The Russians love to use the French phrase “Cherchez la femme,” popularized by Hugo, which implies that most trouble, directly or indirectly, is caused by women. Their women use it with equal fervor, because beneath the façade of female solidarity, they actually all hate each other.
In my case, these words should be embossed on my walls, mirrors, and coffee mugs.
Most of the women I’ve met as an adult over the past 28 years collectively inspire me to write a punk rock version of the Rod Stewart classic “Some Guys Have All the Luck.”
Only my punk anthem would start with:
“Some dudes get blowjobs, others the whack jobs - no prizes for guessing where I belong…”
Misogyny? Sour grapes? Trapped by unwanted pregnancy and bamboozled by child support payments? Did the ex-wife take it all? False rape accusations?
Nooo… sir. It’s far more insidious.
I could, of course, rant for hours about a recurring theme with women in my life: “I rejected you earlier to sleep with or marry someone else, but now please feel sorry for me.” Some turned up the next morning, others after 10 years, the latest after 30.
Not my skeletons, not my closet - I was just opening the front door. So why me?
A more benign, though no less infuriating, episode occurred when I first relocated to Delhi. Some friends of mine, a couple, introduced me to one of their friends - a runty little woman with a large pumpkin-like head and small beady eyes. Despite having the sex appeal of a female Mr. Bean, she seemed intelligent, friendly, and quite witty. A few drinks here and there, a walk in a mall, and we all ended up at her place.
At some point, she pulled me aside to help replace a burned-out bathroom lightbulb. The new one blew instantly. She then launched into a damsel-in-distress routine, which I did not yet know was her speciality, about leaving early for work, returning late, dealing with uncouth electricians, and living alone.
Tipsy and gallant, I offered to help her out if she couldn’t find anyone to check the wiring.
The next day, I gave her a quick call to ask whether she’d managed to fix it - no more than 30 seconds. To my relief, she told me not to worry about it.
Before I knew it, my friend’s wife was accusing me of harassment (sexual, of course) of a poor married woman under the pretext of helping with a lightbulb, thanks to copious inputs from the latter. This had already caused a big fight between her and her husband before she decided to hold her own trial for my supposed misdeeds. While I was dazed by the accusation, I was far more pissed off with my friend’s wife than with Madam Pumpkinhead, who was and remained a complete stranger as far as I was concerned. There you go, I told myself, once again trying to help people out. After all, no good deed goes unpunished.
Later, my friend claimed he got revenge on my behalf by posting a photo of Madam Pumpkinhead on Facebook, sitting on someone’s lap at a party, for her husband - who lived in another town - to see.
As for his wife… well, let’s just say we stopped being friends. And for various unconnected reasons, she later ceased to be his wife too.
P.S. With my karma demon (whose existence I vehemently deny) apparently working overtime, a few years later Madam Pumpkinhead, her husband, and a bunch of party regulars were all arrested in a high-profile case by the narcotics police in their hometown, with a huge stash of drugs. Their names and photographs were plastered all over local newspapers and TV, effectively ending her banking career. Though I heard about it much later, I still unashamedly savoured the news with unabashed schadenfreude.
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