This article arrived quite late in my pipeline, but as it suits the season, especially this season, here it is. I don’t know what winter is associated with for everybody, but for us, it is specifically, singularly, almost religiously associated with one activity more than any other. This article is very much regional, very much ours, you would see a reflective image of our specific corner of the world in it.
There’s this phenomenon that happens reciprocally in winters, as if the season itself calls and the people answer. It’s one of the key defining specifics of winter here. Not that it’s exclusive to these months, but it’s as if everybody has collectively designated this particular activity for this particular part of the year, waiting with bated breath for the season to arrive so they can finally, finally perform it.
So this is all about that activity. And that activity involves a location.
This is the anatomy of it. This is the anatomy of a hall.
The Approach
If you ever care to walk on a winter evening, through the buzzing fog, stepping out of your home just as night is settling in, you would notice various things lighting up. Not just the moon in the sky or the streetlights on the road, but one more entity gets added to the winter landscape: house lights. You would believe that every other house is just ablaze with light, illuminated from foundation to rooftop as if preparing for some divine inspection. Just as you smell food cooking every day, that familiar scent of dinner wafting through the streets, this time you’d see the sight of celebration too.
These are homes lit in preparation, dressed in lights from head to toe, with buses and cars crowding their fronts.
And then those people emerge from those houses, step into vehicles, and move toward another destiny, a destination meant for a specific number of persons, all converging on the same inevitable point.
The Exteriorial Dissection
You arrive. You see the gates, grand or trying to be grand. The footpaths. The entering. The divide becomes explicit, the location reveals itself. You start moving toward it and you begin to observe the specimen in its natural habitat.
A big, spacious location. Most of the time an ostentatious one. A few more footsteps and you notice the vases, so many vases, flowers crushed beneath your feet, petals scattered above your head like confetti that jumped the gun.
And yes, people. A lot of them. Chattering, all of them chattering, don’t know what about, don’t know why, but they just are. They presume it to be for a specific and most needed cause, this gathering, this convergence. So yes, they are doing something, saying something to each other, performing the essential function of being seen and being heard.
A Ritual in Itself
Then you go in. A grand old entry. But the entry is not yet complete, not for everyone. For some, yes, that’s all there is: walk in, you’re done. But for others, there’s one more performance required here, one more small theatre of acknowledgment and obligation before they can be considered fully entered. You’ll know them when you see them, the ones who pause, who exchange, who complete the unspoken contract before proceeding.
The Interiorial Dissection
You step further inside and the chandeliers reveal themselves, big, old, trying desperately to impress. The lights, the roofs, the ceilings stretching upward as if reaching for significance. Everything and much more.
Go deeper and you will have before your eyes, spread out like organs in an operating theatre:
There will be palanquins perched like decorated hearts. There will be stalls functioning as the digestive system, processing endless streams of guests. There will be sofas, the lungs, where people rest and catch their breath. There will be curtains acting as delicate membranes, separating one section from another. There will be dishes arranged like vital fluids, coursing through the crowd. There will be spoons glinting like surgical instruments. There will be desserts piled high, the sweet lifeblood of the evening.
There will be all and all and more than all.
There will be the cherishing, the looking, the witnessing. There will be eyes meeting eyes, views overlapping views, sights layered upon sights. There will be much more than what can be contained in simple description.
A Study in Controlled Chaos
And now the hall watches, because the hall sees everything.
The hall observes as its carefully arranged tables become battlegrounds. It witnesses the subtle shoulder-pushing, the strategic positioning, the calculated approach of aunties who have, somehow, transformed into military generals planning an offensive. The hall hears the clinking of plates piled higher than structurally advisable, the scraping of spoons against serving dishes as if archaeology is being conducted at speed.
The hall feels the weight of feet rushing—not walking, rushing—toward the food section. It knows that somewhere, someone is definitely taking three plates “for the people sitting at the table” who are, coincidentally, also in the food line taking three plates of their own.
The hall has seen generations of this. It knows the hierarchy: dessert-first people (rebels), biryani-obsessed uncles (traditionalists), and the ones who came only for the food and will leave immediately after (pragmatists). The hall simply exists, holding space for this culinary hysteria.
When the Hall Holds Its Breath
Then comes the moment the hall was built for, though it will never admit to having favorites.
The hall dims its lights just so. The hall watches as everyone suddenly remembers they have phone cameras. The hall observes the collective surge toward one specific area, as if gravity itself has shifted.
