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The Mush Register

LOVE & LAUGHTER Kalyana Krishnan, Retired Chief Engineer (Civil), Department of Telecom, with wife Lalitha, former employee of British Council.

K. A. Kalyana Krishnan

Humour can enrich your marriage. We try not to miss a single meeting of Humour Club International and lap up any book that can tickle the funny bone and use the jokes we've heard or read in our life together. Once I turned up for dinner when I should have been home by lunchtime. A note from her said: "Day before night you came home yesterday morning, yester night you came home this morning and tonight if you come tomorrow morning, you will find that I left you yesterday."

Our fights follow a predictable pattern — they will end in uproarious laughter. In the middle of a head-on confrontation, a funny line will creep in and defuse the tension. We use our private jokes at club meetings. I think I have told the whole world that her tight-fisted father invited me to see her on Deepavali day so that he could fob off the same sweets made for the festival.

Lalitha

We have together given about 200 humour programmes and we know long, funny passages and definitions by memory. Sometimes we launch into one of them to the utter bewilderment of our guest. One of us would offer him a plate of sliced apple, while the other would say, in the fashion of a lawyer:

"We hereby convey and transfer to you all our estates, rights, claims and privileges to ownership and possession vested in these pieces of apple, together with the pulp and the juice with full powers to eat, to bite or chew or to transfer it to whomsoever in part or in full by way of sale, exchange, gift or pledge notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained herein or in any previous statement or document pertaining to this apple." We realised we were overdoing it when we overheard our son (in primary school at that time) try one on an unsuspecting visitor: "What do you call an Indian who has left the country and settled abroad?" Our boy solved the riddle himself: "Hindustan Le(a)ver"

AS TOLD TO PRINCE FREDERICK

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