Sweet Revenge
I’m Indian and in my country, until a few years ago, you could get steel utensils from door-to-door vendors in exchange for clothes. This barter system still exists in villages and some small towns. My grandmother, being the insane hoarder that she was, loved getting utensils in this manner. Utensils that no one else was allowed to touch, that she would never use and would only gather dust in her room.
Any time my stepmom or my dad tried to donate our old clothes to charity, she would throw a hissy fit. She’d collect all the clothes we weren’t going to wear anymore so she could exchange them for pots and pans. At times she would take it a step further and demand clothes that we were still going to wear. She would insist that they don’t fit us anymore, or some other argument to get us to hand them over.
Seriously, we had to sometimes fight her to keep our clothes. Oh but she never, I mean NEVER, gave away her own clothes. She only took garments from others, namely me, my dad, my stepmom, and my stepbrother. When I was around 21, I had just lost a lot of weight and needed new clothes. Yes, I lived with my parents. In India, you can’t afford to live independently unless you have a well-paying job and I was in college at that time.
So one day I went to a local store’s clearance sale and bought a bunch of new threads. I left them on my bed and went off to a friend’s place. When I returned a few hours later, my new clothes were gone! My dad, stepmom, and brother weren’t home, so I figured out instantly who must’ve taken them. I confronted the Grandmonster and asked what she’d done with my clothes.
She was sitting on her bed admiring her latest haul of pots and pans. Without even looking up, she told me my clothes were ugly and “too westernized”. And that she did the right thing by exchanging them for “something useful”. At that point, I lost it. I yelled, cursed at her, called her every name in the book. And she had the audacity to actually defend her actions.
That evening, there was a major showdown in our home. I was still livid and asked my dad exactly how long we were going to put up with her. My stepmother and I don’t get along, but when one of us was up against Grandmonster, the other always lent her support. This was no different, and my stepmother agreed with me wholeheartedly.
My dad told Grandmonster that she was now forbidden from entering my room without my prior permission. She started to fake cry and said we were all being so cruel to her. My dad later came to my room and said he would make it up to me and buy me new clothes. I, of course, was still livid. And I wasn’t about to let that witch have this victory. So I got my revenge.
My grandmother needed sleeping pills to fall asleep. She took them even during the day. So a few days later, I snuck into her room during her afternoon nap. I opened her “utensils trunk” (yes, she had a whole trunk full of them) and took out a whole bunch of her beloved pots, glasses, plates etc. I shut the lid quietly and exited. I went straight to an old-age shelter that was nearby.
I donated the utensils and earned the joy of giving and the taste of sweet, sweet revenge. I didn’t tell anyone what I had done and just waited for Grandmonster to discover her loss. Which she did, just a few days later. It happened in the evening. I was in the kitchen cooking dinner when I heard her ear-piercing wailings about how someone had pilfered from her utensils chest.
A satisfied smile spread across my face. My dad called me into Grandmonster’s room and asked if I knew anything about the missing utensils. I admitted that I had taken and donated them. Grandmonster looked like her head would explode. I calmly told her I had done the right thing because those utensils were “ugly” and that the shelter needed them more.
And clearly, if she could come into my room and take my things without asking, I could jolly well do the same! I think my dad was upset with me but really had nothing to say to me. He spent the next hour or so trying to calm his mother down. I slept so well that night. When Grandmonster passed a few years later, the first of her belongings that we got rid of were those utensils.