Kemal celebrates New Year and plays tombala with the Keskin family

Kemal celebrates New Year and plays tombala with the Keskin family on the night that ushers in 1977, a domestic celebration that makes visible how far his life has shifted toward Füsun and her family. After ending his engagement to Sibel and withdrawing from their shared circle, he joins the Keskins for a game that becomes an annual ritual, repeated for eight New Years. Its cards, dried beans, small presents, and familiar family customs give a private love story the shape of everyday life.

A New Year Between Two Lives

Kemal remembers the evening as proof that his life had changed irrevocably. He had begun visiting the Keskin home four or five times a week, while largely giving up the habits and company of his former social life. Yet until this New Year’s Eve, he continued to tell himself and others that the old life remained available—that he could return to it whenever he chose. The game at the Keskins marks the moment when that belief becomes harder to sustain.

He does not go straight from his family home to the Keskin celebration. To avoid upsetting his mother and older brother, he first eats supper with them. When his nephews call for a game of tombala, he plays a round with them, even as his attention is fixed on the evening ahead. He meets his sister Berrin’s eyes across the family gathering; she raises her eyebrows as if asking whether anything is wrong. Kemal whispers that nothing is wrong and insists they are having fun. Later, he leaves on the pretext of going to Zaim’s party. Berrin sees through the excuse, but he does not answer her look.

The false departure makes the contrast between the two households part of the occasion. Kemal performs the familiar role of a family member at home, then hurries toward the people and the life he has chosen but cannot openly explain. On the night itself, he briefly wonders what Zaim, Sibel, Mehmet, Tayfun, and Faruk the Mouse are doing. Zaim has prepared a party at his summer house, with electric heaters installed and the caretaker sent to light a fire. But Kemal’s attention turns back to the Keskin household: what matters to him is not the party he has left behind, but Füsun’s notice of him at the game.

The Game at the Keskin Table

As Çetin drives him to the Keskin home, Kemal is anxious but happy. He runs up the stairs, savors the meeting of Füsun’s eyes, and sets out presents his mother had prepared for the tombala winners. He announces that they are for the winners. Aunt Nesibe has prepared presents of her own, as Kemal’s mother has done every New Year since his childhood, and the two collections are mingled at the table.

During the game, Füsun notices that Kemal is not following it. When the number twenty-seven is drawn, she points out that it appears on his card and places a dried bean on the square for him. She tells him to stop fooling around and play. For a moment, she looks at him with concern, anxiety, and tenderness. Kemal identifies this attentive gesture as the kind of happiness he has come to the house hoping to find. The exchange is slight, and its meaning depends on the intimacy that cannot be spoken openly: a bean placed on a number becomes a small, unmistakable act of care.

The game also joins two family traditions. At Kemal’s home, the New Year gifts have accompanied tombala since his childhood; at the Keskin home, Aunt Nesibe has prepared her own. The shared presents do not make the households identical, but they allow Kemal to bring something of his family’s familiar celebration into the evening he is beginning to share with Füsun’s family. The gathering offers no public declaration of their relationship. Instead, the two sets of gifts and the repeated rules of the game establish a quiet form of belonging.

A Ritual Repeated, Objects Remembered

Kemal’s account presents the tombala set as more than equipment for a game. The Keskin family uses it on eight consecutive New Year’s Eves. Aunt Nesibe gathers the pieces afterward, returning the numbered wooden tiles—ninety in all—to a velvet pouch, stacking and tying the numbered cards, and collecting the dried beans in a plastic bag for the next year. The careful packing makes the celebration repeatable: its familiar objects are put away not as remnants of a finished night but as the materials of the next one.

The practice has a wider history in Kemal’s telling. Tombala originated in Naples and continued to be played by Italian families at Christmas; in Istanbul, the game and other New Year customs passed from Italian and Levantine households into general use after Atatürk’s calendar reform. Kemal also places the Keskin set beside the similar set his mother used for roughly forty years, first with her children and cousins and later with her grandchildren. A private household ritual thus carries traces of both family continuity and the city’s shared customs.

Later gifts acquire meanings the players do not necessarily recognize. On New Year’s Eve 1980, Kemal brings an antique glass that belonged to his grandfather. He and Füsun had drunk whiskey from it at their last rendezvous on the day of his engagement. By then, the Keskins have noticed his habit of taking small belongings and replacing them with more valuable things, but the practice remains unspoken; the glass appears among the ordinary tombala prizes without provoking surprise. When Tarık wins it, Füsun does not recognize it as the glass associated with that painful day. Kemal later watches Tarık use it as a raki glass, unable to properly revisit the memory while sitting at the family table.

Other small prizes acquire their own place in the recurring celebration. Aunt Nesibe sometimes includes a child’s handkerchief. In 1982, Kemal wins one after completing the top line of his card and calling out that he has won. Aunt Nesibe congratulates him, and he repeats the familiar response that it is just the sort of handkerchief he needed. The joke recalls an old family convention: adults who won a child’s present would claim to need it, to the amusement and uncertainty of the children. Within the Keskin household, the game’s pleasure lies in winning, not in the price or ownership of the prize; everyday things briefly become valuable through the occasion and the company around them.

Continuity and Private Meaning

The New Year gathering begins a series in which the gifts and the game preserve more than the sequence of holidays. Füsun wins the New Year lottery ticket at the Keskin table every year from 1977 through 1984, but when the winning numbers are announced, she never receives a prize—not even a refund. The repeated coincidence gives the yearly ritual a small, wry pattern, while leaving its central value elsewhere: in the time spent together and the attentiveness Kemal receives from Füsun.

For Kemal, ordinary objects gather memories through their use and setting. A glass can hold an undisclosed recollection; a handkerchief can call back a familiar joke; the tombala set can evoke the sequence of evenings in which the Keskin family made room for him. The 1976 celebration matters because it converts his increasingly separate life into a shared domestic custom. What he cannot say openly about why he comes is enacted through his presence at the table, the presents he brings, and a game that the family will play again the following New Year.