Room for One More

The table seats eight.

This is not a matter of opinion. It is an extending table of a standard type and it seats six closed and eight open and the manufacturer's website says so.

Since 2014 the average attendance at Sunday lunch at the Bhattacharyas' has been thirteen point four.

The furniture

The eight are at the table.

Four more are at the folding table, which is smaller and lower and lives behind the sofa and which is known, universally and without affection, as the Annexe.

Two are at the breakfast bar with their backs to everyone, which is the worst seat and which is allocated by a system nobody has ever written down and everybody understands.

Overflow beyond fourteen sits on the stairs. This is not a punishment. There is a faction — small, vocal, mostly under twelve — that considers the stairs the best seat in the house, and they are not entirely wrong, because the stairs are the only place you can see into both the kitchen and the front room.

The rule

There is one rule and Vikram Bhattacharya states it roughly monthly, usually to someone who has just apologised for bringing an extra person.

The rule is: there is always food.

This is not hospitality. It is arithmetic. Anjali cooks for eighteen every Sunday regardless of the number expected, and has done since 2014, and the leftovers get eaten in the week, and in eleven years there has been exactly one Sunday where there was not enough, and it is still discussed.

Who comes

The core is six: Vikram, Anjali, their two adult children, and Anjali's parents.

Then it opens out.

Priya's boyfriend, who has come for four years and who is, everyone agrees, essentially family and who has never been told this because that would be strange.

Vikram's colleague Bogdan, who came once in 2017 because he had just moved and knew nobody, and who has come every week since, and who now brings his own mother.

The Whitmores from next door, who come about one week in three and who provide, without being asked, a large tub of the specific coleslaw that Anjali's father likes and that nobody else will touch.

A rotating population of teenagers who are friends of the children and who have, in some cases, kept coming after the friendship ended, which nobody has felt able to raise.

Two ex-partners.

On the two ex-partners

This is the part outsiders struggle with.

Sunny's ex, Farah, split up with him in 2019. It was not amicable at the time. Farah came to lunch the following Sunday because she had already said she would and she is a person who does what she said she would.

She has come, on and off, ever since. She has never missed a Christmas.

Sunny married someone else in 2023. His wife Meera and Farah get on extremely well, which Sunny finds unsettling and which the rest of the family finds hilarious.

The second ex-partner is Vikram's brother's ex-wife and that situation is more complicated and is not discussed at the table.

The incident of the second table

In 2019 Vikram bought a bigger table.

It was ten seats. It cost a considerable amount. It arrived on a Thursday and it was beautiful and Anjali looked at it for a long time and said nothing.

On the Sunday, sixteen people came.

Ten at the table, four at the Annexe, two on the stairs.

Vikram sat at the head of his new ten-seat table and understood, with total clarity, that he had solved nothing whatsoever and had merely moved the boundary, and that there was no table in the world large enough because the number was not a number, it was a function of the table plus about five.

He sold it in the spring. They went back to the eight.

Anjali has never once said anything about this. Twice a year she says, apropos of nothing, "Nice table, that," and Vikram says, "Mm," and that is the entire ongoing life of the incident.

The stairs

Last Sunday there were nineteen, which is near the record.

The stairs held four children and, for about twenty minutes, Anjali's father, who is eighty-eight and who went and sat there deliberately with a plate on his knees.

Anjali found him and asked what he was doing.

He said the stairs were where you could see the kitchen and the front room at the same time.

She said, "You have a chair. You have the good chair."

And her father said, "Yes," and did not move, and ate his lunch on the stairs with four great-grandchildren and one of the ex-partners, and did not come back to the table until the pudding.