“How Was Your Day?”

Depends who’s asking, says Palash Krishna Mehrotra

- Palash Krishna Mehrotra

A conversational evening in English-speaking India, spent among friends or strangers, begins and ends with two sentences. The first is ‘How was your day?’ The last sentence of the evening, muttered with grim self-importance, is ‘Better get going. I’ve an early morning tomorrow.’

I’ve never been sure about the first question. Is it merely rhetorical, like ‘How are you’? If one answers it with some loyalty to fact, then the reply will vary from person to person.

To ‘How was your day?, a shopkeeper will say: ‘Well, business was slow in the morning, slower in the afternoon, but picked up in the evening.’ A suicide bomber will say: ‘Woke up, ate dates and raisins, popped some Captagon, blew myself up in the afternoon, and was in Paradise nightclub by 11 p.m.’ The gau rakshak will say: ‘Being unemployed, I woke up late. Went to the railway station. Beat up a man in a skull cap eating a banana. Celebrated in the evening with a Morarji cola.’