Music for a card table

The taash party is the drinking occasion inside the festival and it has a genuine religious cover story. In much of north India, playing cards on Diwali night is considered auspicious rather than merely tolerated - the usual telling has Parvati playing dice with Shiva and blessing those who gamble on that night, and another has Lakshmi decreeing prosperity for anyone who plays. Whether or not the story convinced anybody, teen patti on Diwali is now as fixed a tradition as the diyas.

Which makes the music requirement unusual. A card table is not a dance floor and it is not a dinner either. People need to hear each other, they are half-concentrating, and the music has to hold six hours without anybody standing up to change it. That rules out everything with a big drop and everything mournful. What works is mid-tempo, familiar and unhurried: Kajra Re, Deewangi Deewangi, Dus Bahane, It's The Time To Disco, the whole warm end of the 90s.

The evening does move, though, and it moves late. Around midnight, when the serious players have thinned to four and the drinks have caught up, the set can go where it likes - Ganpat, Chhote Chhote Peg, Kala Chashma, Brown Munde. This is why the default lighting here is talli rather than jashn: a Diwali night is a mixed, sprawling, four-decade evening, not a themed party.

One thing worth saying to hosts: nobody at a taash table wants to be asked what to play. Set it once at eight, put the phone down, and let it run. If the older relatives are still around, start on purane gane and let the room age forward as they leave. That transition happens on its own if the music is already moving in the right direction.