Pilgrim's Regress

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It all starts with your winning the First Prize in Essay Writing Competition (rigged) in your Class VIII; and your HM Father selecting as a prize for you a cute brass plaque on which is engraved the motto:

"Cleanliness is next to Godliness"

It turns out it is the only prize you ever got in your life and so you become pathologically attached to it and carry it wherever you go nailing it to your wall (hoping folks will ask you where you got it...they won't).

Since the house you are living in is full of kids you ask your mom and get a single room all for yourself. Then you spend three hours cleaning it up and beautifying it.

When you return from your school, you find to your dismay that your room with its books, crayons and drawing sheets has been vandalized by your youngest sister. You revolt and write with a chalk on your door:

"No Admission without Permission",

a slogan you saw on your HM's Office and liked.

Then you join College and ask for a single room in your hostel, the Assistant Warden guffaws and gives you a choice: a Triple Room with your batchmates or a Double Room with your senior. You ponder over it and decide to take the Double Room.

And discover that your roommate is no pilgrim on the holy path leading to the Demigoddess of Cleanliness. And after a week of attrition you lose and take up the whole task of keeping the room clean day in and day out.

When visitors come in and praise your room, your Senior proudly points to the brass plaque on the wall and says graciously:

"That is our motto!"

damn him.

You then join a lowly job and to save money share your digs with three of your Seniors, all of them non-vegetarians, smokers and boozers.

You clean up their ashtrays, bottles and chicken tikka masala remnants before you go to bed.

Then you get married hoping that your wife will keep the house clean for you...Ha!

When you grumble irritably, she offers a choice: she would invite her mom to stay with you saying she is as clean as a bald egg.

You agree to withdraw your complaints if she withdraws her offer.

By and by your infant son arrives and fills your heart with joy, except that the bum has perverse ideas of cleanliness. And you employ a teenage maid to keep him clean...you end up cleaning her leavings too.

And your son grows up and takes up his job as a Programmer (Trainee) and refuses to live with his colleagues since they are all smokers, drunkards and beef-eaters.

And asks you to join him in a rented apartment since you are now retired and unemployed.

Back to square one...you end up cleaning the apartment from his shoe rack to his wardrobe.

You get him married, thinking you can at last outsource your cleaning jobs...Ha!!!

Then you decide to withdraw and live in your bedroom with your book case and stop mixing with others on the Dining Table or Sofa...just so you can keep your simple one-room digs clean. And confine yourself to your bed and become a two-state system, lolling and blogging.

Then Ishani arrives.

After her bath and makeup she ambles to your bed and throws up her tiny hands asking you mutely to lift her up your bed.

And she rumples, crumples and devours all your bedside books and papers with unbounded joy and glee.

You just watch her and decide that no amount of cleaning up gives you a speck of the mountain of the joy you get just watching her.

And you cuddle her and ring up Prakash, the newspaper vendor:

You: Prakash, give us two copies of DC from tomorrow

Prakash: Two copies of the same paper, sir?

You: Yes

Prakash: At the same address sir?

You: Yes

Prakash: But...but...why sir?

You: Never mind why

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After Ishani leaves your room for her mom's, you inspect the ruins, laugh heartily, and paste a paper slip on that brass plaque to read:

"Cleanliness is next to Impossible"

and wait for her to arrive again and again and again...



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