With open bars, made-for-social-media décor and an exclusive guestlist where a majority seems to have their own personal stylist—the elite Delhi cards party revels in its extravagance. Designer Rahul Khanna’s favourite anecdote is about a food area comprising colour-coded tents. “They’d flown in local food from all 28 states in India—the red tent was Maharashtra, orange was Bengal, and so on,” he says. It’s true, the Big Fat Delhi Card Party is nothing short of a no-holds-barred society wedding. “I once saw a Champagne fountain, surrounded by these extravagant floral arrangements. They’d also flown in a really well-known international chef to design the menu,” adds designer Abhinav Mishra of his wildest cards night.
The only real differentiator between a big fat wedding and a Diwali party (and the real kicker) is the card table, where the stakes increase with every pour of aged scotch. Both Kapoor and Rishi will tell you they’ve seen keys to luxury cars tossed onto the table in the wee hours. Tytler jokes that he remembers standing behind the game “like a waiter”, watching as keys to a Rolls-Royce landed amongst the poker chips. “The hardcore guys start gambling weeks before Diwali,” he adds. “The women are cautious. They don't play with their jewellery or anything like that. They lose their pot, and once they're done, they're done. But the men tend to go overboard. Hence the car keys.” Mishra does us one better. “The card games can get surprisingly intense. Even properties are up for the taking. It can quickly go from friendly to competitive!” he says. Rumour has it, farmhouses were swapped at the end of a game at one of the more notorious sessions.
Lost property isn’t the only show you’ll get to witness here. A big ticket performer is almost always on the playbill. “I’ve seen AP Dhillon, Jalebee Cartel, Midival Punditz and various other Indian musicians flown in to perform,” adds Khanna. “This one party, all the guests were like’ oh they’ve flown Sukhbir in for tonight; and I was like ‘doesn’t he live here?’” recalls Rishi. “The big, industrialist parties go all out,” Tytler shares. “Honey Singh, Guru Randhawa—I’ve seen Sid[harth] Malhotra and Shah Rukh [Khan] dancing, you name it.” I marvel at how wild it is to drop that kind of cash on a party most of us host in the living room of our 2BHK. “That’s a Delhi Diwali, baby,” says Tytler, brushing me off.
The setting, though, is always uniform, always Pinterest-apropos; sprawling farmhouses or estates in Chhatarpur, West End Greens or Sainik Farms, peppered with details that could put a wedding planner to shame. Tytler has attended Diwali parties with an ‘Egyptian’ theme, as well as a ‘boudoir’ theme, while Khanna talks of Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with tealights, decorated elephants walking alongside the buffet, and canopies full of fresh flowers over the guests’ maang-tikka’d heads.
It all makes for a perfectly ostentatious picture, but run a closer look and you’d find the chaos that ensues. “At the end of the night, someone always falls in in their full designer set,” says Khanna of the expected splash disrupting the candle-lit pools. But the unmissable marker of these parties, for Tytler, is the collective of Russian or Ukrainian models that are asked to attend some of these parties. “I love them, talking awkwardly in their little silos wearing their Chandni Chowk kurtas. Delhi is obsessed with white people; they literally become party decor.”
This year, as I prepare to step into the swirl of glamorous Diwali madness, there are three key takeaways from my research. The first, don’t bet the family estate in a tequila-soaked burst of enthusiasm. Second, falling into the pool is fine, but not before midnight. And the third, of course, always read the invite. That dress code, in bold letters, is not for style. The Delhi Diwali party, like the city itself, goes big. And then, at about 7am, it packs up its elephants, its bench-pressable couture and its Bollywood VIPs, and goes home.
