A Hitchcock’s Tale

After a long time, I spent a day alone at home today. I have been away at college for the past 2 years and have forgotten what it is like to take care of my parents’ house when they are away. In the past 2 months I have been reading a lot of Hitchcock’s short stories which I bought from the streets of Mumbai. And I never thought I would be able to relate a day in my life to one of those stories.

The story obviously revolved around a murder. A husband was exceptionally tired of his squanderer of a wife who had some new purchase to show him every time he came home. He was not only getting exhausted of his wealth, but was also losing interest in her and wanted a divorce. Since divorce would mean a more expensive option, he decided to kill her. A well sketched out plan of her murder with a perfect alibi of a vacation, he comes home and kills her. While he was disposing off her body he started being constantly disturbed. Salesmen, marketers, neighbours were all in their full swing that day. While answering each of those calls and rudely cutting them off, he realized that maybe his wife wasn’t really at fault. Maybe she was just keeping her head above water and yielding to all the forces that surrounded her daily. The story ends with his guilt of not being able to understand a day in the life of a homemaker.

I had at least 5 different people ring the bell until afternoon, answered about a dozen calls on the landline and none of them were for me. Frustration reached its peak when the doorbell and the phone were ringing simultaneously when I was having a shower. I also started to realize that my mom can more easily have bad days at work at home than I in the office. I remember cribbing about the unnecessary team meetings and conference calls I had to attend at the cost of getting some work done at the desk. Work space at home is so much worse. And it gets taken for granted and completely unnoticed because you are in a place called home.

I was narrating this to my dad who at the end of it smiled and asked if I too spent a lot today. I laughed it off but thinking of it more closely I probably spent more at home today than I would on an average bill at a café with my friends.