Saat Patti ki Watt

What started as a perfectly innocent weekend card game soon turned into a devious cat and mouse game of outwitting each other and sometimes oneself..

Well let me take a step back and show the BIG picture so that you know where we are..

A long weekend caught us by surprise and here we were coming home on a Friday evening with the prospect of 3 days at our dispense.

AJ and Ron crashed in for some timepass and Friday evening dinner was some wonderful leg pieces of BOBAAL chicken cooked by Mani..

Come Satuday early morning (read 12 noon) .. While AJ and Ron decided to push on to Milford to provide company to sis-n-law during the next 3 days (BIG B was out at office trying to implement some stuff his geeks had cooked up), we found ourselves tossing a couple of comforters in the back of a CRV and walked out of our house.

A lovely afternoon it was, on Milford parkway and we made good time to Railroad Vihar while bhabhi almost got lost in some by lane near her house.

We settled down to a game of e-darts while wolfing down a pack of delicious sweet-n-salted popcorn. I remember Mani lobbing a few straight from the carpet into her mouth.

After running out of patience with darts we made a dish of panipoori before settling down to a new game of cards we had learnt called SAAT PATTI.

The whole objective of the game was to loose all your cards in hand after distributing them in round-robin fashion. One had to start with a seven of hearts followed by next numbers in series one up or one down) or a seven of another suite.

Soon losing trust in lady luck to hand us our wins, the ever-competetive spirits at the table started hoarding sevens and othe numbers in hand till loosing all other cards effectively holding up most others.
That was a game 2 could play and soon we ended up having no body playing any card!!

From then on it was a game of who would play nice guy and loose, loose patience and loose or simply hold on to all cards and loose big time!!

It lasted till we had to think of antitrust laws to break the impasse, and then some way around the antitrust laws!

The whole thing turned into a game of chess and we squeezed every bit of humanity from that game.

By 1 am we were exhausted.

-- Manas