LORD OF THE HOUSE

THE LORD OF THE HOUSE

Khaliqur Rahman

I feel like getting married a second time. But don't get me wrong. I want to marry my wife all over again. It is a kind of eleven-year itch. The go-slow-approach is successful, even though it has delayed the itch by exactly four years. It is a different matter, however, that I had to be away from home for five years and had to write love letters to her as if I was never married. I am sure she never missed my message I never wrote to her for she is still intelligent and still beautiful and she must have read in between the lines.

So, I proposed to her the other day all anew after my bonafide declaration well within my rights. But she promptly brushed it aside asking me not to be silly. Her reason: the children are quite grown up and more importantly, she cannot neglect her work.

I quite realise that her work means a lot -- the house-hold chores like bringing up two obedient school-going children, one faithful obedient-cum-commanding husband and then teaching in a school.

Now, I had always throated my opposition to her going to work. But during my absence, she took a job in the school where our children too were studying. She pleaded she would be able to look after them better there, especially the younger one. My father-in-law, who is seventy and sensible, grudgingly approved of her designs. I too okayed it for I thought it would mean some more money and she would minimise in a healthy manner the pangs of separation.

But now that I am back to domesticity I hate the idea of having to pass , in the house , even a single bachelor moment. And yet I have to languish in her absence that no more makes the heart grow fonder. It is from 10 to 1, when finally I have to serve myself a lonely lunch and eat it, too! Then, I come back from college around 4 and enter the house like a defeated captain. The children come back from school around this time , too. They quietly change and are out to play. Without the Lady of the House nobody likes to stay in the house. But poor me. I have to wait and wait. And the longest hour is the last hour , indeed.  A number of LOH-like figures come and go until at last the real figure arrives at 5.30. It is only then that I sip my conjugal cup of just tea. Yesterday, round about this time when I was just going to press my proposal afresh, I heard the children coming back from the play-ground and soon I was alone in the crowd. She gave them Maltova for strength and unwrapped a statue for me. She said she bought this for my birthday which was still a few days away.

A beautiful piece of work it was. A blind folded Libra with the scale of justice in her hand. I could see: an eye for an eye. She had passed five years without me.

All right, I said. For the next five years I would be the LOH -- in her absence -- the Lord of the House!