Men should never be asked to find things.
It is not that we are lazy. Especially when it comes to finding things that matter to us….we are definitely not lazy.
If there is one last piece of fried chicken hidden under three layers of biryani rice, we will find it. If the TV remote is stuck between sofa cushions (God knows why women love them!), we will find it.
But God forbid, Rekha ends up saying, “Rajan, can you get the sambar from the fridge and warm it up for Ritwik?”
We suddenly we become blind. This is a very special type of blindness that affects married men only when the object is needed by the wife, or her mother.
And in such a situation different kinds of men will emerge.
Type 1: As they get up from the sofa, they will ask “where is the fridge?”
Type 2: They will know where the fridge is, but as soon as they open the door, they will ask, “where is the sambar? I don’t see it.”
Type 3: They will get to the sambar, but will end up asking, “I got the sambar, but where is the microwave to heat it?”
And then there are the Type 4 men – the worst kind – who will end up asking, “Ritwik? Who is he?” In this case it happens to be my 12 year old son.
I don’t know what kind of a husband you have got, but whichever type he is, please don’t ask him to find things.
Let me bring you in on a secret…men don’t search. We men scan. Searching burns calories…scanning doesn’t.
Searching means you open the fridge, move the half-cut water melon, lift a steel dabba, check behind the dosa batter, bend slightly, look at the second shelf, and then find the microwave-friendly bowl that has the sambar.
Scanning means you open the fridge door, stand like the President of India inspecting the Republic Day parade on Kartavya Path. Like the President you will only move your eyes for three seconds, and shout out loud, “Rekha I can’t find the sambar …are you sure it is here?”
This is the male method – we try to find things without disturbing other things. We try not to interfere in our wife’s arrangements.
That’s when Rekha will get up from the sofa with a sigh, which I am used to now, and open the fridge with the confidence rarely seen in a man.
She will just move one bowl, and there it will be in a medium-sized bowl – the same sambar which I had failed to detect.
At that moment, the husband will say one of three things.
“Oh, this is sambar?”
“Why did you keep it behind.”
“I didn’t see because it was covered with a lid.”
All three are wrong answers….but since when have we started expecting correct answers from men?
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You know who I blame for men being like this? You women!
As boys, we were trained by mothers to not find things.
Every Indian boy has stood in front of an open cupboard and shouted, “Amma, where is my uniform belt?”
And from the kitchen, while frying vegetables or cutting fruits, or washing dirty dishes, the mother will say, “it is hanging on one of the dining chairs.”
The boy will walk slowly to the dining table…scan it…and then shout back, “It is not there!”
Mother will say, “It is there.”
Boy will say, “No, Amma, I checked.”
Mother will come, pick up the belt which would have just fallen down on the floor from one of the dining chairs, and say: “It is right in front of your eyes.”
This sentence has followed men from childhood to marriage.
First we have heard our mother say it and then we hear our wife say it. And if we are lucky, and our daughter decides to stay with us (or decides to take care of us), we will also hear the same sentence from her.
Every mother has had a chance to fix this, but she didn’t. She played on, because it made her feel wanted…even after her son became a teenager.
The worst part is that women expect men to find things using logic.
But women forget that we men are liner beings…we only think straight. Expect when the blood rushes elsewhere and we can’t think straight.
Anyway, getting back to the topic…if I am looking for my grey socks which we bought from Decathlon, I will look in the sock drawer.
If my socks are not there, I will shout, “Rekha, where are my socks?”
Rekha will calmly reply, “Check the chair.”
In case you are wondering we have a chair in our bedroom – so that if one of us has some work to do, we can use it.
“Why would socks be on the chair?” I will wonder. I won’t say it because remember we Rajans are cockroaches…real survivors…so we won’t risk a fight with Rekha.
But not all cockroaches are scared of a good fight – you don’t need to look beyond what’s happening at Jantar Mantar for that.
Anyway, coming back to Rekha… even though she would be in the kitchen, she would be able to read my mind.
So she will shout again, “I folded clothes yesterday and kept them there.”
By now I am angry and I want to ask her, “Why did you not keep the socks where it belongs?” but I don’t. After all I am a survivor.
But Rekha knows what’s going on in my mind, so she once again shouts back, “I was going to keep them inside later….but forgot.”
Now, how is a man supposed to know this? And then we are asked to look properly!
For women, looking properly means thinking like the person who last handled the object. For men, looking properly means looking where the object is supposed to be.
Even my son is like me.
Ritwik will stand in front of his school bag and say, “I can’t find my French notebook.”
Rekha will say, “Check properly again.”
He will look into the bag, move a few books here and there and then shout back, “It is not there Amma.”
