Tambola d’amour @the Dissident Club, Paris
Tambola is a South Asian bingo game that is a weekly night entertainment at “family” clubs in Pakistan, where nightclubs and alcohol have both been banned since the 70s, so tambola is an alternate entertainment. I went to tambola night religiously with my grandmother, little cousins, friends my age, and we experienced fun together. Tambola in fact originated in Italy in the 1500s, but what makes South Asian tambola special is the community aspect of it and the ‘calling lines’— each number is joked about, for example, the host may call out, “Sailors legs, number eleven,” or “Watch your son at two and one, twenty-one,” and these calling lines are standardised cultural tradition; I have most of them memorised. I created a love-themed tambola which I hosted as my alter ego, Princess Zahra, alongside performance artist and musician, Piyush Wadhera, at a location which physically doesn’t exist in Pakistan: a public bar in Paris with many South Asian diaspora and non-South Asian people in attendance. The experience design involved collaborating with a perfume and cocktail curator on a spin off drink called ‘Chai on the beach,’ creating and performing contemporary ‘calling lines’ for Tambola numbers, and kitschy graphic design.