Our friends haven’t had a party in months, blaming it on the weather. True, it has been a little hot, and though you can have everything from the bar services to the main course catered, the thought of being in a room with only elbow-space between guests as they start to perspire after their third whiskies, is too awful to envision. “Imagine a packed Metro coach,” explains my son, “at the end of the day” — just the thought is enough to put you off your sashimi…
Or maybe I should qualify that to say our Indian pals have been prevaricating with the entertainment while our diplomat and expat buddies have been generous about bingeing with their friends. But these invitations, far from taking the ennui off the summer heat, are something to be dreaded. “Oh dear,” says my wife, “the Masons are having a party again.” “How dreadful,” I agree, “do you think we could take a rain check, or tell them we’re out of town, or…” “Stop,” says my wife, “we’ll have to go, but promise me we can leave after one beer.”
The Masons are a lovely couple, but like the other foreigners in town, they seem to be more Indian than most Indians, who are turning increasingly chi-chi about air conditioning and dress codes and designer distractions. While Sarla and company fuss over glassware and lighting, music and cooling, the Masons, the Edwards, the Newlys and the van-Dams have gone native with a vengeance. They host garden parties in, literally, their gardens, without mist fans – or even any fans at all – dumping the beer and the wine in a tub of bazaar ice, getting the local caterer to tandoor-up some kebabs and leaving it to you to find the unmatched glassware that may require you to drink your tepid wine out of a whisky tumbler.
Everyone sweats a great deal, particularly since the humidity levels have scorched up to unprecedented levels, the Indians more so since the dress code – “casual” – means different things to the occidental and the oriental. Our foreign hosts and their peers think nothing of appearing in shorts, Ts and flip-flops; the Indian guests think they’re under-dressed even in jeans and starched shirts. In the end, nothing matters because everyone’s so soaked in perspiration, you’d think you were at a rain dance.
What’s peculiar is that the foreigners seem to actually enjoy it — heat, humidity and all. Sarla, Padma and my wife are the first to break the quorum, sneaking indoors “to visit the washroom”, from where it’s a small step to “checking out the art” or “the books” in the living room, to settling down on the sofas and switching on the air conditioner. Before long, they’re joined by more friends, or strangers – united only for being Indian – and practicing a social discrimination that segregates the desis from the firangis.
Nor is the new apartheid the only differentiator. Our foreign friends discuss plans to go to Karim’s near Jama Masjid, the Indians talk of their dining experiences at five-star restaurants; the foreigners are game for bargain shopping at Sarojini Nagar, while Sarla and her sorority won’t step outside the air-conditioned malls; the firangs love Delhi in summer when the city is free of the natives, those inhabitants having fled to cooler continents where it strikes you that it isn’t so impossible that every sixth human is an Indian after all. The problem lies in explaining to our expat friends that Indians don’t do summer parties, so though we’ll attend them because we’ve been invited, don’t expect us to reciprocate, as my wife says, “any time soon.”