Happily Never After

By Jane De Suza

Tina Raja's average day involves a houseful of kids, animals, fleas, leaking pipes and sundry relatives. Is this the marriage she signed up for? And anyway, with an absentee husband, can she be certain she's married still? Okay, so there are a couple of options: she could have an affair (but only if the blinking phone will stop ringing); she could see her therapist (but he's an absolute dingbat); she could pour her woes out on her secret blog (but her readers are lecherous brutes). Meanwhile, loneliness and bad plumbing aside, her best friend is mooning over a guy called Moo, her ten-year-old daughter is writing a super-secret diary of her own, and her sister is being a dolt as usual. There just might be one silver lining, though, in the form of a kissable dentist. But hello, is her husband even paying enough attention to feel jealous? Look, guys, this is pretty serious stuff. STOP laughing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Sep 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9789352640676

Jane De Suza

Jane De Suza is a leading humour writer and columnist. Her books, which have a habit of hitting bestseller charts, include the SuperZero series for kids, Happily Never After and The Spy who lost her Head. She is a management grad, storyteller, advertising Creative Director and now lives between India and Singapore, which is definitely uncool (being 1 degree North of the Equator).

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http://heat.and.lust.blogspot.com

Saturday, 03.00 a.m.

This is an anonymous blog about life and love and lust and climate change. And all those questions that keep us awake at night. Who am I? Where am I? How did I get here? Where did I leave my other slipper? Should I dash to the loo right now with one slipper on? Or should I throw the slipper at the selfish twats I can see partying in the window of that Prestige apartment opposite, making that godawful noise in the middle of the night? Or did I already do that?

I am a beautiful, exciting woman in Bangalore, without a man (a temporary phase, I hope), working all day to bring up my kids and plants (almost all the plants have died). I have a full house, but an empty life. (I am very proud of this line; it is our human condition in one line of poetry, don’t you think?)

This blog is deeply personal and will raise hot topics. Will I ever have a hot body in my bed again? (The dog does not count!) Will I ever find love again? Will I ever find lust? Will I ever find that damn slipper?

And here’s the punchline: All you suckers who are young and in sappy love will one day reach this point. Ha ha. That’s the best thing about this blog. You’re going to live it one day.

Comments: 39

(38 comments – all deleted for indecently and deliberately misunderstanding my heat-and-lust blog about climate change and bathroom slippers.)

SeniorBlogspotter says: If you want readers, you should really stop insulting them and going ha-ha at them. Also, it’s not very anonymous if you’ve just told the entire cyber world that you live in Bangalore, have kids, overlook a Prestige apartment, own a dog, sleep alone … It could be a matter of seconds before someone tracks down your house. Look out!

I’ve changed the URL from heat.and.lust.blogspot.com to lustlesslady.blogspot.com (That should send the right messages out. This is a blog about deeper things in life than … well, what the 38 perverted comments thought it was about.)

Saturday, 10.00 p.m.

I am blogging on the doctor’s advice.

My friend Kanchan had remarked that I was so stressed out I was losing it. I told her I wasn’t losing anything – I hadn’t lost a single pound.

‘That’s it, see! You talk rubbish! You scream at the kids, at me, I even caught you yelling at the sky the other day.’

‘I was merely asking it to stop raining. Come on, everyone complains about the rain.’

‘Yes, to each other. Not to the sky. You’re having a midlife crisis.’

‘I’ve not reached midlife,’ I objected. ‘I’m still young and wild.’

‘See, you’re even delusional,’ she pointed out. She insisted it wasn’t too late to save myself, and that I should see a counsellor immediately. She even got me an appointment.

Of course, being chronically too late for everything (Too-Late-Tina is one of my less-popular nicknames), I was also late to the therapist’s office.

Determined to make the most of my hour’s fee, I strode past the empty waiting room (how good could this doctor be if there wasn’t a squabbling queue in his waiting room?) and swung through the door into the chamber to find myself staring at the soles of a large pair of shoes on the table. He was asleep! On my time? Mine was the first appointment of the day. Shoes up on the desk, spectacles back on his head and slouched in the chair. Was that a snore? Not on my time!

