumpkin instead was just as effective.
“But you know, it somehow lacks the drama; the colour; the theatre quotient!”he said lamely.
Had my wife not been so terrified of those pieces of black cloth, I would have shown that rascal what real drama and theatre quotient could be. I would have proved that the blood dripping from the nose of a crook was equally effective in checkmating the occult.
The whole night, the two exorcists continued their exertions to rid my wardrobe of evil spirits and any ghoulish spillover to the shoe rack. While the pandit mumbled complicated mantras, the jhaad phoonk guy danced around a large pumpkin cut into two. He burnt foul-smelling resins and merrily scattered cow dung in every room.
On Tuesday morning, Phulwanti walked in, all sweetness and light. In her Bengali accented Hindi, she demanded to know why the two ‘adbhut manush’were spreading dirt in ‘her’clean house. My wife explained excitedly that she had unmasked the sinister plans of my enemies just in time and stymied all conspiracies with the jaap and mumbo jumbo. As proof positive, she held up exhibit numbers one, two and three—the three black serviettes.
“But sahib only brought these,”declared Phulwanti. “They were in sahib’s trouser pockets, so I washed and ironed them along with the other clothes and put them in his wardrobe.”
That surprised the little woman, and I was stumped. Then I remembered! On Saturday, my wife and I had attended the gala opening of a new avant-garde restaurant. Black was the theme of the reception, with the walls, curtains and even the furniture being painted black. The tapas were served on black platters, with those small black serviettes.
“I must have inadvertently put those in my pocket,”I said.
Phulwanti chimed in, “Yes sahib, and not for the first time. Whenever you attend a party, the next day I find a napkin or two in the pockets of your trousers when I put them in the wash. After ironing, I always put such napkins in the linen drawer. These black serviettes were small, and they fitted better with your kerchiefs.”
An unfortunate fallout of this sordid affair has been my wife’s declaration that henceforth she will make me empty my pockets before we leave for home after any party. She has also had to promise a handsome bonus to Phulwanti at Diwali for keeping quiet about my being a klepto—a klepto who filches napkins at parties.
K.C. Verma is former chief of R&AW. kcverma345@gmail.com