My heart missed a beat. There it was staring at me — the telltale stain of pink lipstick on my white shirt. The sign of my ‘sin’ was shining so gloriously that this time I was in for the stick. Corporal punishment may have been outlawed all over the world, but not in the home presided over by my wife. My fingers trembling like peepul leaves in the breeze, I picked up the exhibit in question, my shirt, from the laundry and bent down to examine it at close quarters.
There was no need to use a magnifying glass. The evidence was too evident to be denied or diluted. The indelible mark was evidently made by a pair of super lips. But how on earth did it get there? For the life of me, I couldn’t place the origin of that undistinguished mark. I desperately tried to flip through in the pages of my mind the profiles of all my lady acquaintances with special attention to their lips. The idea was to home in, through a process of elimination, on the guilty party who had dipped her lips into l’affaire de shirt.
I discovered that though quite a few of those acquaintances had big mouths, their lips were rather petite; so much so that I often gazed and still my wonder grew, that such small lips could spout all they did. They were ruled out right away as their lips were nowhere near size L. Of the handful generously endowed in the deportment of their lips, only a miniscule used lipstick. This lack of application of lipstick could be due to its cost.
My logical analysis thus helped me to narrow down the number of suspects to just two. Then I remembered what one of the shortlisted two had once confided, in a lighter moment during teatime at the office. She always used ‘non-stick’ lipstick, she said, the kind that could not be ‘transferred’ to the rims of a teacup and so left no ugly trail behind. This, I thought, should apply, mutatis mutandis, to her victim’s shirt as well! Consequently there remained a sole contender under suspicion, indiscretion on whose part had threatened to ruin not my shirt and my very existence too.
I grabbed the offending shirt and rushed to her. Hoisting it for her to observe the stain under enquiry, I pleaded, “Look what you have done!”
I expected the ‘bull’ in her to react to the pink stain as a ‘red’ flag and come charging at me. Instead, my wife gave a sheepish smile and said, “I know. By mistake I put your white shirt along with my pink blouse in the washing machine.”
“This is not lipstick at all?”
“Pink lipstick and me?” she looked scandalised. “When will you ever notice that I never use anything but red on my lips? Unless of course you are so colour blind that you can’t tell the difference between pink and red. Besides, even a novice can tell that the stain is too large to have been made by human lips, let alone a lady’s!”
I went red in the face. I had to concede that her lovely lips, especially when she pouted, looked hardly human. They bordered on the angelic.