I tapped his shoulder tentatively. ‘Good morning, doctor. Can we begin?’

He blinked awake and then pulled his spectacles on, agonizingly slowly.

‘I’m running out of time,’ I cried.

‘Oh, sorry! How much longer have the doctors given you?’

My turn to blink. ‘No, no, I’m not dying. Not yet anyway,’ I plunged in. ‘I am so stressed, so frustrated, so full of it all that I’m going to burst.’

He said, ‘Do you mind using the tissues? The carpet’s new.’

I meant to make full use of my hour’s fee, and went at it like an electric drill. ‘So you’ll want to know about me. I am Tina Raja, the first on your appointment list for today, as you can see. I am an exciting woman in my thrilling thirties, as you can also see. Don’t ask me to give away my exact age, since it is something I swore to my mother not to give away – along with her lace doilies. Bet you don’t even know what a doily is.’

He coughed.

I raced on. ‘I am married to a man who has fled to Singapore, leaving me with a houseful of kids, dogs, fleas, bills, in-laws, termites, blocked drains…’

He coughed.

‘Anyway, I am so, so frustrated that I had the dream again. The third time this week. You know the naked dream, right?’

He nodded. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘You know that dream where you’re … that is … I was running out in a towel and the towel slipped off.’

‘And?’

‘And what? About a hundred people were staring at me!’

‘And what were you wearing underneath?’

This wasn’t going in the direction I had assumed it would. Perhaps this is what they call deep psychological probing. ‘What? Well, I … er … all right, I was wearing underwear. Definitely. I am not the kind of woman who romps around in front of a hundred people without underwear, even in my dreams.’

‘What colour was the underwear?’

‘How is that relevant?’

At this point in the psychological probing, the door swung open, and a wiry man with a worried face rushed in and looked apologetically at me. ‘You must be Tina Raja. I’m Dr Shankar. So sorry I’m late – this Bangalore traffic.’ He then turned to the bespectacled man and said sternly, ‘Lokesh, your appointment is next. Please wait for your turn outside.’

Lokesh rose, stretched, grinned happily in the direction of where my towel had slipped off, and left.

Once I’d overcome my mortification, I demanded the good Dr Shankar’s photo identity, doctor’s licence, pictures of his grandchildren and pet rabbits.

I then spent the next two hours ignoring the knocking on the door and unloading my woes to the sound of his clucks, which grew less sympathetic as time went by. I told him about my husband fleeing to Singapore on work a little too willingly, leaving me to single-parent our young kids – Ryna, Rehan and the baby, who, though adorable, was ridiculously self-centred and took up every spare moment of my day. No one noticed how I was working myself to the bone. I couldn’t have a bath without someone knocking down the door because of an emergency involving things being stuck up some kid’s nose. I hadn’t had a decent outing or pedicure, or even a good conversation, in yonks, except with the sky. And the sky was not exceptionally chatty, so it was a one-way conversation.

He reminded me, gently at first and then more edgily, that my time was up. I assured him that it was doing me immense good talking to him already and I wouldn’t mind spending all day doing it. That’s when he urged me to find an alternative way to vent – I did not have the kind of psychological disabilities that warranted his expertise, he assured me. Perhaps a blog would be ideal, he said, and much less expensive than visiting him. It is therapeutic to have strangers listen, he said – and Lokesh was not to be taken as an example. So hello blog, here I am!

Comments: 22

(21 deleted for asking for more details about my dream. Pah!)

Private_dic says: Is a doily an oily dolly? Those pump up ones?

I am writing a new diary to become a celebrity. Everyone in my class wants to become ontroprunners and get rich and famous. I am writing this diary because kids who write diaries get more rich and famous like Wimpy Kid.

I must introduce myself.

My parents named me Ryna Raja (which sounds like Humpty Dumpty). I am ten years old and am the only normal one in my family, except for my awesum father, who is now in Singapore. I miss him very much.

