Life between people and peeves

Khaleej Times - Opinion

(LIFE) 30 March 2012, 9:13 PM

My neighbour and I have a serious problem with our apartments. We don’t have a room with a view. Being on the inner ring of the building the windows of which open into the middle space, we both are forced to stare at each other if we happen to open the windows at once.

In good old times, such an arrangement would have made for a direct channel for some happy, everyday banter — what’s cooking, are the kids home, and stuff.

Our apartments have yet another deficiency. There is no balcony to grow a garden or dry our clothes or dump our LCD and PC cartons. So we hang our laundry outside the window on strings and hangers, more out of compulsion than choice. Now, our lady and her family across find this offensive because what they see from their living room window when they pull the curtains is our clothes line! We see theirs too, but for some reason it doesn’t rankle us. Call us short sighted. Or severely deficient in aesthetics.

“Can you stop drying clothes on this window? It looks dirty from our living room,” she says one day. “Huh? Dirty? I swear that I wash them before drying.” I pinch my throat. I lean over to make sure I haven’t festooned anything that would hurt their sensibilities – lingerie and such. No fears, I have always been careful about that.

So what gives, I wonder. How awful can some washed, well spread clothes look from a distance of 30 feet across your window, outside someone else’ room?

“We don’t like it. If you see, we don’t do it either on this window, because we know it would look bad from your living room.”

“No, no! We don’t even look.” I begin to say, at which point she says, “Don’t take me wrong. Just that we don’t like it.”

“How about pasting a picture of the alps on our window?” I itch to ask.

“You may use the window outside your bedroom if you want,” she suggests haltingly.

“Blind to that one?” I want to ask. Instead I nod my head blankly.

“Don’t take me wrong,” she repeats and slips out before I can respond.

It is nearing lunch time. The other folks next door are frying fish and the smell wafts in thick and fast. Being vegetarian, it is far from appetizing and taking a cue from the lady above, the head suggests, “Go, ask them to stop eating fish. Tell them it churns your stomach.”

Right! Catch me doing that! Or telling the lady on the floor below that the way her little girl bawls all day crushes my creative instincts. Or impressing upon the guy somewhere downstairs, practicing the same notes on the key board every weekend that his dull, repetitive music grates on my nerves. Or telling the lady sitting across me in the train that her red hair colour blurs my vision. Or telling our neighbour back home who painted his bungalow in an appalling shade of blue that the colour explodes in my face every time I step out. Or confront men who callously spit on the road centimeters away from my foot, and yell, “Hey, you civilized homosapien or what?”

No, I don’t have it in me. It takes genuine guts to tell someone of your peeves upfront and ask them to change their ways just because personally they make you queasy. In a new, hyper sensitive world order, it is better to move on than to leave a bad taste. We had better be martyrs than rebels because we don’t roost in ivory towers. An appallingly slavish attitude perhaps, but verily practical. Call it compliance, tolerance, or plain timidity, but rest assured, you will have that many more people sniffling into their kerchiefs at the end of your term, whispering, “bloke never made an enemy in his life.”