The Afternoon Visitors

 

When I was growing up in Mumbai in the late ‘50s and the ‘60’s, we often had

visitors. Or to be precise, my grandparents did. After the many decades

they had spent in the south and north of India and my grandfather’s long

and steady career in the government’s Ministry of Finance, they had

numerous friends and acquaintances in addition to our large and expanding

extended family network.

In their role as elders, they received visitors who were contemporaries,

peers, old friends, their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, siblings,

cousins, nieces, nephews, other relatives close and distant, removed by varying

degrees, kin by marriage or blood or both. 

Often they would call out to us to join them - my mother and the three of

us - to introduce us and explain the intricate connections to us. These visits

knit us all into a kind of large colorful social fabric, providing ongoing

cognitive stimulus to our young imaginations working out these interwoven webs

of relationships in our minds long after the situations had come and gone.

The visits often happened unexpectedly. It was generally acceptable back

then for people to just drop in unannounced at any time of day except

perhaps during siesta hour, which was in fact made up of the two hours or so

that tended to follow the lunch hour between 12 and 1. Grownups zealously

guarded their after-lunch nap-time from invasion or interruption; it was a

time when most households would be at their quietest during the day. It

seemed that everyone, even our dog Dopey, would be taking a nap but me,

bright-eyed, eager and wide-awake, at age 7 or 8. Often, my grandmother or

mother would cajole me to lie down next to them for a shut-eye but within a

few minutes, as they drifted into sleep, I would be up, creeping quietly out

the bedroom door. 

As I looked for things to do to occupy myself until everyone awoke and we

got ready for tea-time at 4, I would often wish for afternoon visitors to

arrive to liven things up. And nine times out of ten, they did. Afternoon

visitors were in a category by themselves, different from morning or evening

visitors or people we invited to lunch or tea or dinner. I soon learned to tell

them all apart.

Morning visitors were usually people on errands, dropping in to deliver

something from someone else, or to collect something we had for them or

someone else. Their visits were brief, to the point and they often looked at

the clock as they spoke. Our evening visitors were different, they usually

arrived after a busy day spent elsewhere doing something and dropped in to

pay a social visit that they felt was due, and were often on their way home.

They would accept my grandmother’s warm offer of tea and snacks and stay

to chat with her and my grandfather for an hour or so before taking their

leave so as to get home in time for dinner with the rest of their family. An

occasional evening visitor would stay on for dinner at my grandparents’

insistence, like my grandmother’s youngest brother or her nephew, my

favorite uncle.

But afternoon visitors were in a category by themselves. They tended to be

the women in the family, sometimes multi-generational and stay-at-home

(i.e., they did not work outside the home) and sometimes one or more of

their children or an out-of-town visitor or two would accompany them on

visits to relatives and friends. Or they were whole families visiting town,

making the rounds calling on people they knew. Afternoon visitors also

seemed to know the value of siestas so they often arrived after the usual

siesta hours, about 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon. Occasionally, they would

mention having had early lunches followed by quick short siestas that they

themselves took, and setting out so that they could fit in their visits before

dinnertime.

Afternoon visits were different in many ways. They were more relaxed, less

rushed or focused and it was assumed that the visitors would stay for tea.

Dinner-time was still remote and the feeling was that of an abundance of time

and much conviviality. Everyone, hosts and guests, were generally refreshed

from the lunch and naps they had had, beginning to feel mellowed and euphoric

from the reunions that some of these visits enabled and symbolized, and

immensely cheerful at the prospect of hot steaming cups of tea on the way

accompanied by favorite traditional snacks. 

At least a couple of times a week, after her siesta, my grandmother would be

pottering in the kitchen and my mother would on occasion join her, mixing,

kneading and rolling out dough - flour, milk, sugar, butter or oil and condiments

in various combinations to make a variety of Indian snacks, steamed, baked or

fried. Khadis (like fudge), maalpoories (sweet soft fried cakes), Phenories

(layered pastries), tukdae (little fried diamond-shaped puffs ranging from

salty to sweet to spicy, chakklis (fried salted pretzel-like savories) and

occasionally, the Parsi nankhatai, the little rounded sweet cookies, that we

would send down to the bakery around the corner to bake in their oven until

they were perfect because our’s didn’t quite do it for some reason. These

were all side-accompaniments to the main tea-time snacks like upma, usli,

idlis, pollae (dosa) and so forth. 

Many of our visitors seemed all too aware of my grandmother’s reputed culinary

talents and her regular bouts of snack-production in our kitchen. Sometimes we

suspected that some of our afternoon visitors plotted and planned to visit close

to teatime because they knew what was in store for them. Everyone stayed as

long as they could, swilling second and third cups of tea and munching the snacks,

murmuring delirious praise while my grandmother would recite her recipe in

measures involving handfuls and pinches. Everyone would be talking nineteen to

dozen as though they would never stop. But finally they would take their leave,

sated and happy, moving in gradual stages from the drawing room to the balcony

and then the head of the staircase. Then from downstairs walking along the

crazy-tiled path to the main road beyond the gate, they would look up and wave

to us and call out long words of parting as though these had to suffice until we

met again. And we would look down and wave at them until they were out of sight,

everyone heaving satisfied sighs.

At times, we were those afternoon visitors in someone else’s house, being hosted

and feted through the array of snacks from their kitchen. Many of these two and

three hour-long visits were immensely satisfying. We children would be playing with

our peers, our same-age friends or cousins, the adults engaging with their

counterparts, catching up on events in their lives and those of the larger families

and community, exchanging news, confidences, until we would look at the clock,

startle, take our leave and then start back home so that we reached well before

dinner time. 

