“Have you found the keys yet?” the mouth-piece of the phone could well be the microphone of an unconvincingly loud yet confident politician when the husband questioned the wife about the missing keys.
“No, I have searched the entire house....from the drawers of the old-dressing table to the children’s cupboard to the new shelf in the drawing room and even behind each and every book in Baba’s study. God knows where it is!”
“I am tired you know”, the wife replied leaving the listener to assume its frame of reference.
“Don’t worry. It will be alright.” The husband wittedly responded with a universal answer without a hint of objectivity, smoothly ignoring the real issue underneath.
The husband had been out for an official tour since the keys had last gone missing. He had completely sensed what his question would turn to.
The problem of everything being wrong is sometimes easier to solve than the problem of little somethings that are not right. The little something that he was trying to cope up with a job which was the slow poison given by life’s moribund bus driving through the bumpiest road to a dreaded destination and you can’t get off the bus because you can’t muster up the courage to tell the conductor to stop, with every fellow passenger doubting your sanity with loudly questioning stares as to why would you get off the easiest way to travel on a road always taken.
The little something that his wife was struggling with the melancholy of daily home chores which she never envisaged doing while proving her mettle at the same business administration course as her husband but never got the opportunity to practice giving in to make everyone’s life around her perfect while mildly ignoring the little imperfections in her own life. Only as drops make an ocean these little imperfections had filled the cauldron of her bearing power to the brim.
The little something that as much belittled the couple secretly felt by their own little somethings, they somehow felt relieved and resolved when admiring at the shelf in the drawing room containing their children’s trophies and felt ecstatic in pretending to be humble when the forced-upon and parent-contrived-effort success of their teenagers became the topic of discussion at each social gathering.
The little something that there was nothing grand in the way the grand-father of the family was treated. His inability to hear was often misjudged as his inability to perceive, to perceive that no one around cared how much he missed sharing his thoughts, how much he missed being able to sit in a room full of people where his presence if not his existence little mattered, how much he missed that someone would give an ear to the advices he could give based upon the experiences of his simple life.....how much he missed being missed when he spent the entire day in his room hoping that someone would come enquire about the fever he tried so hard at faking.
The keys were THE KEYS to the most important closet of the house. The closet which contained something so important that no one actually remembered what it contained.
