J-zine - The PC

How I lost my wife to the Computer.

When we got married, three years ago, I gave my wife a PC. The motivation was simple. I use PCs extensively for my work and although I wanted my wife to be computer literate, I didn't want her to mess up valuable data on my PC. Best she has her own PC, I thought. I had an extra PC lying around. It was an old 286 model that my office had given me to use at home, but was long since discarded as obsolete. I upgraded it with a new 486 CPU for a sum that was quite modest compared to buying a brand new PC. Eagerly, I tried to get her to use it, but there was hardly a glimmer of interest. Even when I got her to use it, she became bored and disinterested very quickly. Thus Kalpana's Butterfly, as the PC was called, lay unused and neglected.

The thing

Last year, she became tired of being just a house wife and went back to college for a one year diploma course in journalism. Assignments had to be written, and in the first flush of enthusiasm, she decided that they should be typed. Suddenly a monster of a typewriter invaded our domestic life. I realise that there are still many such mechanical typewriters in use in India, but for someone who has lived and breathed computers for twenty years and more, it was a cultural shock to have this thing in our apartment. It was more than that, it was an insult. I hated it. I glared at it, and the thing glared back. When it was not working well, a service man was called and attended to the thing as a doctor might be called for a family member. After he left, there was a faint but unmistakable odour of machine oil that might have gladdened the heart of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first (mechanical) computer but filled me with disgust.

Suddenly one day, Kalpana came home and said she wanted to learn to use computers. It seems that a girl in her journalism class had applied for a job in a magazine, and the first question they had asked her was whether she could use a computer. Learning to use a PC was a must, but how? At first, she was reluctant to learn from her husband. She checked out the computer classes and even paid a fifty rupee deposit for a course, but never started it. There were end of term exams to study for and time just didn't stretch to going to computer classes as well.

Once the exams were over, the need to learn to use the PC became acute. We switched on her PC, newly upgraded to run Windows 95, and started Word. Slowly Kalpana learned the basics. In the beginning, I would sit with her for a lesson, and then she would sit alone and practice. Often she would sit up at night. She would type in the day's lesson as repetition and then print it out to keep in a file as a reference. In the beginning, she would often come running to me for assistance when something strange happened. Bit by bit, she became more capable and less flustered. She told the that the computer was "cute" when it popped up a message explaining that she had entered something wrongly. She started writing anything and everything that came into her head. It had become her new confidant. She would sit up until two or three at night, typing in her innermost thoughts.

Kalpana's Butterfly

One day she stopped at the local book shop and started looking at mouse pads. I knew this was the turning point. Now there was no way back. The typewriter was unceremoniously taken away. A project was to be done and she decided that she would do it completely on the PC. In the evening, I left her working on the PC and went to bed. In the morning, I woke up and found her there still. I had no idea if she had come to bed that night. I tried to say good morning to her, but she didn't break off her typing. "Warm up some parathas from the fridge", she told me firmly, without moving her gaze from the screen. Our maid looked in askance when she arrived and saw me in the kitchen getting breakfast while Kalpana sat at the PC. I ate my aloo parathas to the non-stop tack-a-tack accompaniment of her typing. I comforted myself with the thought that at least she was doing something that made her happy. This repeated itself for three whole days. I spoke to Saloni, our youngest daughter from Kalpana's first marriage, and told her how things were. "Don't tell me", she said, "I came yesterday to keep mummy company and all she did was sit in front of the PC." Finally, the project was finished and Saloni and I helped Kalpana print it out and get it bound. It was a relief to get my wife back again, I thought. For as long as it lasted!

Now she had assignments for Femina, where she had done four weeks of training as part of her journalism course. At night, when I was trying to get to sleep, I could hear the sound of voices from her Pressman cassette recorder as she played off an interview and wrote her latest article. In the evening, when I came home from the office, she sat there, with the cordless telephone wedged under her chin, typing in an article on women drivers. On the morning of our wedding anniversary, I woke up to find her at the keyboard. As usual. "I have to finish this article today", she said. "Get your own breakfast". In the evening, when I came home, she was attending a seminar at the Taj Mahal Hotel. It was for an article on non-invasive surgery. I ate dinner alone. When she finally came home, it was late. "We'll celebrate double next year", she said. The following Saturday, I was told I could go and sit in the bedroom as she was going to work on the PC and didn't want to be disturbed. As I retreated to the bedroom, I looked at our house plants. They had started yellowing and looked distinctly neglected. They were getting the same treatment as husband and daughters!

She does break off for now and again, but only to get me to help her fax in her articles. Her PC doesn't have a fax modem. Yet. We only have that on our portable. How can a modern woman cope without a fax modem on her PC? I will obviously have to buy her one. She has already asked why we don't have an Internet connection at home. I suppose I will have to get that too. Her niece in the US has already gone over to sending us email instead of old fashioned letters. If we get an Internet connection at home, we could at least keep in touch by email, I guess. That's how modern couples communicate, these days. Maybe we'll celebrate our next wedding anniversary in cyberspace?

P.S Want to know how things have progressed? Visit Kalpana's web site and see for yourself.