EWP is a good acronym. It feeds off the established seriousness of the EPW, the Economic and Political Weekly. And perhaps because it begins with “E”, it also hides the low energy. I propose the registration of the Exhausted Wives’ Party as a political bloc. “E” words have been ruling our world — email, e-commerce, e-business, e-wallet. Half the world, or at least much of the married world, has been speaking of another “e”. Exhaustion. But perhaps because women have to say everything a few times to be heard (I wish we were like OTPs that didn’t work if not paid attention right away), no one’s noticed; or it comes with our condition of existence, like having anaemia.

It’s the collective exhaustion of women that I felt as I read two books recently — one by a man, the other by a woman. The first by the historian Gyanendra Pandey, Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India, a book — I am still surprised at my audacity — I read in the confessional tradition: A man’s belated admission of female labour that allows everything, including his discipline, to live and prosper. As I read through the list of famous men who........

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