Cards on Diwali night

Ask almost anyone who grew up in North India about Diwali and the story will include a card game. The lamps go up on the balcony. Someone brings out the good sweets. And after the puja, somewhere between dinner and midnight, a white sheet goes down on the floor and a deck comes out.

The night the cards come out

The games are mostly teen patti and rummy, played for fun. Grandparents who never play the rest of the year sit down. Cousins who live in different cities sit next to each other. Children are allowed to stay up and watch, and sometimes to deal.

Many families say a little play at Diwali brings luck for the year ahead, a nod to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, whose night it is. Whether anyone believes it is beside the point. It is a reason to sit together on the floor for a few hours.

What the game is really for

Watch a Diwali game closely and you will notice it is not really about the cards. It is about who is talking. An uncle tells the same story he tells every year. A sister-in-law turns out to be the sharpest player in the house. Someone is accused, with great ceremony, of cheating, and denies it with greater ceremony.

The rules change from house to house. In one home a joker is wild, in another it is the card under the joker. Nobody writes them down. They are passed on, like recipes.

From the living room to the card room

Many of the players you meet in Indian card rooms today first held cards on a night like this. The living room is where they learned to read a face across a table, and to lose gracefully in front of people they love.

The rooms know it, too. Around Diwali, card rooms across India light lamps at the door, put out sweets at the desk and run their busiest nights of the year. The table is bigger and the dealer is a professional, but the feeling is the one from the floor at home.

So if you walk past a balcony full of diyas this year and hear laughter and the slap of a card on a sheet, you know what is happening inside. Someone has just been dealt a good hand, and the whole family knows it.