Sometimes, only the adults would go, leaving us in someone’s care. They would explain

that it would not be suitable for us children to go because the occasion would be a

somber one. Someone was sick or seriously ill, or sometimes, when they acted all

mysterious and would not explain, I began to realize that it was because someone had

died. My mother would be tightlipped and serious and my grandmother would be

mopping her eyes and sniffling. She would reminisce about something or the other

that we really could not connect to anything but we knew it was a serious matter and

one for the grownups to tackle in their way.

My grandparents awoke early every morning and my grandfather would advertise that

fact to everyone in the neighborhood within hearing distance by turning on the radio

in their bedroom just before Akashvaani beamed out its morning welcome at dawn.

For years, I would awake to its inspiring and haunting signature-theme tune and then

turn over for a bout of sleep before I had to wake up. Then the news, followed by a

stream of devotional songs, melodious and familiar to most of us who have grown up

in India or with things Indian.

In the kitchen, the sun would be coming up over the four-storeyed building behind

ours, flooding the kitchen with brilliant sunlight as my grandmother and the cook

brewed tea. Before taking a cup of tea to my grandfather sitting in his easy-chair

in the bedroom, however, my grandmother would walk to the front door to pick up

the Times of India newspaper that had been delivered that morning. While my

grandfather would call impatiently from the room to ask if the paper had arrived

yet, she would turn over the top right-hand corner to glance at the tidings column

- births, engagements, weddings and deaths column - right inside the front page.

She almost always found something of interest about someone she knew. She

would learn about someone she knew whose son or daughter had got engaged or

married or had a baby or who had died. Depending on what she found there, she

would beam and exclaim or cluck her tongue and shake her head wondering aloud

at the inscrutable ways of God.

As my grandfather would keep calling out impatiently to see what had happened to

his tea or the newspaper, my grandmother would detour en route, stopping at our

bedroom door to inform my mother in exaggerated stage whispers about what she

had just learned, beaming, praising God, or shaking her head and looking aghast. My

mother would take in the news, nodding and saying something appropriate. Later,

after breakfast, the two would commune together to discuss about what needed to

be done or conveyed and how. That’s when the afternoon visits would come into play.

It was often the only time they could go without inconveniencing the whole family.

Go after lunch and siesta and return by dinnertime. Make sure that someone can keep

an eye on the children meantime.

It was one such time that I remember vividly. My grandmother had looked at the

personal announcements column that morning and discovered that a longtime friend of

the family from their years in Shimla and Delhi, the wife of a contemporary of my

grandfather was no more. Shocked and saddened, she rushed to my mother to tell her,

went to inform my grandfather and then spent most of that morning silently mourning

the loss of her friend, shaking her head or stopping in mid-action with a blank look

every now and then. 

I heard her say the name of the lady and knew who it was. We had visited them a few

times and her granddaughter and I had played together. I remembered the lady in

question, quiet-spoken and hospitable. To my child’s mind, she was just old, in a manner

ageless like my grandmother. I had seen them chatting together animatedly at weddings

and other family events they had run into each other at. My grandmother had told me

about how they would pay visits to one another during those years spent in the north.

Now I was too young to feel anything but curiosity about what would happen next.

My grandmother and my mother decided that an afternoon visit that very day was

necessary, given the closeness of the friendship between my grandparents and them.

Together they planned the details and made arrangements for us to be cared for while

they were away. After an early lunch and a short siesta, they took a cab to somewhere

in Colaba where the family lived, in the heart of Mumbai. My father had arranged to go

there directly from his office so that they could all drive back home together in the car.

I imagined what might be happening based on what I had overheard before they left. I

expected that there would be a good deal of grieving and sighing and commiserating with

the family. I thought that my family would return saddened and quiet, based on other

similar situations in the past. 

To my surprise, and that of my grandfather who had not accompanied them that day but

kept us company, they all entered looking lively and in good spirits. It took some time for

them to communicate and for us to understand that the situation was far from what they

had believed when they left to go there. A mix-up, they said. A case of mistaken identity.

Who knew there was another couple with the same names!

It seemed that their impression had been dispelled as soon as they reached the house in

Colaba. The lady’s son and daughter-in-law had come rushing to the gate to halt and greet

them. They explained in low tones that it was all a mistake. Apparently someone with the

same first and last names had passed away, and she even had a husband who had the same

name as my grandmother’s friend’s husband, whose name was mentioned in the Times’

announcement. What a strange coincidence!

The son and daughter-in-law said that the phone had been ringing off the hook all day and

they had had a steady flow of visitors since morning. Then more came in the afternoon to

pay their respects. They asked everyone to stay to tea but not to let on to the elderly

lady about what had happened. She tended to be a bit superstitious and they did not want

her to know about it at all, in case she did not see the humor in it but perhaps a grim

hidden message.

The ploy worked. Everyone, relieved about the mix-up, mellowed and relaxed and socialized

to their hearts’ content. Tea and snacks flowed, more people came, stayed, ate and left.

Because of the old familial ties, my parents and grandmother stayed on a little longer, after

many of the guests had left. At one point, the center of everyone’s attention, the lady, the

heroine of the evening, apparently looked around, sighed contentedly and exclaimed half to

herself and half to the people left in the room something like: “How unexpected! We have

never had so many afternoon visitors at one time! I wonder why everyone decided to come

here today. But I think we all enjoyed it…”

I can imagine the looks that those hearing her might have exchanged. This story might have

ended here but…

You as the reader might dismiss this as over-dramatic and contrived, but the fact remains

that it was exactly one year later, down to the exact date, that the lady in question really

did pass away, still clueless about what had transpired a year before. Those she left behind

were incredulous and speechless once more, this time at the magnitude of the coincidence

involved.