Smile Please!

‘Christmas is over. New Year is over. Now shall we do the Passport?’ chirruped the husband rather too chirpily. On the fourth of January.

Before you do a double take, let me assure you, Passport isn’t a newly resuscitated pagan festival. Also, New Year’s Eve had been sedate. Very sedate. The husband will vouch that I was snoring in bed by 22.30 hours. With a cold.

So, it wasn’t celebration overdose that had pulled the reins on the form-filling process. It might have been that we were busy filing my income-tax returns. It might also have had something to do with a certain someone having rediscovered his guitar, but I am a good wife, my lips are sealed, I will say no more.

In any case, there was no need at all to chirrup. That loud. I looked bleary-eyed at him. ‘Now?’ I asked through red-rimmed eyes. ‘I have a cold. An aching head.’

The husband gave me a look. One of his famous ones. One that is usually supposed to take the place of a scathing retort. As the son will vouch. But today, it seemed, I deserved more.

‘If we had to wait for when you didn’t have a cold….’

‘Okay, okay,’ I jumped in hastily, muffling a sneeze. ‘Let’s do it.’

The husband was right in that I do have more than anyone’s fair share of colds. It could have something to do with my adenoids being yanked out in my early teens. Or it could be that it was January and we were in the middle of a cold wave.

But that was not the point of dissension. It was that the husband had a cauldron full of bubbles and boils that were supposed to make me cold-free. And I had allergies – mythical or otherwise – to most of them. This is an argument we’ll probably be continuing when we sit in matching urns placed side by side on the son’s sideboard. Or relegated to the topmost kitchen shelf from where we’ll have a vantage view of how the probable bahu is not cooking that dish the way we did.

Right now, it was our laptops that were side by side. ‘Right,’ said the husband, ‘where’s your phone? We have to take photos of you.’

I stared at him aghast. ‘Like this?’ I wailed out aloud. ‘Have you taken a look at me? My eyes? My nose?’ I rushed to the mirror. ‘And that pimple is still there!’ The Overbooked book club’s play had not evoked chicken pox in me after all, only a pimple. Still, a rare event in my life. And it was still there. On the tip of my nose.

‘It’s okay,’ said the husband impatiently. ‘You look fine. Let’s just get it done with.’

And we did.

Now I’m waiting uneasily to hear back from the authorities. Uneasily because no country worth its salt would issue a passport to anything that looks like I do in that photo. Worse thought: if they do issue me that passport, I’ll have to live with that photo for the next ten years. Time to go into hibernation, I’m thinking.