My mother taps away all day at her laptop, writing a blog about lusts and slippers. Every time I go near her, she jumps guiltily and asks me to go get her a glass of water. She has drunk nine glasses of water already in one hour and so I am super-suspicious. I am reading what I can on her laptop when she goes to the loo, only to protect her from dangerous stockings. Our teacher said the internet is full of predators stocking you.

I also have two brothers. Rehan is six years old and he is a boy. This means he has different body parts from me (for example, he has no brain). He has more body parts in common with his dog named Dog (like a wet nose). My cat is called Anjelina Jolly. We are both clean and beautiful, though I don’t lick myself all day.

We have a ten-month-old baby brother with no manners and no name. So he is called Vishal by Papa and Appu, Bundle and Baby Poo by Mama. Rehan and I call him the Blob, because he is shapeless. He is totally cute and fat and all and my friends love him, but he keeps throwing things at me when I’m writing this diary. I told him it’s bad manners to throw things at my diary, so he stopped. Then he took my diary and threw it out of the window.

My mother is now writing about underwear – the predators must be very excited and endangered! Help!

Tuesday, 10.00 p.m.

Bah! That Ryna keeps looking over my shoulder. Since I don’t want my daughter to read about my innermost, secret turmoil, I keep sending her out to get me water and my bladder now feels like the community swimming pool.

Tuesday, 11.15 p.m.

Hi again, blog! Since this is NOT a blog about doilies, but about love and life, let me tell you about mine.

We had a fairytale wedding, Vikrant and I. We have photographs to prove it, with us smiling for five hours. Our jaws froze. We smiled at our loving parents who had just spent their life savings on three types of non-veg and four types of desserts (papad and pickles included but extra for the pineapple raita).

We smiled at our friends who came and popped champagne while I sipped metallic machine tea, since my new mother-in-law had been told I was a virtuous teetotaller. We smiled at our guests while the loving parents made a mental note of how many plates the other party had notched up.

It was a really happy day.

The wedding reception went on way past midnight because of the torturous ritual of clicking photographs with endless guests. In the last few photographs, I look like a puffer fish with mumps. It’s just that I was starving and every time I put a morsel of food into my mouth, another round of guests showed up. So I ended up chewing, smiling and clutching on to the last few guests tearfully, less out of love and more for support. My over-priced must-have high heels were killing me.

Our resolutely cheerful friends accompanied us to our hotel suite too. A very drunk gang of his friends began singing ribald songs while my friends kept hiding Vik’s shoes. The shoes were bought back at forty times what they’d cost and then thrown at the drunks to shoo them off.

In an attempt at getting some slivers of romance back, I slid into my slinky lingerie, which is exactly when the guy from the hotel desk came to remind us to catch our flight to Copenhagen, which, after lengthy discussions (in my slinky lingerie), turned out not to be a surprise honeymoon gift from a rich uncle but just a mistaken call to the wrong room by the rotten hotel desk. We’d just dived into bed, it being well into the morning by then, when my new in-laws landed up to introduce me (still in my slinky lingerie) to the entire new in-law clan. And then, in the middle of the grand-uncle-who-had-fought-a-war’s speech, I finally fell asleep and began to snore (according to Vik, whose testimony is always suspect).

And that’s how my ‘happily ever after’ began.

Wednesday, 10.00 a.m.

Why are there suddenly no comments? I feel slightly unappreciated, I must admit. Dr Shankar said talking to strangers is therapeutic, so where are all the strangers? Hellooo! Talking to myself is hardly therapeutic – it’s just certifiably loony.

Comments: 1

Darshana says: Did you find your slipper?

Wednesday, 10.30 a.m.

No, dear stranger (Darshana, this is for you). I am here to talk about love, passion and being betrayed by the snake I am married to.

In case you think I’m calling my husband names, I’m not. Vikrant was the brain behind The Solitary Creeper, that cartoon in the dailies, which was a runaway success about a know-it-all snake that everyone was in love with – including me. Vikrant was brilliant and funny. We fell in love, laughed and talked into the early hours of every morning, planning utopian futures. We promised we’d love each other forever or until aliens attacked the world, whichever came first. We agreed that we were going to live happily ever after. Only, we’re not. And I don’t know what went wrong.

