BIRTHDAYS, BIRTHDAYS...

When I was 8, I celebrated my birthday by going to school in a red-checked tunic and top stitched by my mother, carrying a bag of toffees for my classmates. Flushed and excited, I was even more thrilled to be allowed to wear the sleeveless tunic without the top later on in the evening. What mother thought would be a concession to the hot evening, was a step towards the joys of adulthood for me.

When I was 18, I celebrated my birthday rather sombrely. My father had died just over a month ago, my twelve-standard exams were looming within weeks. It was a time of change and expectation, of determination to prove myself and a great big lump of sadness that Baba would never again see my birthdays.

When I was 28, I celebrated my birthday with a lot of trepidation. I was pregnant with my first daughter, the delivery was due in May, and I realised that the next birthdays would never be the same again after the life-changing event of motherhood. There was a a kind of desperate gaiety, a clinging to the joys of the carefree pre-motherhood-dom.

Now that I have just celebrated my 38th birthday, I really feel thankful that I am so so busy. And that all I have lost over the last one year was a few kilos of weight. And what I have gained is a new confidence, a lot of work, and a lot of good friends. God keep me busy, happy - and slim - down the next few decades!

HAPPY BIRTHDAYS OF LONG AGO: PART II (AT HOME)

Sorry for the diversion into dark and sweet (and forbidden) chocolate territory.

When I was young, birthdays were celebrated at home in the evenings. The pampered ones had balloons and streamers put up on the walls (with a glittery golden cutout HAPPY BIRTHDAY in the background) and specially baked cakes with frosted icing (shaped like Mickey Mouse or a house in the woods or a cricket pitch - this was before the invasion of Cartoon Network), which would arrive in a white box from some shop (strictly untouchable with an invisble handle-with-care sign).


Being a more frugal sort, we neglected the wall decoration bit and concentrated on the food - not 'ordered from out' but home-made. Maa and Didia (my intrepid cousin) would bake two round cakes with holes at the centre in the trusty Murphy oven. They (the cakes, not the oven) would be full of bits of cherries, petha (a white candied bottlegourd), and kismis (raisins). One cake would remain plain and plump brown (this was held in reserve for second servings) but the other one, meant to be displayed and cut, would be decorated with white icing sugar, mixed and poured through a paper cone. My Didia's painstaking effort in writing my name on the cake would usually result in illegible semi-transparent squiggles on top of the cake. She moped, but we were happy because we got to break off the stiff pieces of icing sugar and suck them even before the cake was cut.


A few of my close friends in the neighbourhood (Mampi and Soma, Sujata and Sonali, with their plaits and pigtails neatly combed and oiled for the occasion) would come, as would my cousin J and her family. I would go ooh and aah over the gifts [faking my surprise, because they had all told and 'consulted' me before buying the gifts - pens and pencil boxes, a jhola/shoulder-slung-bag, crayons and water-colour sets, Amar Chitra Katha-s (comics about Indian history and mythology), inexpensive Bengali storybooks]. One grand present (costing the princely amount of Rs. 40) was a Tintin comic-book given by my Dida (mother's mother) on my tenth birthday - it occupied the pride of place in my bookcase for a long, long time.


The cake-cutting would be a swift and perfunctory affair, with some half-hearted attempts at singing the birthday song (I suspect many of my friends and family were uncomfortable with all that singing in English). The gusto would be reserved for the food.


There would be hot just-fried luchis (puris/ fried hand-made flour pancakes), alurdom (potato-curry) and chicken-curry, followed by the cake ( a nod to our colonial heritage) and payesh (rice cooked in sweetened condensed milk - a traditional Bengali birthday treat).

I remember a certain birthday when the payesh was replaced by a complicated caramel custard (from a recipe in Chic - a popular 'women's' magazine which was diligently devoured by Ma and Didia). My grandparents were slightly dismayed at this deviation from tradition, but everyone else enjoyed the novelty. Later on, in the nineteen-eighties, when Chinese cooking was making incursions into Bengali cuisine and long blue packets of egg-noodles were showing up on grocers' shelves, the luchis were replaced by chicken-chowmein-Bengali-style. But it was all still cooked at home. And after eating (surely the focal point of all Bengali celebrations), the grown-ups would settle down to a round of adda (conversation, often extremely animated) while we kids would be left to play (and sometimes fight) on our own. Unsupervised by any DJs or event-managers or hired men in grotesque Mickey-Mouse-looking-like-Gorilla costumes.

In these hard times, maybe it would make a lot of sense to revert to those simpler celebrations of yore.

WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS? SELF-SUFFICIENT OR DJ-DEPENDENT?

HAPPY BIRTHDAYS OF LONG AGO: PART I (AT SCHOOL)

When we were young, birthday celebrations had a pre-determined pattern that was much anticipated long before the day itself. For instance, if you were born in February (as I was), you could officially start counting the days and salivating in anticipation from 1st February itself (like I did).

First of all, there was the BIRTHDAY DRESS to be decided upon. No going out and buying from the shops for me. Maa (my mother) and Didia (my cousin) would decide upon a suitable pattern from a sewing book, I would be taken along to buy the dress material and then Maa would make it at home. I was too thrilled and tongue-tied at the entire exercise to offer any choice of my own.

Then, unless one was extremely unfortunate and the birthday fell on a holiday, Maa would purchase a big plastic bag full of toffees to take to school to share with my classmates. (Anything more than simple toffees was disallowed in my school, unlike in today’s schools where students often gift their classmates anything from CD-ROMs to expensive stationery sets). We usually got sugar-boiled candies or sticky toffees, even the 50 paise worth Cadbury’s Eclairs were given only by the affluent-elite nose-turned-up few.

Other preparations would be on in full swing, setting off an agony of expectations in me, which would increase so much that it would almost impossible to go to sleep the night before my birthday.

The great day would dawn and I would jump out of bed, vibrating with excitement. The ritual was to touch the feet of all the elders in the house (and there were plenty of them in my joint-family). I would dip down and bounce up several times, collecting blessings for the coming year.

A rushed-through-bath and a gobbled-breakfast later, I would be ready for school, not in my usual uniform, but in my brand new ‘colour dress’ which would make me the cynosure of all eyes at school. In the assembly during morning prayers, everybody would go nudge-nudge, whispering about the lucky one whose birthday it was. Oh, the thrill to be noticed and talked about. The trick, though, was not to be too obvious about it all; you had to pretend to be matter-of-fact while secretly walking on Cloud 9. But you could have your eyes saucer-shining and have a spill-any-moment-smile on your face.

Almost bursting with self-importance, I would give sweets (Parle’s orange boiled-sugar candies, my inexpensive favourites) to my classmates (trying to cheat a bit by giving more to my best friends) and then go to the other classrooms and staffroom to give the teachers and Principal (no wonder most of the teachers were overweight – the combined offerings of all the students all year round must have been huge). I would return, the victorious queen, to my class where everybody would stand up and sing loud-and-lustily, though sometimes indistinctly-through-toffee-sucking-mouths, “Happy Birthday to You”.

When we were in Class V (Fifth Standard), our class-teacher hit upon the idea of making a list of all our birthdays, collecting one rupee from each student (apart from the birthday boy/girl, of course), and gifting the birthday child something. I got a plain-jane stainless steel dish with my name inscribed under it. This might seem to be a paltry gift in this age of Conspicuous Spending, but in that simpler age the yet-to-be-devalued one rupee purchased a lot of joys for us.

HOW DID YOU CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY AT SCHOOL?