Deep throat

(I know, I know, it is not quite the association one wants here, but it is descriptive, as you will soon see…)

For the past few days I have been under the weather and pretty low. Which is not unusual, since the weather has been cowed down by a strangely whimsical lack of control from the powers that would normally control it. Add to it paint dust and wood polish fumes and, voila! You have my favourite ailments in the whole world: cold, cough and fever. Having got rid of the first, for the most part – it is in the green gunk stage, but that would be so disgusting to write about that it would put off the few readers that I have – and banished the second to almost-normal degrees (ha ha!), I am now having a prolonged argument with the middle factor. I never get coughs (she says with valiant good humour, trying to speak through a paroxysm of hacking and wheezing, with a couple of gasps thrown in for good measure) but I do get the infrequent bronchial attack. I call it one of the few things that Delhi gave me. For which I am duly ungrateful.

So as a result, apart from the most unbecomingly ungraceful whooping that I occasionally am convulsed by, and the nasty dull ache in the chest that makes me wish I was dead, at least until the cough was completely gone, I have this wonderfully growly voice that is very unlike my usual dulcet tones (Do I hear a derisive “HA!” from those who know me well? Believe me, they are just envious.). I crackle into the telephone like I am trying to vie with the phone company in the who-makes-more-static stakes, and I occasionally break into a hilariously uncontrolled squeak just at the moment that I am aiming for a seriously intent tone. More amusingly (for listeners, not myself), my voice tends to get rather stuck somewhere on its way out of me, so I push to be audible; and right when I have the decibel right, it gets unstuck and whatever I am saying comes out in an embarrassingly high-phonic bellow.

So I decided to take a bit of a spot poll and see what other people thought of my voice, since I could not judge it for myself. Being rather biased, of course, and firmly believing that I was sounding as sexy as Satan’s female equivalent in a pair of wicked red spike heels, I knew that the opinions would be positive. But life is full of surprises. My boss, startlingly me with his non-irascibility and actually being astonishingly cheerful about life in general, the office and my spectral appearance after a morning out in the sun, gave me an avuncular lecture – mercifully severely edited down to minimalistic proportions – about how if I didn’t rest the chest, I would be debilitated. After confirming that he did know what the big words meant, I glowered at him and walked back to my own desk. Then I spoke to a buddy in Delhi, more to thank him for a parcel he had sent Small Cat than to show off my voice, and asked whether I sounded husky and dark-chocolate-ish. Go home and stay in bed until you are all better, he said, a certain disgust in my obstreperousness lacing his normally fond tones.

Ok, so I was getting nothing I wanted with this lot. So I got on the phone to a friend that I knew would be nicer. “You been ill?” she demanded to know with my first hello. I gave up. I asked Father, with the fabulously coaxing note that only a daughter can use to get what she wants. He said, “I told you to stay home, you sound awful.” So I retreated into my head and replayed the scene where I had laryngitis a few years ago and had asked my mother whether I sounded sexy and wonderful; she successfully dampened me with “You sound sick.”

I felt like Mick Jagger; no satisfaction to be had anywhere. I think I will talk to Small Cat instead. At least she only bites.