<b>Rahul Jacob:</b> Invitations to treasure

I received an unexpected phone call midweek. “I have just been to INA market. Will you come over for crab curry tomorrow?”  Even two years after moving back to India, I am often asked why I did so. The long answer is I wanted to do something radically, even, as it often seems, overwhelmingly different at work after years of being a foreign correspondent. The short answer is that standing in for British colleagues in the summers of 2011 and 2012 convinced me that Delhi has among the best dinner parties in the world. Nowhere else do you find your social calendar such a jumble of generations; the invitation for dinner on Thursday was from a spry 70-something artist. The same evening, I received a reminder for a birthday party on Saturday. “You better not come and cut. It is after all my 30th (birthday),” the text read.
 

This mix of casualness and courtesy, the occasionally furious political arguments that are not taken too seriously as people mostly part on friendly terms and the fabulous food make for a winning combination. When I left Hong Kong, a college-mate’s wife told me at a farewell, “We want to see your photo at Page 3 parties.” I have failed, but more than ample compensation has been reuniting with college buddies and family friends, who behave as if I never left. In a fortnight when pop economists have mangled the latest Census data to insinuate that the Christian population is increasing much faster than the Sikh population and correlated that to the foreign funding the community’s NGOs receive, I feel blessed even as an avowed agnostic to have a frequent place at the dining table of homes where the name-plates read Parshad, Puri, Paul, Thapar and Singh. Having listened to the beautiful kirtans at three bhogs in the last 18 months, the most recent being last week at the restful Gurdwara Dam Dama Sahib near Humayun’s Tomb, I came away with the unexplainable feeling that I want my wake to include that music too.

In this awful ‘Age of Arnab’, when the airwaves are dominated by one tawdry saga after another, I have mostly been able to escape television by going out to dinner. On Monday, a friend invited me to dinner with Anjali Gopalan, the head of Naz Foundation, who I have long been in awe of. I learned that the foundation is still hopeful about the prospects for the curative petition filed on Section 377 that might in time lead to the redressal of the Supreme Court ruling in 2013. The country might yet get a respite from a narrow interpretation of the rights of homosexuals, transgender people and indeed heterosexuals — or at least those interested in activities other than reproductive sex in the privacy of their bedrooms — now once again proscribed by British penal codes from the 19th century.

On Tuesday, I received an email from Priya Paul, an invitation to my favourite sort of dinner at her home — divine ghar ka khana off a tray in the TV room. She filled me in on a close Calcutta childhood friend’s 50th birthday party that I had missed in mid-August. Looking at videos, I tried to guess who was who of our childhood friends wearing Tina Turner-style wigs for one evening’s entertainment. I chanced on a book of her father’s by Marshall Goldman on the difficulties Russia faced while trying to embrace Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. It ought to be required reading in North Block today.

On Wednesday, I called Romila Thapar to say I was going to get to her home closer to 9.30 pm. It was casual, she replied, but insisted I came wearing a lungi. (We share a passion for Sri Lankan lungis) “I hope you remembered to take one to work this morning,” she said, which made me laugh out loud. I  duly stopped at home to change. The dinner guests included her cousin Premila, who taught me to read intelligently by introducing me to Virginia Woolf  when I was in and out of her home while  in college. The indomitable Thapar told us of giving the Asghar Ali Engineer lecture recently at Jamia Millia Islamia on secularism and calling for a uniform civil code. At lunch afterwards, she was congratulated by several people.

The following day, I was at Anjolie Ela Menon’s home for delicious crab curry with her husband, daughter-in-law and a Kolkata contemporary, who is brave enough to run a tea estate in Naxalbari. I know her as the fond ‘Aunty Julie’ of close friends, but on Thursday I discovered that her mother and she stayed with my maternal granduncle, Victor Paranjoti, and his family for a month at the time of the Partition while her father, a doctor in the military, continued to work in Lahore. My late mother would have been pleased to hear this as she adored Ela Menon’s work. To my surprise as I got up to leave, her husband, Raja Menon, realised he had sailed in regattas in competition with my parents in the little dinghys that miraculously moved, despite the tides and silt of the Hooghly in Kolkata. “Your father was a very good sailor,” he said. I found myself fighting back tears of pride.

I promised myself I was staying home on Friday, but received a call from Malvika Singh. I treasure invitations to her home the way Bertie Wooster did to eat the food of chef Anatole at Aunt Dahlia's. “I want to discuss Nehru,” she said. When parsing over Census data to invent enemies has become a pastime, somehow overlooking that we will be a country of 1.7 billion people when our population peaks, that sounded an unalloyed pleasure. Of course, I said yes.