A game of Flush

It is customary to play flush (teen-patti) in most households in Diwali, I fail to know the reason behind this tradition, but then again, what the heck!, as long as everyone is enjoying it, who cares. It was the night of Diwali, and was way past bed-time, about half past midnight, we were all about to leave from my uncle's house (everyone was invited to their place for dinner), when my uncle came up with the plan of playing cards. There was a lot of indignation about the plan, with people citing reasons from being sleepy to tired to just not interested. But as has always been, my uncle always has his way and finally everyone agreed to play "one round" of the game, I have no idea whom we were fooling. Snacks were layed out (inspite of just getting done with food), a sheet was spread on the carpet, the uncle took out a brand new deck of cards one of which was distributed to each one of us to fix places for everyone, the one having the highest denomination being the one who stays in his place while the rest had to move and sit next to him, highest to lowest denomination of cards. My uncle got the biggest card in this case, the queen of hearts and so he stayed put. The rest of us started shuffling around depending upon the cards that we had, there was a lot of disagreement about who should sit where, how fat everyone had gotten, how unflexible we all had gotten, how sitting on the floor was a forgotten art, how in the 'good old days' people were never bothered by all these things, how the times have changed and everything had "modernized" (it is important to note that anytime anyone talks about modernization, it is always looked down up, specially when there are a lot of elders involved) and many more things to that effect. Eventually, we all settled down after much pushing and pulling and the game was set to begin. Let me add in here that we were about sixteen people, including my Uncle, who was the sole proprietor of the game. Each of our cards were returned to one of my cousins (Uncle's son) who was allotted the responsibility of distributing the cards. He started the tast with absolute finesse and began counting the cards, which unfortunately added up to 51 only. He counted them twice and could still not come up with the magic figure of 52. He was admonished and scolded for being so stupid as to having finished engineering and still not being able to count to 52 and then the cards were recounted by almost every other person who volunteered, only to see to their dismay that the cards were still 51. It was then that someone came with a brilliant idea of laying the cards out one at a time to check which one had gone missing. Imagine everyone's shock when that card happened to be the 'Queen of Hearts'. Everyone tried to remember who had gotten it and it was not long before it dawned on the people that it was Uncle who had gotten it. By then it was already half past one and everyone very angrily (only as much as they could get away with, with Uncle) asked Uncle to return the card. So he lifted his right hand, then his left, then shifted to the right and then back to the left...to not find the card anywhere, consequently, the people sitting next to him were asked to shift around, move, get up and dust their dresses to produce the coveted card. But the card, it seemed, had a plan of its own and had vanished into thin air. When all of us had almost lost our heads and couldn't figure out how a card which was very visible 5 mins ago could manage to disappear...Uncle opened his wallet...only to find, the "Queen of Hearts", lying safely inside.The rest, as they say, is history.