She will say, “Remove the books from the bag and try.”
He being an early teenager will remove only two books and say, “Not there!”
Rekha will say, “Remove everything.”
Even though he doesn’t want to, Ritwik will still remove everything with great sadness, and there, at the bottom, will be the notebook.
Then Rekha will say, “See?”
If there is one word that can demolish a man’s confidence it is the word ‘see’ followed by a question mark.
I would be watching all this unfolding in front of me, but won’t jump in to his rescue.
Sometimes I feel bad for him because I know his future – today it is a notebook and tomorrow it will be sambar in the fridge.
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Let me tell you one more secret – we men give up too early.
I know it is surprising…I mean, aren’t we supposed to be the hunters? Aren’t we supposed to look around till we found something we could take home? But still, we do not have stamina for searching.
I can almost imagine, what would have happened back in the cave man (and women!) days. After waiting in the cave for couple of days with nothing to eat, the women would form a group and step out.
They will track their husbands out into the forest, and tell them, “Listen…just move aside for a moment…let us try searching for a prey.”
Having been unsuccessful for the last two days, the men would happily oblige.
And lo and behold, the women would spot a deer, shoot an arrow and kill it. The men who are tired by now, would be more than happy that they were finally getting something to eat.
And that is how ladies and gentlemen, slowly women took over and we men from the hunter became the hunted. All because of our lack of stamina for search.
But don’t take us for granted…for we have stamina for other things. A five-day Test match, for instance. Or looking through a thousand car reviews for a car we don’t have the money to buy.
The other day both Rekha and I were at the dining table. She was packing a birthday gift for one of Ritwik’s friends, while I was writing yet another story.
“Rajan, can you get me the scissors from the kitchen?” She asked.
I got up, stood in the middle of the kitchen and did a slow 360 degree turn lasting 4-5 seconds and replied, “it is not here, Rekha.”
Without looking up, she said, “It is in the container in which we keep the tongs, grater, can opener and the whisk.”
For a moment, I did admire her – she didn’t just know where the scissors were…but she also where the tongs, grater, can opener and the whisk were in this house.
I stood there in the middle of the kitchen, not knowing where this container was. But that’s the beauty of wives – they know when their husband is in trouble.
Without looking up, Rekha said, “It is next to the water filter.”
Now, I am not that bad a man…I know where the water filter was in my kitchen. But as luck would have it, the scissors wasn’t there in the container along with its siblings.
“Rekha…” I had only started my sentence when yet again without looking up Rekha said, “Aarthi may have kept it in the drawer along with the spoons.”
In case I haven’t already shared with you, Aarthi is our cook – she comes in at 7 am and helps us in the kitchen.
Now I know where the spoons were because when I pour my drink, and take a bowl of peanuts to go with it…I always open that drawer.
That day, I found the scissors…but it was humiliating. For a man, the greatest humiliation is when one tries to look for an item and fails but the object is exactly where the wife said it would be.
When I was growing up, my mother was also like this. She could find anything without moving an inch.
In our Ambattur house, if something went missing, my mother would know where it was, where it had been, and even who had taken it.
If I said, “Amma, where is my geometry box?” she would say, “Under the cot, near the wall.”
“How did you know Amma?” I would ask.
She would say, “Don’t you know…I have eyes even on the back of my head. So, never lie to me.”
That’s how she would bring in life lessons even while searching
for a geometry box.
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I think I know why we men can never find anything. The reason is probably the same reason why men can’t be as emotional as women.
I think we men are superficial beings, with no depth.
We only scan. We scan the fridge, the cupboard, the drawer, and even our wives and girlfriends.
We scan our wives’ faces after saying something stupid, and only notice surface-level things like, “Ohh…she is not smiling.”
If another woman had seen the same face, she would have identified hurt, disappointment, and anger. And that ladies and gentlemen, is the problem.
To find something, you need depth, patience and belief that what you are looking for is there…one just needs to keep looking.
Women do this naturally. That is why they can find sambar in the fridge, safety pin in a box, pain in a sentence, and insult in a tone.
We men cannot.
If a child says, “Nothing,” the mother knows something is wrong and holds the kids hands and talks to them.
The father would just say, “Okay,” and go back to his cricket highlights.
And this is because the father ‘scanned’ the kid while the mother ‘searched’ the child.
And now for the question – do all women hate this incompetence of their husbands/boyfriends? I am not sure.
I think some women may enjoy this power. There is a small satisfaction wives get when husbands fail to find things.
They may act irritated, but somewhere inside they are happy and thinking, “Without me, this man is as useful as a paper umbrella during a strong downpour.”
And they are not wrong.