Learnings from the festive season and mistakes to repeat next year.
1. Feasting: Cows have four compartments in their stomachs. Humans, even more. An extra compartment for mithai (sweets), for example. At each house you visit during the festival season, no matter how full you already are, there’s always space for ‘You must try this, special homemade’. How rude it is to say no to your kind hostess.
2. Gifting: Everyone is into recycling, when it comes to gifts. The fancier, the more the urgency with which it gets recycled. How could you ever eat out of this pretty glass bowl with beads? One bead breaks and it’s useless. Better send it onwards for someone else to break. Candles and lamps get recycled at the speed of light. If you were to keep all the fancy candles you received, your bonfire would be seen from Jupiter.
3. Cleaning: Spring cleaning before the festival is a true revelation. You find things you never knew you possessed, including cockroaches. Uninvited termites have been tenanting your cabinets. And your tenancy contract specifically prohibits leasing out any parts of your apartment.
4. Dressing: Years of slouching through the pandemic in pyjamas have rendered every other item of clothing hostile. Cost-a-bomb kurtas now pretend they were never yours. They refuse to accommodate your new bulges which you promise you’ll get rid of soon, along with the cockroaches. But for now, you have nothing to wear to festive parties where everyone else looks stunning and svelte. Even your shoes have shrunk. Depression demands you open up the fifth stomach at once and pop a few boondi ladoo in. After all, they remind you of your current shape. Like-like should stick together.
5. Hosting: Whenever you throw a party, it is mandatory to forget to invite someone. ‘But I’m your FB friend,’ they will complain and unfriend you immediately. You will go on to commit further blunders. You will serve sweets to the diabetic guests and chicken kebab to vegans and the spice level will always be wrong; which panting guests with watering eyes will say is fine before rushing to the loo. Remember to keep your restroom sparkling, and whisk away the embarrassing medicines and hair dyes to secret spots only the termites and you know about.
6. Celebrating: It is very, very nice to meet friends again. You never realised how much you missed losing money. You go on playing cards late into the night, eating, drinking, chatting, maskless. How interesting the other halves of everyone’s faces are. Sharing plates, sharing germs – this is what life is about.
Where Jane De Suza, the author of Happily Never After, talks about the week’s quirks, quacks and hacks
