This is not one evening. It is the shape most of them take, assembled from a lot of them, written from the corner where we sit.
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6:10pm. We arrive earlier than anyone expects and it is always the right call. The lift is small, the flat is on the fourth floor, and the cases go up in two trips.
The host is not ready. The host is never ready, and this is fine. Someone is still moving a sofa. There is a discussion happening about whether the dining table should go into the bedroom. It should.
We find the corner. Usually it has been chosen for us and usually it is wrong, because it was chosen by looking at the room standing up. We sit on the floor in it and check what we can see. Half the room is behind a pillar. We move two feet left.
6:30pm. The first guests arrive, which is to say the ones who took the invitation literally. They are an aunt and her sister, and they sit immediately, front and centre, and they will still be there in three hours. Every gathering has them and they are the backbone of the evening.
The host is at the door and will remain there for forty minutes.
6:45pm. Somebody asks if we need anything. We ask for water and for the ceiling fan above us to be switched off. Both arrive. The fan goes off, then someone else turns it back on, then it goes off again permanently.
The room is filling. It is loud, standing, and nothing about it suggests that anyone is about to sit down and sing.
7:05pm. The light changes. Not naturally — someone has finally turned off the tube lights and switched on the lamps, and the room drops about two shades. The volume follows within a minute. It always does. People lower their voices in lower light without deciding to.
The diyas get lit. There is a small crisis about a lighter.
7:20pm. The noise changes pitch. This is the thing we are actually listening for. The standing conversations have halved, most people are seated, and the sound in the room has gone from bright and scattered to lower and rounder.
We start.
7:25pm. The first bhajan is not for the room, it is for the key. It is slower than what will follow and quieter than people expect. Perhaps six people are singing. The aunt and her sister are two of them.
7:40pm. Something has shifted. It happens around here almost every time. A dhun with a short repeated line gets to its third or fourth repetition and the room joins without being asked. From the corner you can hear it arrive, a wave coming in behind you.
Children have moved to the front. They always do, and they clap before the adults.
8:15pm. The peak. Faster, louder, hands going, a few people standing at the back. This is the part everyone will describe afterwards and it lasts perhaps fifteen minutes. Trying to hold it longer is how evenings get tired.
8:35pm. Down. One slow bhajan, quieter than anything since the opening. Somebody's grandmother is crying, which happens often enough that it has stopped surprising us and never stops mattering.
The room is completely still. This is the actual end of the evening, whatever the clock says.
8:45pm. Prasad. The room becomes a room again, loud and standing, and the transition is instant and total.
Four people come over to ask what the third bhajan was. Two of them are recording the name into their phones. One asks whether we do this at offices.
9:30pm. We are packing up. The aunt and her sister are still seated.
The host, who has not sat down once all evening, finally does, on the floor, in the middle of a room full of empty cushions and burnt-out diyas, and says the thing hosts always say at this point, which is that they did not get to hear any of it properly.
They never do. It is the one unfixable problem with hosting.