The Best Parties Wander

When I turned fifty (yes, thank you), I did what any food and music obsessive would do. I curated the soundtrack.

Not one playlist. Three.

(Glad the theme song for that party is back on Spotify. Phew)

The first was the warm up. Music that lingered in the background while people arrived, hugged, found their first drink, introduced friends to friends and settled into the evening. Songs that invited conversation instead of competing with it.

The second was for when the room found its pulse. The chatter grew louder, glasses were refilled and people stopped checking their phones.

The third was Birthday After Hours. That's where the guitars came out, the guilty pleasures emerged, and singing in tune became entirely optional.

There was just one tiny flaw in my carefully orchestrated plan.

A couple of enthusiastic friends discovered the After Hours playlist almost as soon as they arrived.

The Encore that became the starter.

Within minutes, we had skipped the opening act and gone straight to the encore.

Then came the wonderfully cringe additions. Songs nobody would publicly admit to loving suddenly appeared in the queue. After a drink or two, everyone knew every word.

My beautifully paced musical journey had been hijacked.

And it was hilarious.

The dance party that never happened!

Those playlists still travel from party to party, collecting new songs and new inside jokes along the way. They've become less of a soundtrack and more of a living guest book.

That was probably the first time I realised something about hosting.

You can curate.

You can't control.

Over the years, I've found myself designing parties less like dinners and more like little neighbourhoods.

The bar counter is where conversations begin. Five stools somehow become space for eight people balancing little bowls of chips, cheese and canapés while discovering mutual friends, favourite bands or upcoming gigs.

Untuned

The dining table isn't there to keep everyone seated. It's simply a place to return to. Somewhere the hot dish waits while people drift in and out between conversations.

Appol View

Then there's my brother Anit's room.

Some evenings it resembles a tiny version of a Boiler Room session, with people disappearing inside to discover music videos they insist everyone else has to see.

Really Tiny Room Jams

On other nights, the guitars come off the wall, someone finds the drum kit, and suddenly it feels less like a gathering and more like an impromptu Tiny Desk concert. The musicians play. The rest of us confidently contribute enthusiastic backing vocals of highly questionable quality.

Eventually, almost everyone migrates to the terrace. It’s happened a few times, when someone, usually Mohit or Sid, pick up a wrong handed guitar (lefties). The stars became the stage lights. Nobody remembered who started the first song.

And somehow, everybody joins in.

Heart: The Bhondus

Meanwhile, my little Acoustic Flavours pantry quietly transforms into another gathering spot. What began as a pantry somehow became a bar. It wasn't planned. It just happened.

Good parties have a habit of creating new centres of gravity.

For years, the centre coffee table was never really part of the party. Not because it couldn’t be, but because it belonged to the pets. Food simply wasn’t placed there. That wasn’t its role.

Appol was the best centre pice of the party. Always!

After they were gone, we finally filled it with platters at a recent gathering. It worked perfectly. People gathered around it, picked at snacks, leaned in for conversations.

And yet, it felt strangely unfamiliar.

Sometimes the hardest thing to rearrange isn’t the furniture.

It’s memory.

Food, like everything else in the house, slowly found its own rhythm too.

I don't believe in overwhelming people with endless choices. I'd rather make one vegetarian and one non vegetarian dish that deserve to be remembered.

Din Din

A Khao Suey bowl one year.

House special paneer pav bhaji another.

Sindhi kheema pav has become something of a regular headline act.

That menu came from experience.

Many years ago, I proudly served a slow-cooked Sindhi mutton curry.

At some point during the evening, while everyone else was happily singing upstairs (that one party on the terrace where Mohit and Sid had everyone convinced they could sing), one dear friend quietly polished off every single piece of mutton.

Not most of it.

All of it.

To this day, the mystery remains unsolved.

The rest of us enjoyed excellent gravy.

Instead of introducing serving rules or announcing dinner like a railway timetable, I simply changed the menu for future parties. Kheema doesn't mind if someone gets there first.

Problem solved.

That's probably become my unwritten approach to hosting.

Don't fight human nature.

Design around it.

People will eat early.

They'll change your playlist.

They'll discover corners of your home you never intended as gathering spots.

They'll wander.

And that's exactly what you want.

One of my favourite things isn't something that happens during the party at all.

It's discovering months later that two people who first met over a bowl of snacks at my place are now concert buddies.

Or hearing that friends I met during the Gostana years have quietly become part of each other's lives, long after the café closed its doors. Looking around my home today, nearly a third of the people in the room are friendships that began there. I didn't realise it at the time, but the community never disappeared. It simply changed address.

Perhaps that's what hosting really is.

Not perfectly folded napkins.

Not flawless playlists.

Not making sure everything happens according to schedule.

It's creating enough little spaces for people to find where they belong.

The bar counter for the storytellers.

The music room for the obsessives.

The terrace for the dreamers with guitars.

The sofa for the conversations that somehow last until two in the morning.

Even the teetotaller should leave feeling just as intoxicated by the evening as everyone else.

Because the best parties are never really about the food or the music, however important they are.

They're about the people who carry a little piece of the evening home with them.

A new friend.

A favourite song.

A concert companion.

Or perhaps a mystery that, years later, still has us asking the same question:

Who ate all the mutton? (Well, I do know, and her secret may have not been safe with me)

The warm up that then became The Encore!