Smashing times

Is there a ‘clumsy gene’ and whether any of you suffer the depredations of cack-handed house-persons

It started with Zakir and has continued in an unbroken, no pun intended, line ever since. He was our first domestic helper in the village of Chalt in Nagar, north of Gilgit. He chose us rather than the other way around, arriving shortly after we moved in to our house and preceded by what we quickly came to recognise as The Nagar Reek. Even by Nagar standards Zakir was spectacularly smelly, a smelly of the birds falling from trees and buffaloes keeling over variety. You could bottle Zakir’s body odour and market it as a weapon of mass destruction. But no matter — we needed a person about the house busy as we both were and Zakir was a quick if malodorous solution.

Recently married we had an abundance of crockery and cutlery, and we did not notice a diminution in the cups and plates department until Zakir had a few days off. Yes, there were definitely fewer, a lot fewer, round thingies to eat lunch from. And not many of those things you put tea in either. The ones with handles. And a lot of those that were still left were minus their handles as well. Knives, forks and spoons were getting thin on the ground also.

It was Wonderwhiffy the Clumsy that was depleting our domestic treasures as we discovered when his stash of smashed wedding gifts was discovered behind the house under a sack. We never did find out what happened to the cutlery and it was farewell to Zakir whose next job, as a gun-guard for a cleric in the area proved fatal. Zakir did not know one end of a gun from the other and died, as did his employer, in a brisk little firefight just round the corner from our house.

Pentium 1 came with the lease of the office in Jaffarabad. The product of a millennia of vigorous incest P1 had inherited The Reek from Zakir and he had a curious peripatetic hump on his back that appeared in different places day to day. Some sort of animal living about his person we speculated. His progress through the office — when he was allowed in sweeping for the purpose of — was accompanied by a series of increasingly loud and expensive crashes as computers, monitors, wall-hanging mirrors and on one memorable occasion the entire phone system hurled themselves to the floor. P1 professed complete innocence inasmuch as he was able to profess anything and I eventually banished him to outdoor duties only. Like Zakir he came to an untimely end courtesy of a very large truck and his habit of lying, drunk as a skunk, in the middle of the Karakoram Highway.

Moving swiftly on and only stopping briefly to mention the fragrant Fareshta who was employed to do the ironing whilst I was busy doing Important Things at the office in Peshawar. A picture of innocence was Fareshta. I took her on as a favour to some colleagues who were leaving the country and thought no more of it… until I happened to come home for an early lunch one day and discovered that the fragrant Fareshta was multitasking by running a boutique brothel in the servant quarter of my house. Farewell Fareshta.

Which brings us to the present day via a string of congenitally clumsy domestic staff and the tinkle of broken glass yet again yesterday. Yes it was my rather fine German beer glass this time, only recently gifted to me, that apparently disintegrated entirely of its own accord whilst being washed.

All of which leads me to wonder if there is a ‘clumsy gene’ and whether any of you, Dear Readers, suffer the depredations of cack-handed house-persons who are able to assume an attitude of complete mystification as they stand over the shards of what was once a rather nice glass fruit bowl? Is there some cabal of these creatures bent on turning our lives into a forever-cycle of there never being enough matching wine glasses even for the most intimate of dinner parties? Am I forever to play Hunt the Teaspoon or Has Anybody Seen The Tin Opener? And what is that I hear? No problem Mr Chris just the wardrobe fell over. A bit.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 3^rd,  2015.

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