The hall sees the phone-wavers, the selfie-takers, the ones climbing on chairs for better angles despite the chair’s protests. It watches performances it has seen a thousand times yet somehow never the same way twice. The hall notes the synchronized head-nodding, the clapping that’s slightly off-beat, the uncles who think they’re helping by providing live commentary at full volume.
“Beautiful!” someone shouts, though the hall isn’t sure what specifically they’re referring to—everything? Nothing? The general concept of existence?
The hall witnesses the children running between legs like tiny, well-dressed obstacles. It sees the teenagers clustered in corners, pretending they’re too cool for this while secretly photographing everything. The hall knows. The hall always knows.
The Emotional Infrastructure
And here’s where the hall earns its keep.
The hall feels the shift in atmospheric pressure when the crying begins. Not sad crying, no, this is different. This is the ceremonial weeping, the traditional tears, the culturally-mandated emotional overflow. The hall has absorbed so many tears into its foundations it could probably grow salt crystals if it tried.
The hall watches as tissue boxes appear from nowhere, multiplying like mathematical sequences. It observes the dabbing of eyes, the ruining of makeup that took three hours to apply, the hugging that threatens to wrinkle outfits that cost more than the hall’s monthly electricity bill.
The hall has learned that this phrase is not actually meant to stop crying, it’s meant to cry together, synchronized, a chorus of emotional excess. The hall provides the acoustics. The crying echoes beautifully, if the hall may say so itself.
Someone’s mascara runs. Someone’s dupatta falls. Someone says “Allah khair karay” with such feeling that three more people start crying. The hall holds all of it, the drama, the genuine emotion, the performed emotion, the emotion-about-the-emotion.
A Systemic Shutdown
The hall begins to feel it in its very walls, the tiredness.
It watches as the initial energy deflates like balloons three days after the party. High heels come off. Ties get loosened. Children who were running now lie dramatically across sofas as if they’ve survived a great war. The hall sees uncles gravitating toward corners, seeking refuge, desperately looking for chai that isn’t there or friends who have already left.
The hall observes the mothers whose smiles have become fixed, automatic, running on pure willpower and the fear of what people will say. It sees the fathers checking their watches with increasing desperation, calculating exactly how much longer they’re contractually obligated to stay.
The makeup has melted. The flowers have wilted. The food has been decimated, though somehow there’s still too much and simultaneously not enough. The hall has seen the same plates picked over seventeen times, the same desserts rearranged to look fuller.
People sit now where they once stood. Someone’s child is definitely sleeping on a pile of coats in the corner. The hall provides the corner. The hall understands.
The Slow Unraveling
The hall watches its own dissolution, its temporary purpose coming to an end.
It observes the leaving that takes longer than the staying. The goodbyes that span forty-five minutes. The “we should go” that means absolutely nothing because thirty minutes later, the same people are still talking. The hall has learned that departure is not an event but a prolonged negotiation with time itself.
The hall sees the gift-collecting, the tupperware-distributing, the “take some food home” insistence that results in people leaving with enough biryani to last until the next event (which is probably next week). It watches the searching for shoes that have mysteriously migrated, the hunting for children who have formed alliances with other children and refuse to acknowledge parental authority.
“It was lovely,” everyone says, though the hall knows they’re already exhausted beyond measure.
The hall watches the last car pull away, the lights beginning to dim, the workers starting the cleanup that will erase all evidence of this orchestrated chaos. The flowers will be thrown away. The decorations will be packed. The hall will return to being just a hall, until next week, when it will transform again into something magnificent and ridiculous and absolutely, entirely too much.
The Final Testimony
This is the anatomy of a hall, but really, it’s the anatomy of obsession.
The hall has seen it all: the planning that starts months in advance, the fights over decoration colors, the last-minute panics, the “why did we do this” moments that happen approximately seventeen times before the event. The hall has witnessed the devotion to making everything—everything—an event worthy of encyclopedic documentation.
The hall knows that somewhere, right now, someone is already planning the next one. Already measuring. Already obsessing. Already calculating exactly how to outdo what just happened.
The hall will be ready. The hall is always ready.
Because this is what we do when winter calls. We answer with lights and food and flowers and chaos and tears and laughter and exhaustion and love and performance and genuineness all mixed together until you can’t tell where one ends and another begins.
This is the hall. And the hall, in all its temporary glory, holds space for our beautiful, excessive, absolutely over-the-top devotion to celebration.
The hall witnesses. The hall endures. The hall, somehow, understands.
