Diwali card parties: Gamble on, you little Lakshmi's helpers
If just ten percent of the crores gambled away at Dipavali card parties, just in Delhi, was spent on social work, the blessings of India’s widows and orphans would probably outweigh Mahalakshmi’s on the cosmic scales. But who’s doing karmic calculations? Dipavali card parties in some Delhi "farmhouses" start at five lakh rupees, for heaven’s sake: get your "Can Play" token at the door or get back out there on the highway and keep going…to Ulan Bator, which went broke gambling away Mongolia’s money in the naughty 90s though not precisely at teen patti. Same principle, though.
Where does India get her mad gambling gene that goes for broke every year at Dipavali? It’s not a poor country thing because we were rather rich until the 19th century. We also know that the greatest gambler of all time, literally of epic proportions, was Yudhishtir in the Mahabharata and he was a king. Actually he got to be an emperor after he performed the Rajasuya sacrifice, which was the Vedic way of telling everybody. In a kinda-sorta epic continuum, the official reason people throw card parties today is "religious" – to "entice" fortune aka the Goddess of Wealth aka Lakshmi into their lives.
Whoever wins takes it as a good omen for the whole year ahead. Whoever loses, morphs instantly into a worrywart and feels he can’t sleep without a Restyl (0.5 mg) or play a really good round of golf or sit under the municipal tap for a bath without losing his carbolic soap until Dipavali rolls by again. And if your greedy personal maid knows about your Dipavali card parties, you have to let her know that you lost by leaving your party sandals upside down when you get home like "Ma" Cooch-Behar did.
It’s all very odd and complicated, not that anyone who gambles is discouraged. It’s what people do and if you feebly or virtuously protest, someone is going to tell you to go drink a desi Pink Lady quietly in the corner because we’ve been gambling since the Early Iron Age well back in BC and the Rig Veda (tenth Mandala, thirty-fourth Sukta) says so upfront in "The Gambler’s Lament" when they played with vibheedaka (Terminalia bellerica nuts, if someone has the gall to say “what?”) and called the dice "aksha".
You need to fix yourself a desi Pink Lady that minute and this is how you do it because everyone knows that devi loves a drink, so it’s religious, right? Skip the usual evil, sugary pink alcopops and Berlin-style elderflower cordials that may do for Poirot but not for khaata-peeta Hindustanis. Mix Bacardi, peach schnapps, ginger fizz, a good squirt of nimbu pani, soda and ice, knock it back and you’re good to go. Back into the “Why do we gamble at Dipavali?” kerfuffle, I mean.
I don’t for a minute buy the argument that gambling at Dipavali is lucky. It’s got nothing to do with Mahalakshmi and everything to do with the thrill of gaming in real life from way before they invented video games. Except this is for real so it’s knife-edge-thrilling and releases our inner risk-taker from inside all that Indian couch-potato blubber and if we’re too lazy for adventure sports or even huffing up the pag-dandi to the Pindari glacier past all those Sabras going crazy in their gap year, well, we can gamble.
We’ve always gambled, our gods like us to gamble, so drink another desi Pink Lady and stop looking like bad luck incarnate with that long, disapproving face, please? What are you, the big grump at the bottom of a totem pole? That’s feathers, not dots, so frowns are so not culturally appropriate at a Dipavali card party, it’s all about Lakshmi, see?
Funny how nobody thinks how bad these Dipavali card parties make Lakshmi look… she looks so bad, so bad, like someone who likes greed, showing-off, carbolic soap and Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls (well, I can live with the liking Marlon Brando part). But you know what I mean? If you really, truly loved Lakshmi, you’d want to be her little helper, right, and put the poor bang in the middle of things? We’d do the parties anyway.