I was usually in the middle of breakfast, when he appeared with half a dozen shirts on his arm demanding, "Which one goes best with this trouser?" The one I eventually chose was usually the one for which he did not have matching socks. And once the shirt was decided upon, the rest were flung on the bed, there to lie unless I rescued them.

I knew he'd come back home when I heard the hum of the voltage stabiliser that props up our computer. From then on, he'd be e-mailing his friends, exchanging the dirtiest jokes you could ever read (the more sanitised ones find their way to the left of this column). A dozen calls for dinner wouldn't budge him, and the family was usually washing up when he did deign to appear.

I have often ruminated over the possibilities of divorce. Modern women, I am told, are prone to such thoughts, usually after 13 years or so of marriage. After all, I reasoned, considering that I see the husband for exactly 15 minutes in the morning, and 10 minutes in the evening, it wouldn't make too much of a difference to my life.

That's when this shoot happened. And believe me, the husband really picked his time for it. The son had his arm in a cast, and the doctor was available only in the morning. Short of making him miss yet another day of school, or taking a day off myself, I could see no way of getting that cast off before his arm withered away.

The house, which had so far appeared in my dreams (or nightmares) only, hit brick and mortar stage two days before the husband left on the shoot. As a result, my greatest friend these days-the one I've begun confiding even my pre-menstrual tensions to-is the fat diary he has left with me. It has the phone numbers and addresses of various brick kiln owners, cement retailers, Tapecrete (for the uninitiated, that's a waterproofing solution) sellers, iron rod manufacturers, and an assorted lot of contractors who ostensibly offer an assorted variety of services, all of them crucial to the housing industry.

I make daily trips to the `site' (it looks nothing like `home' yet) to hold painful conversations with the contractor's representative, who makes it very clear that he does not believe in talking shop with mere women. Initially, I would boldly ask him questions that I thought showed how much I knew about it all. By the third day, he was telling me, "It's okay, madam, we'll take care of it."

To appease his sensibilities, I have even started wearing dupattas every day, and offering lamely at the end of each conversation, "He's so busy, he just doesn't have the time." The contractor still prefers to keep his real demands for when the husband makes the occasional appearance.Then there was the editing suite, which had been in the offing since February, the husband waiting for it impatiently so that he could begin editing on a documentary he had already shot. It chose to make its appearance two days after the husband left, on the same day as our home computer chose to give up its internal modem for dead. All of which coincided with precision timing with the son's school computer project.

If you want an index of my computer skills, let me tell that I am the only one in my office who never received a dotcom offer throughout the boom this year. For me, a computer is a handsome typewriter, one that does not chip my nail polish. But, harangued by a desolate son on the one side, and an eager to go office staff, who had been told they had to complete the editing or else..., on the other, I learnt computers double quick, or about editing suites and modems at any rate. (Where did that boom go?)The last straw on this camel's back came when the son came home from school one day, distraught because he'd got only 32 out of 40 in Maths. Unnatural human that he is, Maths is his special subject. The last time he'd dipped below 100 per cent was when he'd got chicken pox and missed school for three weeks. The problem this time was exponents.

I could admit to dim recollections that such a creature had indeed crossed my path in school, but I had no idea now as to what it was. "Can't you at least read my book and tell me?" he asked hopelessly. Changeling though he was, my mother's heart was not impervious to his pleas. I resolutely pushed to the back of my mind the thought that I had not even taken up Economics in college because I'd thought it was connected to Maths, and grappled with the various xs the book threw at me. At the end of it, the son wailed, "But Mum, now I don't even know what I used to."

Dear heaven, if I should ever mention the word `divorce' again...