A mid-week break is always welcome, and the children are making plans for what to make of their "holiday" the day Delhi votes for a new government on December 4. "You could vote," I tried saying, but what with moving home and being struck off the electoral roles - or being "unregistered" - we're at a bit of a loose end with nothing to do but twiddle our thumbs while the rest of the city goes out to do the moral thing by the country and democracy.
We could go to the club, of course, but polling days are, alas, dry days - which means they won't serve you a Bloody Mary, not even if you ask them to disguise it in a coffee mug, so what's the fun of sitting in the sun with - god help us! - a fresh lime soda and not even the promise of some vodka to fortify it with. "I've never understood why we can't have a drink, it's so bloody uncivilised," Sarla had protested, so, of course, she's decided to carry a hip flask to the polling booth (where she might proceed to do a headstand to prove her sobriety to the administrators - though, really, she would need to be tiddly to carry it off). "I'll tell them it's medicine," she giggled, so even though she doesn't know who she wants to vote for, she's all set for the objective. My driver, on the other hand, knows exactly who he's going to cast his vote for, and it isn't the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party.
"We could go see a movie," my daughter suggested, but it will hardly be fun to sit in an empty hall with everyone aware that we alone of Delhi's citizenry are failing to exercise our franchise. Ditto for going mall ratting. "I don't want people to know we aren't casting our vote," my conscientious son has insisted, so going out anywhere has been struck off the day's plan. We could watch television but my wife says they'll probably show reruns of patriotic films through the day, or have news anchors wrongly predicting the polls, which has got the family's collective thumb's down.
"I could call friends home for lunch," I mentioned to my wife - a brave suggestion considering the cook is on leave - but she withdrew the invitation when Padma said she'd leave her mother-in-law with us while she went out to vote, and Mohini said she and her husband would come only after they'd queued up at the polling booth, so if they got late could they stay for dinner as well? "The cheek," exclaimed my wife, but then she was also smarting because Sarla had called her a middle-class traitor for not voting regardless of any reason. "As if I want to feed someone who is ungrateful," she sniffed, forgetting that it was I who had offered to cook in the first place.
It being right in the middle of the week, going out for even an overnighter isn't much of an option either. Nor has anyone bothered to ask us to their home even though my wife says she's aware that Biswajeet is hosting a beer bash on his terrace. "They're disenfranchising our friendship because you informed everyone that we won't be voting," she explained angrily. Having, thus, been cast out by our peer group of voters, we'll probably end up doing on the day what we would have otherwise anyway - working, even if from home.
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