Paperwallah. A sense of urgency

Like Mrs Dalloway, I too like to buy the flowers myself.

Except my walk doesn’t take me past London’s St James’ Park and Piccadilly. Instead I stroll through my neighbourhood in South Delhi, past the presswalla, St Anthony’s school, and to the edges of SDA market where the florists stand in colourful clusters. It’s hot, so I hurry. And by the time the carnations are in my arms, I’m ready to retire in a mountain cave. But there’s no time.

For tonight, like Mrs Dalloway, I’m throwing a party.

And despite the stultifying heat, in the air, there’s a sense of urgency. Guests will begin to arrive in a couple of hours and all must be laid out and ready.

In Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway , hours before the party, had been visited by Peter Walsh, who’s recently returned from India. It’s an occasion that sets her thinking about the past, of her youth, of Peter’s unrequited love for her, his marriage proposal that she declined for safe, dependable Richard. Around them swirls a messy lifetime of loss, of things left unsaid. My concerns are decidedly less distinguished: Should I set more ice? What if we run out of wine?

Yet it’s a point of much importance that Woolf chooses to set her novel around that singular social event. In other words, what is it about parties?

To begin with, there’s performance.

On both the part of the host and the guests. They are (at least in most cases) putting their best face forward. For the host, the house, like a stage, must be set for the play. The props in place. The scented candles lit. The hand towels changed. The shelves dusted and tidied. The cutlery tastefully placed. The guests arrive ready to be attended to. To mingle, and network, and play the part of the conscientious visitor. To partake of what is offered. To be appreciative. For all their appearance of casual pleasantry, dinner parties are touched by the unreal. They are, in a way, embedded in life as much as removed from it.

There’s also the drama.

Or rather the potential for combustion.

Where emotional baggage and petty jealousies entangle in a confined space, brimming with guests who bring with them all their politics and prejudices.

Which is why parties lend themselves as rich fodder for literature. Often used, for example, as occasions to drive plot.

Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings begins with one such party. At his 111th birthday bash, to which all of Hobbiton has been invited, Bilbo Baggins makes a speech, slips on the One Ring, and vanishes. And this really is the beginning of the adventure. Agatha Christie novels are littered with dinner parties rudely interrupted by the discovery of a corpse. The dour Lord found dead by the fireplace in the smoking room, the hapless heiress who collapses at the table. Apart from adding a touch of the theatrical, this is also a clever crime fiction device to narrow down suspects to the ones present at the party. A tightening, as it were, of the screw.

But dinner parties in literature can also be spaces of quieter revelations.

In James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ from Dubliners , a piece of music brings the past back to Greta, changing things irrevocably for her and her husband. They walk back to their home after the party, him longing to “make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy.” Kim Edwards’s short story ‘In the Garden’, uses the dinner party to hint at the slip of a secret — an affair between her husband and a beautiful, elusive guest. A similar situation is hinted at in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’, which follows Bertha, the protagonist, as she prepares to hold a dinner party to which she’s invited Miss Fulton, with whom she’s convinced she would strike up a special friendship. Parties are spaces of slippages, where masks are forged and fall. Literary dinner parties can also be exercises of the satirical and fantastic. Where else, after all, may one invite (in)famous dignitaries, living or dead, and have them turn up. Satan’s raucous rout in The Master and Margarita may be most memorable for the three-tiered champagne fountain, the tropical forest setting, the chimp band, and a guest list that includes Caligula, Messalina, and Ivan the Terrible’s chief of police. Some parties might quite literally be thrown in the hope of bringing back the past. The mysterious Gatsby, on his Long Island estate, plays host to a string of lavish parties with a hidden agenda behind his generosity: he hopes one day his long lost love Daisy will attend one of his gatherings.

At the end, though, I’m taken back to Clarissa Dalloway.

In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours , comprising three interwoven stories connecting in varying degrees to Woolf and her novella, Richard Brown, a terminally ill writer, says to his friend and ex lover, Clarissa Vaughn: “Oh Mrs Dalloway, always giving parties to cover the silence.” I shall leave you with that while I go check on the ice.

Janice Pariat is the author of the novel Seahorse; @janicepariat

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