One of the great pleasures of spending a weekend in my parents’ home is the meandering conversations I have with my mother. Given that I am her firstborn—arriving when she was quite young—we are friends although she reminds me of her more exalted status whenever I bring this up.
Today we spoke about how people would meet and interact back in the day when the media I am using was not around. In the evenings around tea time, my parents would go “calling” which means that they would visit a friend or a colleague for tea around 5.00-5.30 pm on the weekend. With more formal people, they would usually make a phone call in advance, using one of those rotary phones. As a child, I recall playing on a rotary phone and spinning the dial wheel repeatedly as I imagined I was calling my grandmother.
For the less formal friends, the idea was to simply “drop-in” around tea time and you would be assured that people would be dressed up for the evening, with a welcome cup of tea or a “nimboo paani” (lemonade) and some savories served usually on the verandah to savor the Karachi breeze. The tea fare would be taken out in a trolly, a two-layered table on wheels and the teapot would keep the tea warm, insulated with a “Tea Cosy”. She also tells me that tea trollies with wobbly wheels would be retired promptly. I remember our pre-retirement. It would veer to the left when I secretly played with it and, I had to adjust my posture to the right to get it to move straight.
“It was quite normal for everyone to visit each other and we would always be prepared to visit someone or for guests to come to ours,” she says. The conversations would range from the latest in the news to the cost of living, politics, and children. Religion was never discussed as “everyone is entitled to their own way of interpreting religion and its too personal for a social meeting”. She goes onto say that “there were no preconceived notions or hang-ups around meeting people. As we did not have WhatsApp, that was the only way you caught up with friends and made new friends”.
On rare occasions, the tea would extend onto a “potluck” dinner although my mother never liked the idea of people having to bring their own food. My mother says that initially, she found such meetings to be a bit daunting as she had a pretty traditional upbringing where as a young girl she was not permitted to spontaneously visit people in their home. “But I had to keep up with this new obligation that marriage brings and that too to a sociable person like your father” she adds.
