Kishore Singh: Make yourself at home, please

Two courier packets lay on the dining table addressed to some stranger, even though the apartment number under the name was correct. "Tut-tut," I admonished the house help, "why did you accept the packages when they weren't for us?" "They're for some guests," he explained - even though he was unclear about who exactly they were. "They're my clients," my wife clarified, when I rang her up in Udaipur, "they'll be there tomorrow, do be a pet and clean up a bedroom and empty a cupboard for their clothes." I also had to ensure that fresh towels and sheets were laid, a car sent to the airport to pick them up (while I took a taxi to the office) and their meals organised. What should the cook make for them? "Damn," said my wife, "I hope they aren't vegetarians." Turns out, she'd never met them but since they'd asked to stay when passing through Delhi, she'd acquiesced because she wasn't going to be here anyway.

What she hadn't taken into account was that some distant cousin and his family had been promised board and lodging too. As they were coming to Delhi for a wedding, they'd requested our assistance that ranged from shopping ("we'll need shoes"), to two-hour drycleaning for their clothes, to home services for a hairdresser. "A car would be convenient," it had been suggested. I asked my driver to find a colleague to moonshine at twice his daily rate, and bullied my son into agreeing to the loan of his car (so he too had to take a taxi to work), and was set for the guests to arrive, when my daughter turned into party-pooper.

"My friends are sleeping over, we're having a bash," she informed me, "it's so difficult to get everyone together any more now that everyone's working, I can't change the date." "If I have to cook for the party," the chef threw in his towel, "I can't cook for the guests." "You'll manage," my wife said encouragingly, which was easy for her since she was now in Indore, while we were close to being at loggerheads at home.

I called in the troops - or at least the staff and kids - and we considered what we had: a house full of guests whom we didn't know but who had threatened to command all available services. "What about my party?" my daughter demanded to know. "What about my bedroom?" asked my son, as it too had been requisitioned as part of the guest inventory. Because things looked bleak, I bought peace with my daughter by booking her a poolside party for her friends at a neighbourhood hotel. "It's on me," I offered. As my son required a room, I booked him - and then myself as well, for good measure - in the same hotel. If we had guests holidaying in our home, we owed it to ourselves to have a good time of it as well - even if it was elsewhere.

If I'd hoped that everything was now sorted, I hadn't counted on our guests calling my wife to tell her that "since the house is empty anyway", they'd like to extend their stay - did we mind? "What could I say?" my wife apologised, even though it meant extending our stay in turn at the hotel at considerable expense. "There's just the slightest hitch," my wife said when I told her we were finally headed home, "some school friends asked to spend the weekend with us - I hope you won't mind."