ABSTRACT
The setting is the living room in a first-floor apartment in Defence Colony, an upper middle-class neighbourhood in New Delhi. The time is ten minutes past 1 p.m. and 15 women, mostly married housewives aged between 50 and 65, dressed up in exquisite saris or shalwar kamizes and jewellery, are present.
First all the women hand in their saving share to the cashier, which at this kitty-party is INR 3,000 per meeting. Next, paper strips with the names of the remaining participants are put into a container and the ‘winner’ is the name that is drawn. She gets her full savings-share at once, which in this case is INR 45,000. 1 Each member may only be drawn once during a round, so that when a member is drawn, her name is excluded from future raffles. At this meeting only a few women are yet to be drawn, and one of them has said that if she is drawn she will swap with one of the others. She is saving for a trip abroad to go hiking in Scotland and does not want to get the money too far in advance, in case she should be tempted to start using it on other things.
