What's in a name? A lot, actually. Take the title of the television series Desperate Housewives. The nation is hooked. In the bars, pubs and cafes and homes and offices of the country, the less than flowery antics at Wisteria Lane are setting souls on fire (where were you by the way, if you weren't watching an episode on Thursday night at 10?) It's all in the title.
Who would be watching a series called Housewives to get weekly allowance in next Labour budget, or even Charles and Camilla finalise 759-page wedding guest list? There's something about the coupling of the word "desperate" with "housewives" that is so deliciously furtive, with just the right dollop of sex, a smidgen of sleaze and a slice of scandal.
Everyone knows what housewives are up to, really. All that time on their hands after the cooking, dusting, cleaning and school runs, and all those home visits from plumbers, carpenters and window cleaners who need to be let in without a key. All that strong builders' tea and sugar. Victoria Glendinng wrote in The Observer in 1993, "There's no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure."
If housewives become desperate, it's not that they can't cope with their children's homework or the trail of hair in the bathtub and basin, it's because something dramatic is about to happen, something so unnameable that it can only be imagined. Shaw understood that desperation when he said, "Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo."
"Desperate" is a loaded word. It makes us think of sentences like "His financial situation was so desperate, he took his own life", or "The father made a last, desperate attempt to rescue his children from the flood waters". There could even be a desperate shortage of dentists, punctual trains, broad roads or fruit and vegetables on British children's dinner plates or accurate spellers.
Desperation could be a situation of great recklessness. In a desi context, desperation only means hopelessness, of course. Can you see a desi series with the same title achieving the same popularity and the same pounding and thudding of male hearts from Glasgow to Glastonbury? No, and it's because we all know desi housewives are never desperate. They take life as it comes, with calm and composure. There is one thing that desi housewives do, and it's depressing. They really do leave out an important ingredient or measure in the special recipes they pass on.
(Saumya Balsari is the author of the comic novel 'The Cambridge Curry Club', and wrote a play for Kali Theatre Company's Futures last year. She has worked as a freelance journalist in London, and is currently writing a second novel.)