Guest Night

There has been a routine behind guests coming home for dinner for as long as I can remember. It usually begins in early afternoon in the kitchen and ends with dessert and/or a cup of kehva (which inevitably results in someone asking my Mum about the recipe/ingredients). Over the years, even our little skirmishes before the arrival of the guests - what each person should wear, when we should emerge from the bedroom (we have a tendency of never greeting the guests at the door as a full complement), what should be laid out on the dining table - have started to follow similar patterns.

We tend to visit the same topics over the course of the pre-dinner conversation as well - a wide range of moral-of-the-story anecdotes, the state of higher education in India, how everything around us is now a big business, a few funny stories about mutual friends, a couple of semi-stories that never reach their conclusion because it turns out that the acquaintance one person in the conversation is talking about is unknown to everyone else, a couple of stories about how some acquaintances are known to everyone else (and hence the 'what a small world' conclusion) and, more recently, owing to the direction my life has taken in the last few years, everyone's two cents on law and the legal profession. 

Dinner draws those threads into an even bigger tangle - more stories emerge and it turns out that we know more people than we did an hour or so ago. However, the dialogue is less intense now, due to the greater attention to the food on the table. From a culinary perspective, the dinners we host are never too complicated - we're restricted by my Mum's refusal to present at dinner something that hasn't been made in the kitchen that day (cumulative conditions) and by the inability of the rest of us to cook anything at all. Hence, the focus tends to be on ensuring that the guests have eaten enough, though we're not nearly as bad as some of our relatives for whom guests refusing a second (or, in cases of extremely disagreeable relatives, a third) serving is a treasonable offence, or at least a reason to put those guests at the back of the line of people to be invited to dinner again sometime. 

Once dinner is done, there is a five-minute interlude where nothing seems to happen - this appears to me to be a combination of the satisfaction of being well-fed, the minimal turnaround time we (as hosts) have in getting the next leg of the evening ready and moving the venue away from the dining table and back into the living room, the guests' awkwardness in not knowing what to do while we go from being perfectly normal fellow dinner-eaters to suddenly scurrying around trying to wind up the dinner table and move dishes to the kitchen (any help by the guests in contributing to which is, of course, cheerily and summarily turned down) and the lingering thought in the back of everyone's mind that all the threads that have been so carelessly laid out now need to be packed in. 

The dessert and/or kehva part of the evening is like the recap to a saas-bahu episode - it is great that you could find the time to come, we totally have to do this again (on a larger scale, inviting all the hapless unknowing people we dragged into the conversation this evening, if possible), a reciprocal visit demand to the home of the guests is placed on record and immediately accepted, with a vague time-frame mooted but never finalised and a bullet-point plan of taking some discussions forward, sharing contacts of the abovementioned hapless unknowing persons and a promise to stay in touch and plan the next such dinner is drawn up.

We hosted one of these dinners today and I realised that no matter how long it's been since the last one and no matter how different the surroundings are of what we now call home, some things will never change.