If you’re reading this in the morning, aren’t hung over, and don’t have the kind of bags under your eyes that actor Salman Khan had to have surgically removed, you must have had a loser Diwali. At least, that’s what my wife would have you believe, which is why we seem to have spent the last fortnight out late-night partying instead of warming our middle-aged bones under a comforter with hot-water bags and a snifter of cognac by the bedside.
Fifty might be the new thirty, but it takes its toll and I probably looked like Rip Van Winkle having a bad hair day when the alarm went off in the mornings, which seemed to be as soon as I’d hit the pillow, or at least very soon after, since it was usually dawn by the time we crawled back home night after night of not playing cards. And of course, it was my wife’s best friend Sarla’s fault — or so my wife insisted. Once upon a time, or until last year, we restricted our Diwali card playing to the neighbourhood, complete with dinners that no one ate because everyone was busy drinking, and it didn’t matter how late it got because home was just a walk away after Padmini had been coaxed to sing, Chanda had shared her cache of old jokes, and Sarla had demonstrated her mandatory headstand party trick.
This year, Sarla said she’d had enough parties to last a lifetime and would neither host nor attend any Diwali gig (my wife explained it was because her husband had cut her budget so she had no new wardrobe of sarees and jewellery with which to dazzle everyone); Padma echoed the decision because she clones herself on Sarla; Padmini said she didn’t want to play cards with wimps at low stakes; Chanda insisted her apartment was under renovation — so the fourth-floor wallahs must have felt like fools for having begun the season with a bash three weeks ago, which no one reciprocated since no one appeared to be playing cards anyway.
It turned out, Padma and Chanda and Padmini were playing cards — but surreptitiously. They’d switch off the lights, put their mobiles on silent mode and gather like spies, which couldn’t have been a lot of fun. At any rate, my wife said, “This year we will attend Diwali parties at our other friends’ homes,” even if it meant that we only ever ventured out close to midnight, when all the card-playing groups had formed, and we could claim we didn’t really play cards, the reason for which was the mindboggling stakes that required bundles of green and red currency notes to be moved around like confetti. When people are winning in crores, or losing in lakhs, they don’t like to wind up early, causing the serving of dinner to be delayed, as a result of which we’d come home with the milkman, tired and intoxicated, which my wife would then follow up with phone calls to Sarla to say, “What a good time we’re having this year,” even though it seemed like torture to venture out yet again in the evening.
Which is why I was glad when my wife relented finally to host a Diwali party “on Diwali day, silly,” she told Sarla, and even though it meant I probably served drinks the whole evening, the cook nagged about when to lay dinner, everyone kept a hawk’s eye to spot anyone trying to cheat at cards, Padmini sang, Chanda told her stale jokes and Sarla did her mandatory headstand, I at least didn’t have to drive back home … and if you’re reading this first thing in the morning fully rested and sans hangover, you couldn’t have had a happening Diwali — loser!
