Column

Not much is known about a certain Mr Williams. But over the last six months he’s tried hard to explain to his relatives and friends that his wife Sunita didn’t walk out on him after saying, “I need some space!” After all, it’s not easy to be married to the woman who spent the longest time in space for no fault of his. Now that she’s back, Mr Williams is a relieved man. However, it might just be too early for him to celebrate….

The ground reality that the 195-day space flight has changed his wife hit him hard when yesterday Sunita served him a breakfast of freeze-dried, thermo-stablised and dehydrated samosas with mutter paneer and raita.

If that wasn’t bad enough, she insisted on eating a tube of Colgate Gel because she was used to eating her food in the form of paste and mistook it for the tube of leftover wasabi that she had great difficulty eating on the space shuttle due to its zero gravity atmosphere. When

Mr Williams expressed his disapproval of such a drastic change in lifestyle, Sunita threatened him. “Don’t tempt me, mister,” she said. “I will go back into space and come back a decade later when I haven’t aged a day while you are all old and wrinkled!”

But Michael J Williams wasn’t ready to give up without a fight. “Don’t you think I am a fool, Sunita,” he snapped. “I know you’re dying to go back into space!

I know all about those three long spacewalks you had with astronaut Michael Lopez-Algeria!” Sunita shook her head. “That was a mistake,” she tried to explain. “I wasn’t spacewalking, I was sleepwalking! And I was dreaming of you! So when I said ‘Michael, let’s go for a walk’ I meant you! It’s not my fault if Michael Lopez-Algeria thought I was calling him and immediately obliged!”

But Mr Williams wasn’t convinced. “Oh yeah?” he countered. “Then how come your third spacewalk lasted six hours and 40 minutes? How come you never came out with me for that long a walk on earth?” Mr Williams wasn’t finished. “Now I know why you only enquired about our pet dog Gorby and not me when you landed!”

By now, Sunita Williams was livid. “If you utter one more word,” she hollered, “I will take the next flight to India where they just might make me a presidential candidate!”