Some chicken! Some neck!

Forget about Donald ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy’ Trump and Bibi Netanyahu threatening Iran with dire consequences and Iran returning the compliment with interest. Forget about Trump escaping yet another assassination attempt. Some cynics are going, ‘Third time lucky, maybe.’ Cruel, cruel. Then again, forget about Trump barefacedly denying to the CBS ’60 minutes’ channel that he is not a rapist, ditto paedophile! Forget about Iran threatening the entire Gulf kingdom with mayhem if they keep supporting the satanic duopolistic powers, meaning the United States and Israel. Europe does not count and the Russia / Ukraine conflict has been put firmly on the back burner in terms of occupying our mind space. Forget about China, at your own peril. Forget about naval blockades in the Strait of Hormuz. Forget about Pakistan doing its cravenly obsequious bit with an eye on the main chance. Forget about India not doing very much about anything at the moment – the state elections take precedence over everything else. All else can be loftily ignored. Or benignly neglected. We have lived with this scenario for well over a couple of months and frankly, it is beginning to pall. It is entirely possible that after the local assembly polls, which is engulfing the nation, the central government will wake up once more, bloody but unbowed, to the looming oil and gas crisis and turn its gaze towards the Middle East and further afield, to the US of A.

In short, forget about international war games and geo politics. I am doing a 180-degree turn. I have my hooks into domestic violence, by which I do not mean macro issues affecting Bharat that is India, but micro matters that take place in our homes. Not in mine specifically, but in quite a few homes. My thoughts, at the moment, are with two male members of a family living far apart in Hyderabad and Vadodara, who expressed extreme unhappiness with their respective wives’ culinary offerings and paid the ultimate price. I know what you are thinking, dear reader. The aggrieved husbands, returning home after a hard day’s toil, express their dissatisfaction at the menu by hurling their dinner plates at their ducking wives, food spatters their kitchen walls, the wife wails and they trot off to some eatery nearby to sate their appetites. You could not be more in error.

In a macabre turn up for the books, here is what actually happened and I kid you not, as The Times of India is my witness. The husband in Hyderabad threw a petulant fit because his wife did not prepare his favourite chicken curry for her lord and master. One’s heart goes out to the man. He loves his chicken curry, was dreaming of tucking into it on his way home. Being denied the same on his arrival and sitting down to dinner, and finding his plate replete with cabbage and greens, not to mention two dry rotis, he expressed his disgust in no uncertain manner. Yuck, about sums up his feelings. Vegetarians will never understand this aversion non-veggies have to spinach, beans, ladies’ fingers and other leafy vegetables. Rich in vitamins but the meat fancier cannot quite get his teeth into it. Vile abuse was then hurled at the poor wife. She responded in kind. What was till then a perfectly normal slanging match, a noisome argy-bargy, soon took on frightening proportions. The good lady wife had ‘had it up to here’ with her hubby’s constant backbiting and bickering, her blood was up, she eyed the freshly honed sickle lying in a corner of the room. To pick it up and deliver a swift blow to her life partner’s neck, with plenty of wrist work and follow through was with her the work of a moment. ‘I shall have my revenge,’ she appeared to be telling herself. Remorse and recrimination, to say nothing of her heinous crime and the consequent punishment, can come later. A momentary lapse of reason, blood thirst satisfied with some justice, and she was prepared to face the long arm of the law.

A little over a thousand miles away from Hyderabad, in the city of Vadodara (formerly Baroda), another domestic contretemps was brewing. A labourer, possibly a construction worker, the press report was not clear on the precise nature of his occupation, comes home for lunch and sits down for his afternoon meal. The report is not forthcoming on what was on the luncheon menu but the husband looked askance at his plate and proceeded to issue a volley of oaths at his wife. Perhaps it was, yet again, the complete absence of chicken, mutton or fish that so incensed the husband. I am only conjecturing.

On the other hand, they may have been strict vegetarians (it was in Gujarat, after all) and the wife fobbed her husband off with some cold rice and dal. Period. No fried potatoes, dal fry, boiled carrots and paapad to go with the main course. Enough to get anyone’s hackles up. The labourer husband went on a shouting spree, one would surmise, and at some point, the wife seemed to tell herself, ‘Up with this, I shall not put.’ She did not merely stop with the verbals. She picked up, what the newspaper described as a ‘bladed weapon’ and without so much as a by-your-leave, proceeded to stab her husband multiple times on the head and chest.  The neighbours, hearing the deathly screams, rushed round to help. By then the assaulted husband had shed his mortal coil. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. This is Nari Shakti at play. The lady of the house is now cooling her heels in a police station, unrepentant.

The daily newspaper, aka ‘The Old Lady of Bori Bunder’ had displayed these two grisly crimes as a twin story with a common headline which ran, ‘Food for thought: Culinary, Cautionary Tales.’ Side by side, the two stories were sub-headed, ‘No chicken at dinner, man shouts at wife; she kills him’ and ‘Man refuses lunch his wife cooked, gets murdered.’ They could have added that his goose was cooked, but the poor sub-ed might have had a local to catch from Victoria Terminus, and the paper had to be put to bed. And he might have been a vegetarian.

I realise that I lay myself open to criticism from right thinking people who might well go, ‘The world is in turmoil, WW III is at our doorstep and you are going on endlessly about a couple of guys who literally got it in the neck because they were not served chicken or potatoes by their harried wives. Where are your priorities?’ Tell you what, I have a snappy answer to that stupid question. If the Times can ‘go on endlessly’ about the chicken and veg starved husbands, I do not see why I should hold my horses on the subject. Our women have been held back for too long, and if they choose to take out their frustrations on their ungrateful husbands with ‘bladed knives,’ bully for them. If push comes to shove, our women will take arms and risk imprisonment or worse, but they will take no prisoners. In the words of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ (Shakespeare’s grammar can at times sound dodgy). As for me, I gobble up whatever is served for lunch and dinner without a murmur of dissent. I place a high price on my neck.

In sum, I can do no better than to reprise Sir Winston Churchill’s defiantly ironic words in 1941, reacting to his allies’ dire warnings about Hitler. ‘In three weeks, England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken! Some neck!’ Brave words, but when Churchill went home for dinner and was served a plate of cold cauliflower cheese by Lady Clementine, he wolfed it down uncomplainingly. It was war time after all; rationing was on and stringency was the watchword, and it was more than the Prime Minister’s neck was worth than to demand steak and kidney pie of his good wife.