4 min readJul 18, 2026 07:07 AM IST First published on: Jul 18, 2026 at 07:00 AM ISTEWP is a good acronym. It feeds off the established seriousness of the EPW, the Economic and Political Weekly. And perhaps because it begins with “E”, it also hides the low energy. I propose the registration of the Exhausted Wives’ Party as a political bloc. “E” words have been ruling our world — email, e-commerce, e-business, e-wallet. Half the world, or at least much of the married world, has been speaking of another “e”. Exhaustion. But perhaps because women have to say everything a few times to be heard (I wish we were like OTPs that didn’t work if not paid attention right away), no one’s noticed; or it comes with our condition of existence, like having anaemia.It’s the collective exhaustion of women that I felt as I read two books recently — one by a man, the other by a woman. The first by the historian Gyanendra Pandey, Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India, a book — I am still surprised at my audacity — I read in the confessional tradition: A man’s belated admission of female labour that allows everything, including his discipline, to live and prosper. As I read through the list of famous men who built their careers on the unacknowledged labour of women, Mohandas Gandhi, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Rahul Sankrityayan, and others, I found myself adding other names: Men in my family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, writers and artists I knew, even admired. “Men touched food — to eat, though not to cook or prepare it. They touched beds, or sheets, or makeshift mattresses on the floor — to sleep, but not to tidy or clean them,” writes Pandey.AdvertisementThe other book is Mannu Bhandari’s memoir, This Too is a Story. Reading about her husband, the Hindi writer Rajendra Yadav, who justified his adulterous life by “sometimes invoking modernity, sometimes in the name of his writing and sometimes some other concocted bit of philosophy that could prove him right”, I found myself thinking of the male professors at Indian universities who taught feminist theory.What Bhandari writes about her husband applies equally to their lives: “According to him, a wife should be like a nurse whose job was to serve her husband without expecting anything in return.” There’s a semiotic of this division everywhere — women exhausted from gathering, cutting, cooking for a puja, a male priest who arrives after the arrangement is done and chants the mantras; women carrying a child for nine months, whose surname comes from the man.As I was finishing reading Bhandari’s memoir, I read about Becca Scott in The Independent. She’d been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “When she left her husband, it disappeared.” The symptoms are all around us, exhaustion churning into anger, in films like Juice or Mrs., and now even condensed cheekily into a slogan on a tee: “Thak gayi”.AdvertisementMultitasking was sold to us like the smartphone — that it was possible for one device to do everything; that women could be like the multifunctional kitchen gadgets they used, the OTG, or the mixer-grinder. There’s a reason it’s called “running” a family. Running a marathon at a sprinter’s speed between home and the workplace, caregiving and childrearing, conventions and capitalism, archiving to-do lists in the head without a pause button, plumbing the imagination necessary to fix menus thrice a day, every day of being alive, the emotional labour of explanations and discussions that have the boniness of arguments, and pleas to be seen as someone whose engine is struggling to reach ignition temperature. And — always living on the “and” — living on the conjunction while breaking apart, always falling behind, always catching up, always apologising for having forgotten something, always thinking of the next thing to be done.you may likeOccasionally, when I have the opportunity to catch a young couple on screen waiting to say “the three words” to each other, it’s not “I love you” that I’m able to think of but “I am exhausted”. The protocol for responding to “I love you” is to add “too”. Here too, almost: “We are exhausted doing the work of two.” This too is a story.Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor, Ashoka University. Views are personal