If you drove down one of the semi-prominent streets in the city's largest shopping area tonight, you'd come across a restaurant of some fame bedecked with vines of wires with red and yellow bulbs glowing on them. Aquaria is its name, but larger than the board that declares that is one that declares "50th Wedding Anniversary!", and yes, with a real and provocatively slanted exclamation mark.
Of course, three hours still remain for the dinner party to commence but the womenfolk are already busy getting the proportions of mascara and ugliness right on their faces. I must be careful, I tell myself, as I wait patiently before everyone has departed to the venue so I can ready myself in peace and silence. With one hand reaching out for coffee and the other fending off a cousin's head curiously close to my laptop to see what's keeping her brother busy, I spend my evening all the while dully astonished by how the plasticity had slipped everyone's mind... or perhaps their determination in keeping it from conquering the festive mood.
A few weeks ago, my mother and my sister returned from somewhere in South America after my father had finally been transferred to a city in India with the company he worked for. Since I was temporarily lodged with my maternal grandparents before I went off to college, they joined us, and suddenly, we were nine people in a 2 BHK: grandpa, grandma, an uncle, an aunt, their two kids, and me and my mum and my sister. Not a day had passed when summer decided to join us as well.
Barely 10 days before the occasion, my grandma received a phone call from one of her cousins, a cousin who'd been thrown a surprise party by her son for her 40th wedding anniversary. As soon as the call ended, there was an awkward silence in the house. Everyone knew paati was a bit of a tempestuous gossip-monger, and as soon as her sour joy would turn into envy, a rant would follow. And it did, and it did. In fact, on second thought, it wasn't a rant as much as it was a lecture on the duties of children towards their gossiping parents, it was a lecture on how siblings existed only so the traditional rat race could be inherited from one generation to another. Thatha (grandpa), a silent man as ever, only grunted. For the much more important occasion of his turning 80, he'd called us fools to try and celebrate anything.
As afternoon turned to evening, and evening turned to night, the presence of paati's voice faded but her eyes seemed to bore into us the expectations that burned in her soul. My uncle did the smarter thing and decided to meet her halfway: he bought dinner instead of having her cook and, as we expected, she wasn't one to be cowed down this time. Grudgingly enough, my mum and my aunt decided to throw a dinner party in her honour and invite her closest relatives, about 20 of them.
Soon, phone numbers were being looked up, the family tree was being drawn up, the menu was being pieced together, and family politics were being called into question. The cousin who'd started it all, of course, was invited first. As commitment to the initiative mounted day after day, so also did the scale and scope of the investiture: everyday paati called up a distant brother or a sister, the list of invitees was modified; everyday paati expressed discontentment with an arrangement, the restaurant was duly notified; everyday paati seemed intriguingly contented, we trod more carefully around the house.
Soon, all that had happened lost every mark of the grudge we bore against the matriarch for "forcing" us to spend Rs. 20,000 on nothings because the tables had turned enough: the guilt, now, was oozing out of our every action and inaction. We were now all condemnable proselytes of a righteous cause, and this was our chance to erase clean the chargesheet.
Behold! The day was come. It rained cats and dogs outside as I readied myself. My diminutive shadow of an uncle - albeit being a celebrated social worker - waited outside on his bike: may be that the rain was expected to cleanse his lack of affection, in paati's eyes he would now be the knight who rode in the rain.
I joined him a few minutes later and by the time we made it to Aquaria, the umbrella hadn't done anything against the wind-blown rain soaking our pricey garbs. More than 50 people had shown up and the street was lined with cars; the police was there, perhaps suspecting the presence of mafioso; the word had spread enough to have relatives call in to congratulate from exotic places like Vijayawada and Bangalore. Finally, the piece de resistance: paati booming on the mike about what such a happy occasion this was, the spontaneous love of her children and grandchildren embracing her like a warm hug after all these wonderful years.
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