The terrible betrayal

Entering the house after a long tour, I immediately sensed that something was wrong. My wife was behaving rather strangely. The furtive glance, the avoidance of eye contact, the surreptitious movement of the hands.. all added to my suspicion. Something sinister was afoot. I was convinced that she was cheating on me.

Without a word, I dropped my suitcase and laptop on to the sofa and headed for the bathroom. I washed my face and hands with the soap that I had picked up from Hotel Le Meridien last month, all the while trying to figure out what my wife had been up to. The white towel that I had.. er.. borrowed from Hotel Taj Landsend last week was on the hanger and I wiped myself, with that grim foreboding that precedes an awkward moment in one’s marriage.

The small bottle of talcum powder that I had thoughtfully put into my toilet kit when I had stayed at the Hotel Atria two weeks back, was still there next to the mirror and I applied it on my chest and back, cursing myself for relaxing my vigil and trusting my spouse completely.

Slipping on the bathrobe that I had sneaked out of the Grand Hyatt during my stay there two months back, I wondered what had happened to the good, old values that were the bedrock of marriages in the bygone era. When vows were held sacrosanct. When the spouse’s word was law. How did it all change, I muttered to myself, adjusting my feet into the white, furry slippers that I had brought back from the eco-friendly Orchid Hotel not long back.

It was then that my eyes fell on the incriminating evidence. I had spotted the source of our marital trouble the minute I entered the bedroom. The bedsheets!! They were new. They even had the price tag intact. When I had left on my tour, my wife had actually sneaked out of the house, gone into a shop and paid good money for the bed sheets.

I mean, money for the bed sheets! While exchanging marriage vows, hadn’t I explained to her clearly that, as long as I kept travelling and stayed in fancy hotels, we were assured of free supplies of shampoos, soap, towels, talcum powder, coat hangers, bathrobes, bed sheets? I had made her take a solemn pledge that she would never burn good money on these things ever in her life.

And I have been true to my word. I have flooded the house with shampoos of every colour , pink, blue, green, flicked from hotels from every corner of the world.. I have an entire suitcase filled with soaps of assorted size and shape and each carrying a distinct smell of the hotel it hailed from.. I have more talcum powder in the house than is manufactured by Pond’s in an entire year in all their factories. As for towels, there are enough white towels with insignias of the Taj, ITC, Hilton, etc to drape the entire lot of Chennai College girls with. It is true that I have been a little negligent about the bed sheets, but if only, oh if only, she had given me a hint, I would have picked up a few from the Intercontinental this time………