The standard time people issue a dinner invitation in Delhi is for eight-ish, loosely and flexibly open for translation to mean anything from eight-thirty onwards till, I suppose, midnight. Certainly, when we have guests for dinner, my wife decides to take a shower around nine o’ clock, sometimes (but not always) managing to be ready before the first guests start trooping in by ten or soon after.
Till a few years back I was foolish enough to get into a squabble over such issues, having grown up in army cantonments where time was subject to as much discipline as manners. “You aren’t ready,” I’d start fussing around 7:30, to which my wife would pay no attention; by the time I was catatonic with anxiety, she’d decide to re-arrange the flowers, or change the living room setting, or add an extra salad to the meal, thereby delaying the process further.
“What,” I’d explode with rage, “if the guests arrive and you aren’t ready?” “Then give them a drink and entertain them,” she’d say, ignoring my rising blood pressure. “But why can’t you be ready in time?” I’d implore. “Because I’d feel foolish dressing up and sitting down hours before anyone is going to turn up,” she’d explain — which, viewed from her perspective, made sense.
If getting her dressed for dinner at home was heavy going, it was a cakewalk compared to getting her out of the house for a party. She’d change her mind about her clothes, do and then re-do her hair, have “urgent” conversations with everyone from her sister to her best friend Sarla, fuss over the laundry, dust the books, send emails, order grocery over the phone, look for lost keys, slip out for some gossip with the neighbours, decide to catch up with the day’s newspaper or last week’s magazines, do her nails, set her cupboard, tally accounts, clean the fridge, tick off the cook — anything that kept her from actually getting ready.
Nor was getting ready any guarantee that we could then leave — she’d want to change her heels, take off her nail-polish and paint her nails again, call the neighbours to show them what she was wearing, disappear into the bathroom to emerge in a changed outfit, have a bowl of soup because, well, because. In all of this, the problem lay not just in being perpetually late, but in being late for events that should have (but rarely) began in time: A play, a wine-paired meal, or a book reading. Worse still were events connected with diplomats, or foreigners, where things did begin in time (allowing for a fifteen minute delay) so often we walked in when our hosts were leaving.
To overcome the problem, I started bringing forward the time our hosts expected us by between a half hour and an hour (and keeping the invitation cards hidden), which helped somewhat, though my wife sometimes wondered why we now seemed to arrive at functions before the majority of the other guests rather than with them.
But it was because of this fortuitous happenstance that we found ourselves arriving a mere hour later than we were expected at a sit-down dinner, rather than the two hours that it might otherwise have been, to find our host keeping us standing for a further half-hour because, of course, other guests had decided that showing up in time belied a social desperation they did not wish to communicate. When a guest speaker at the head table reprimanded Dilliwallahs for their errant ways, my wife tut-tutted about the chronically late: “Imagine,” she whispered angrily, “all of us being blamed for their careless ways.” Of course, the next evening, we only set out at 10:30 pm — “But then”, retorted my wife, “it isn’t as if it’s a formal affair!”