SOMETHING happens to most normal men in the presence of their in-laws. Ever since my parents came visiting us at our tiny Mumbai apartment, the hubby has been behaving, to put it mildly, asininely.

Two days before they were to arrive, he got his tattered jeans cut off into hot pants. ''But you can't wear this in front of them!'' I exclaimed, but he shrugged it off saying, ''So what, your father also wears shorts when we visit them. Plus, they have to accept me the way I am.'' Ah, hmmm!

Anything You Can Do
Needless to say, there is an unspoken tussle of who-dunnit-with-greater-verve between the two men. So if my father says he likes prawns, the young man will eat only squid. If the father-in-law boasts about his six-K walk, the hubby will be seen joining all the health clubs in South Mumbai that same day. If the old man sports a yellow shirt, son-in-law will receive parcels of fuchsia and neon lycra tops from his friends! ( Do you think it is more difficult for men to adjust to the spouses family than it is for the women? )

And of course, there are other hubby quirks that surface only when my folks are around. He's nursed his rusting bike back into rideable condition, and now insists on biking up and down to his office. In a way, it suits us both. He is able to spend that extra hour away from the house, and for me, it is the only 'sensible' thing he has done since his in-laws arrived.

In The Middle
It is difficult for me to be fully at ease when the hubby and my parents are together. Most husbands lack the expertise required to deal with their wives in the presence of the in-laws. It's like the discomfort of not knowing what to do with your hands at an interview. So they alternate their interactions with the wives between fleeting patronising, lordly acknowledgements and the mush-melony hopelessly smitten act.

In our case, with the former charade, he wants my parents to note how well he has been able to 'tame' me; no one's been able to point out that no parents like to see their child bullied. With the latter, the hubby unwittingly falls into the trap of competing head-on with the pop-in-law for the master-of-romance title!

The only way out is to let them spend as little time together as possible. Which is where his sudden urges to bike and hike feel like divine interventions, the sudden illness of his closest friend's wife's brother seems like God's way of telling me that there is a non-combative win-win solution to every problem under the sun, and the most crucial meeting of his life (hence this terrible delay) doesn't annoy me a bit.

But as with everything else, the hubby goes slightly overboard with this too. Yesterday, he shaved thrice, bathed five times, and visited the loo a few more times than that. The trouble is, we have only one toilet in the house, and spending hours on end in there searching for answers to existential quagmires ('Sophie's World' is what he carries in there these days) is not a terribly polite thing to do. If he only knew where to stop...