Before we quite knew it, we had a couple of kids who leaked from both ends. My career sank like the Titanic, and which nobody, definitely not a film crew, was interested in resuscitating. I had gone from being a graceful dancer to a grouchy stomper-around. Vik had gone from cracking witticisms to cracking his knuckles in suppressed irritation. I had an extended family of in-laws who knew exactly how everything should be done (which, of course, was not the way I was doing it). We’d stopped talking late into night, unless it was to argue about whose turn it was to change the diaper. We soon realized we were two adults who behaved like children with two children who behaved like apes.

Things had piled up to such a point that one day, about a decade into our marriage, I told Vikrant that this was not the life we’d dreamt of. He seemed to agree a little too readily. In our hot-headedness, we proposed that the only thing to do was to take a trial break, and we talked about moving apart. And then, on that one misguided night, we moved together instead, and then we were landed with a FIFTH member of our family. Nine months of ‘I told you so’ and ‘It’s your fault’ and throwing up in the mother-in-law’s prize hydrangeas did not help in the least.

Then of course, we didn’t separate because we had another by-product to act responsibly towards. And it wasn’t his fault he was born, was it? It’s not like he asked to be sent into a boat that was being ripped apart, with him balancing on the oar in the centre? And besides, he had dimples, which meant my side of the family. I mean, finally someone inherits the good genes – we couldn’t leave him on the oar after that, could we?

Nevertheless, the baby didn’t help our marriage one bit. We had even less time to talk. We just went on scraping each day out in sulking silences or muttered accusations. After our last really rocking fight, The Solitary Creeper in the Sunday paper suddenly fell into the toilet bowl and got flushed down the plumbing. In full public view of thousands of readers, many of whom wrote in, pleading and protesting. But the snake had left the building.

Vikrant, while cleaning out a milk bottle the next morning and avoiding all eye contact except with the faucet, told me that he was planning to take over the family plumbing business from his retired father and would leave for Singapore to open the international arm of Raja’s Bathing Beauty there.

He said, ‘I’ll make more money for all the spiralling bills our spiralling family is totalling up.’

He said, ‘You need space and I need space.’ (But 7000 kilometres of space? Really? He could have moved into the next room.)

He said, ‘Now you’ll be able to sleep diagonally across the bed as you like to.’

He said, ‘And now you’ll be able to keep the toilet seat down all the time.’

All I wanted to say was that none of that was important. Just don’t go. We’ll work it out.

I said nothing.

He said, ‘If you need me to stay, if you think I’m helping more here, I’ll stay. It’s just that I think I could earn a lot more money for us there.’

I nodded. ‘That’s true, we need the extra money.’

We didn’t need the bloody extra money. I needed him around. I wanted him around. I couldn’t even tell him that.

So he went off to plumb foreign shores, leaving the rest of the loonies back home with me.

Comments: 2

Darshana says: What are you talking about? What oars?

What snakes? What slippers? How is this a love blog if you keep talking about snakes?

Private_dic says: If your husband is away, maybe we could meet and talk about doilies?

Wednesday, 06.00 p.m.

Dear Darshana, please be patient. This blog is not about snakes.

Dear Private_dic, this blog is NOT about doilies.

This blog is about love and life like I have been saying. Why doesn’t anyone get it?

This is a bleeding love blog, can’t you see? I’ve been bleeding and loving and living and venting till I drop dead every night. Private_dic, I am sick of your talking about doilies! I know just where I would like to stuff your doilies!

Comments: 1

Private_dic says: Aha! Now, we’re talking! Where would you like to stuff my doilies, my dear? Can’t wait to meet you.

(I am barring Private_dic from my blog. How, though?)

Wednesday, 10.00 p.m.

I’m ignoring doilies stoically and focusing on love (like when meditating, you ignore the straw mat poking into your butt and try to focus on the air moving through your nose). This is a heartfelt sharing of how you run away to get married and then reach a point (many points if you’re a normal woman) where you want to run away again. But by then, you can’t run