By the strangest of coincidences, my wife and I had been bickering over the terminology of the word when, having decided to turn a family high-tea into a meal somewhere between a lunch and dinner, she was insistent on calling it “drunch”, while I suggested “lunner” as an alternative as “drunch” carried with it the suggestion of dinner before lunch, which made it all wrong. Like many of our debates, this too might have remained at the argumentative level had it not been followed by an invitation from a friend asking us to reserve our Sunday for – is there a God of Wrong English somewhere? – “drunch”. “Never,” said my wife “argue with me again because I’m always right,” though, of course, she was wrong because though our host intended to serve dinner, of lunch there was merely a suggestion, considering the partyathon was to start at 2:30 pm — which might be lunchtime for some, but was a Delhi code that guests came at their own risk before 5 p m, which made it tea-time, the meal, therefore, to be called “teanner”, or “tupper”, though I was beyond suggesting anything by then, particularly since my advice hadn’t been sought in the first place.
Despite what we told our hosts, a “drunch” isn’t such a hot idea because it means giving lunch a miss (in favour of brunch, which in Delhi starts around noon but can stretch all the way till tea-time) but also because it keeps you away from polo (and polo high-teas, which are served around 4:30 but end promptly after). It means the day is spent in a vaguely dissatisfying way trying to figure out the right time to arrive for the “drunch”. Having settled on 9 p m (which some might suggest is dinner time but which, for my wife at least, is just past her tea-time) we weren’t sure whether we’d timed it right, or wrong, since guests appeared to be doing all these things simultaneously: dancing, eating, talking, drinking, suggesting they’d been there a while and indicating that if we didn’t hasten up, we might be left to fend for ourselves while everyone went back home — “in time”, prompted our host hopefully.
Well, we didn’t intend to be party-poopers, even though at my wife’s suggestion I agreed to scribble down my observations on what goes into the making of a “drunch”. “Women guests at ‘drunch’ have to be terribly thin, dress in black, and boots are mandatory,” I wrote. “That’s because the dress code said ‘glamorous’,” pointed out my wife, which might have been the reason the women also wore hats – “so silly at night” sniggered my wife, though, speaking strictly for myself, I’m not as much of a stickler for convention – and the men hid behind shades, which was funny because they resembled a Mafiosi conference who appeared, I couldn’t help scribbling down, to be “gravitationally challenged”. “Here,” said my wife, “let me help you,” and taking the pencil from me, wrote, “Note to men invited for ‘drunch’: you cannot attend unless you are pot-bellied, or bald, preferably both,” which I thought was rude, but since I’d been told not to argue, I kept my own counsel.
As for my other observations – “‘Drunch’ food appears to be dinner by another name” – and quite excellent, for the record – while the more sophisticated music the deejay was playing got him no audience. But every time the speakers blared “Munni badnaam hui” or “Sheila ki jawani” – which, also for the record, seemed to be all the time – it would attract at least the women guests on the floor, however incongruous they might have appeared doing the Bollywood jhatkas in their hats and gowns which, I understood, seemed to be the whole high point of a “drunch” anyway.
