New Year’s Eve Tombala Gatherings at the Keskin Home

The New Year’s Eve Tombala Gatherings at the Keskin Home make an ordinary family game into a durable structure for Kemal’s memory. Beginning on the evening he spent with the family at the end of 1976, tombala recurred through eight consecutive New Years. Its numbered tiles, small household prizes, and repeated gestures offered a reassuring rhythm, even as Kemal’s relationship with Füsun and his sense of time changed. In his retrospective account, the game becomes both a record of belonging and a way to preserve moments whose happiness could not last.

A New Year among the Keskin family

Kemal’s first New Year’s Eve at the Keskin home marked a break with the life he had maintained after ending his engagement to Sibel. He had mostly withdrawn from their shared social circle and was visiting Füsun’s family four or five times a week, yet he had continued to imagine that he could return to his previous habits. Spending the holiday with the Keskins made the change harder to deny. He had supper with his mother and brother first, then left for the Keskin home, carrying some of the tombala prizes his mother had prepared. The family combined them with the gifts Nesibe had arranged, bringing two households’ traditions together around one table.

The game also made Kemal’s new attachments visible through small acts of attention. When Füsun noticed that he had missed a number, she placed a dried bean on the corresponding square of his card and smiled at him. He took this concern as the particular form of intimacy for which he returned to the house. His happiness that evening sat beside the performance of an older life: he had concealed his plans from his family, played a round of tombala with his nephews, and encountered Berrin’s knowing glance before leaving. The holiday did not simply replace one social world with another; it exposed the distance between the family scene Kemal staged at home and the life he was building through his visits to Füsun.

Repetition, objects, and household ritual

The New Year game became a custom repeated for eight years. Nesibe carefully gathered the set at the end of each gathering: ninety numbered wooden tiles went into a velvet pouch, the numbered cards were tied together with a ribbon, and the dried beans were saved in a plastic bag for the next year. The care devoted to putting away these inexpensive components matched the ceremony of bringing them out again. Kemal later displayed the set as an object through which the spirit of those years could be approached. He also situated the game within Istanbul’s changing customs, describing tombala as a practice that travelled from Italian and Levantine families into wider use after Atatürk’s calendar reform.

Prizes made the game’s modest material world part of its emotional meaning. Nesibe might include a child’s handkerchief; Kemal recalled the familiar adult pretense that a prize intended for a child was just what its older winner needed. Socks, combs, soap, and other everyday goods could briefly acquire the importance of winnings, while at the Keskin table the pleasure lay as much in winning the game as in owning the prize. The objects belonged, in Kemal’s understanding, to the household’s shared life rather than exclusively to any one person. That sense of collective possession contrasts with his private, troubled imagination of Füsun’s belongings as things that might belong to her alone.

Over time, the prizes also became a means for Kemal to place objects from his own past inside the Keskin household. On New Year’s Eve 1980, he brought an antique glass inherited from his grandfather as a surprise prize. Füsun and Kemal had drunk whiskey from it on the day of his engagement, during their last rendezvous before a painful separation. By then, the Keskins had noticed his habit of taking their belongings and replacing them with more valuable ones, though the matter went unspoken. When Tarık won the glass, Füsun did not recognize its connection to that earlier day. Tarık used it as his raki glass for the next three and a half years; Kemal, sitting at the same table, could not openly inhabit the memory attached to it. The gift thus carried a private chronology that its new household use concealed.

Domestic time and public time

The gatherings unfolded within the larger routine of Kemal’s visits. Between October 23, 1976, and August 26, 1984, he made 1,593 suppers visits to Çukurcuma across 2,864 days. The Keskins kept a place for him, and the family came to expect him; the New Year gatherings were an annual marker within that much more frequent pattern. On ordinary evenings he usually arrived around seven and left near midnight, after the television broadcast’s closing ceremony. The household’s large German-made wall clock stood as a reminder of time’s continuity, but television had largely taken over the practical task of telling the family when the evening was progressing.

At seven, the clock appeared on the television screen before the news began. Füsun checked her wristwatch against it, while Tarık checked one of his pocket watches. Kemal watched Füsun concentrate on setting her watch and noticed when she smiled at him after getting it right. The clock helped regulate the family’s relation to the outside world, but the small exchange around it belonged to Kemal’s private experience of the evening. He distinguishes this public, measurable time from the moments of happiness that seemed to stand apart from it. The recurring game similarly gave the years a visible sequence—one gathering after another—while its repetition made each evening feel sheltered from change.

That shelter was incomplete. In September 1980, the coup brought martial law and a ten o’clock curfew. Kemal had to leave at a quarter to ten, driven through streets that emptied as the deadline approached. The enforced early departure cut short his time with Füsun, and he remembered the journey home as a painful deprivation. The national schedule entered the household and interrupted its private rhythm. Tombala could return the next New Year, but the game could not prevent political events from changing the conditions under which the family gathered.

Memory gathered into a collection

Other recurring details gave the gatherings their intimate texture. In 1981 Füsun won a Saath Maarif Takvimi, which Kemal urged her to hang between the television and the kitchen. Its pages combined prayer times with poems, historical notes, recipes, and practical guidance. The family often left a page unturned until late in the evening. Kemal delayed mentioning it because he wanted to hear Tarık express gratitude that the family was warm, housed, and together; Nesibe would add that being with loved ones mattered most. Across the years, Nesibe’s affection for Füsun also took a repeated physical form: sometimes Füsun sat on her mother’s lap and accepted her kisses and caresses, knowing Kemal was watching without looking back at him directly. The calendar, the family’s words, and this gesture made recurrence a form of domestic memory, not merely a repetition of dates.

Chance acquired its own recurring pattern when Füsun won the New Year’s lottery ticket every year from 1977 to 1984, yet never received a prize or even a refund. The repeated mismatch between apparent luck and actual outcome echoed the difference between the promise of a new year and the life that unfolded. Kemal preserves such small, inconclusive patterns alongside the objects themselves, because they return him to the particular texture of shared evenings rather than to a general account of the past.

His account finally makes the game part of a larger effort to give private time a material form. He explains that painful awareness of time comes partly from recognizing that the line connecting present moments must end; collected objects can hold something of the moments they carry. The same logic appears elsewhere in his memories: Füsun’s earring fell onto a blue sheet during what he later named the happiest moment of his life, and the object became inseparable from both its joy and its irretrievability. In the Keskin home, tombala’s tiles, gifts, calendar, and glasses served a related purpose. Years later, while visiting quieter museums in Paris, Kemal found consolation in rooms where objects could be encountered apart from the city’s crowded pace. The New Year gatherings are therefore more than a festive episode in his account: they show how repeated domestic rituals and humble possessions became an archive of happiness, while their very preservation acknowledged that time had carried the family beyond the moments they kept.