I don’t care for the Wordsworthian poetic “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion” bunkum, what I want is the capacity for instantaneous verbal comeback. Unlike some people, I cannot come up with clever repartees in a flash. It is only in the solitude of my room and after sufficient strain of thought that I can come up with suitable retorts. I wish in such situations that it were possible to call “waitees” to run to my room (from wherever I am) for a minute or two to come back with clever rejoinders.
The longest short insult I am still smarting from came from my younger brother. I was 14 and ripe with adolescent beauty dreams. Peering into the mirror, I asked, “What should I do to become beautiful?” “Pray,” he remarked and guffawed for so long afterwards. Twenty years later I am still fumbling for a smart repartee to that (any ideas?).
But look at people like George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde or Winston Churchill. Their verbal comebacks and witty sarcasm are legendary. I would say these are people born with silver knives in their mouths, for indeed, so razor sharp is their brilliant wit and ready repartees.
Once a hostess, spotting Shaw standing alone in a corner during a dinner party
approached her distinguished guest anxiously and asked, “Are you enjoying yourself, Mr Shaw?” “Certainly,” Shaw replied, “there is nothing else here to enjoy.”
When a cabbage was hurled at him during a speech, Wilde picked up the vegetable and told the thrower without missing a beat, “I shall remember you whenever I smell this.”
Days after I delivered my daughter, an acquaintance under the pretext of seeing my baby came to wax eloquent about her forthcoming European trip. “You are so fat now. It would need four people to lift you,” she remarked in passing.
How dare she? The last I heard, potamus borrowed hips from her to become Hippopotamus. I fumed for an entire week before I had an answer ready. I waited for that call which I knew would come.
“Hello, Jaya I am off on my world cruise… yak-yak,” she crowed.
I listened to everything patiently before releasing my missile. “By all means go everywhere, but please don’t go to Berlin,” I said.
“EH… Why?” She stuttered.
“No, just listen to me. Don’t go to Berlin, that is all,” I said and stubbornly refused to explain. Her antennae were up and she begged for a full 15 minutes before I relented.
“Why? Why because, if you went there people would think the wall has come back. Hahahahhahahaha. People of your weight should not go to Berlin,” I laughed to my heart’s content.
Yet, the Berlin repartee is not of any sterling quality. In order to truly cut to the quick, the comeback has to be really spontaneous and not be spaced far and between aeons like the avatars of Vishnu. Instant retribution is truly divine.
Lady Astor, first female member of British parliament, irate with Churchill’s sexist views, remarked, “If you were my husband I would poison your tea.” To which Churchill replied pat: “And madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”
Closer home, Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi is a sparkling wit himself. Roughly two decades ago, a group of lecturers and students from our college approached him for funds for a centenary hall. Instead of plainly saying “poittu vaa ma” (go away), Karunanidhi said, “I have lot of karuna (sympathy) but no nidhi (funds).”
Indeed some people have ‘it’, while the rest of us can only gape! Recently I got a call from my younger brother.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Am going to a beauty parlour,” I replied.
“There is also a temple on the way. Go there first,” he said and signed off.
