I really wanted to call this hub ‘my smelling wife’ but that would have been grammatically incorrect and Hub Pages would have rejected it as substandard just after reading the title! YET, despite the current name this hub is not about the sweetness of my wife - it is about my sweet wife and her uncanny ability to smell just about everything.
She can, for one, smell out non vegetarian food. She is a strict vegetarian and we hardly ever get any non vegetarian items home. However, the other day I fell sick and was advised to drink loads of chicken soup, and deciding to make it at home we asked the maid to get some pieces of chicken which she dutifully brought the next morning wrapped in a polythene bag.
Now imagine the scene next morning - there I was sitting at the dining table with the laptop, responding to messages on Facebook, the maid was in the kitchen making the morning tea and in walked the wife. Grabbing a cup of tea, she came and sat in front of me, doing her best to ignore the fact that I was on the net (which as all my regular readers know she thinks is a den of vice where I get my fill of ‘strange’ exotic women who for some strange and undoubtedly exotic reason want to flirt with me all the time). All of a sudden she jerked, flared her nostrils, sniffed a few times and asked the maid “Did you get IT?” At this, gesturing to the maid to be silent, I put a thousand flirtatious strange women on hold and looking into her eyes calmly said, “No honey, she forgot.” The nostrils came back to normal and she responded with a tame, “Must be the eggs she has cooked for you... it sure was a non-vegetarian kind of smell!” Whatever that means.
“But they are hard boiled eggs, darling,” I said. “No way they could smell.” At this she retired hurt and went back to the newspaper (or rather she retired and I knew I was going to be hurt before the day was out) and I smirked and went back to my thousand exotic women, which however was not the end of the story. Just five minutes later she jerked up again, walked into the kitchen, sniffed a few times and looked at the who pointed to the polythene bag and nodded. The bag was then dangled jubilantly in front of my eyes with the comment. ”I could smell it,” she said , as I crashed back to earth with my theory that her fantastic sense of smell was just a put on in tatters.
She can even smell the food I eat. This is fine if I am sitting across the table and eating with her as I do most days . This is however also applicable even when I am out and a double cheese pizza or a deep fried chicken has been placed in front of me. Always, without fail, at that exact moment before I trust the first morsel into my system she calls and asks, “Having lunch darling?” And then coos, ”Yes ,do go on, all those pizzas, burgers, fried chicken need customers too, right?” And all that I was about to enjoy turns to ash in my mouth. Mind you, she actually names the specific dish that is in front of me at that moment and she is always accurate! I mostly have one of my office staff travelling with me and once I even confiscated my colleague’s mobile phone before I ordered, trying to test whether it was he who was texting my wife on the sly.It did not work- she got the name right then too. From then I gave up, realising that she could even smell across mobile airwaves.
If it was just food one could probably live with it but she can also smell out women! I hardly have any female friends beyond the ones who are also her friends but every time I meet an old female friend (say once every five years) she can smell it. Again if she could sniff out the smell of the woman on me when I came home it would be understandable (what a marvellous fantasy – a woman meets me outside home and gets so close to me as to get her smell on me -mmmmmmmmmmmm) but she does not let things get so far ever. An example will explain this.
Once I got a call from my ‘between second and third semester of graduation’ girlfriend, who for a brief three weeks had been really, really – nah, let me not get carried away with that one since my daughters read this too. Suffice it to say that she called and wondered if we could catch up over dinner as she was in town for a day. Since I am not allowed out unescorted after 7 pm I naturally mumbled something unintelligible and we settled on a lunch date. I live in the eastern part of Delhi and so I asked her to travel to the western-most part where none of our relatives and friends live. Telling the wife I was going to be out for lunch, and suspending my best judgement, off I went to meet her. I walked up to her, found her looking the same as when I first fell for her, and looking deep into her eyes, shook hands . She responded by warmly placing her hand on mine...and just then the phone rang.
“Having lunch darling,” asked the wife, in that super soft voice she uses only when she intends to sock me with a sledge hammer later.
“Err, yes, yes, of course lunch,naturally,” I stammered back.
Her sense of smell at full blast, she came back with a super soft, “Who with?” My blood froze as I muttered, “A client”.
“Which client, ” she asked, making it clear she actually meant “witch client.”
I muttered a name as she said “Ahaaaa” as only wives can, and disconnected.
Needless to say there was no lunch date then, since the ex-girlfriend saw blood drain from my face as I mumbled the words, “Hospital...sorry...medical emergency...must go,”’ in some kind of order and rushed away, leaving her stranded.My first date with her in 35 years lasted exactly 35 seconds. I guess she being someone's wife too, smelt the truth too and hence never called back. As for what happened to me that evening, that is another story.
(to prevent anything untoward happening after this is published may i state that the episode with the girl friend is imaginary and bears no resemblance to anything that happened in real life ever)
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