Birthdays

Birthdays are, by design, progressively depressing. But there are some flaws in this design, lovely colorful ones.

The earliest shards of birthday memory I can reconstruct are that of distributing chocolate eclairs to my kindergarten school mates. Probably my fifth birthday, I was instructed by my parents, just to show a note written in my school diary to my class teacher. She read it, smiled at me – and I was made to stand in the middle of the classroom while the rest of the class sang “Happy Birthday to You”. I do not know why it felt so humiliating!  My parent’s instructions also told about the eclairs hidden in my bag of which I was oblivious till then. Since there were goons on the school bus who would have otherwise looted it.

Those days, every birthday came with repeated platitudes from parents to behave well for the  day, so that I behave well for the rest of the year. Since the same demand came every year on a New Year Eve as well as Poila Boisakh, one birthday I asked them to come clean. “Please point out which one was the real beginning of the year.” As if I could not afford to behave myself on all three. Punitive measures followed, I recall.

On my tenth birthday – my eight month old sister could just sit upright!

My eleventh birthday wasn’t sweet. We were writing an arithmetic test – when all of a sudden the teacher appeared from nowhere and dragged me out of the class. I had my notebook, inadvertantly left open over my bag. I wasn’t copying, honestly. Not that I did not cheat, but not in that subject! I spent the whole period weeping outside the classroom. That day, without reason,  I hated my brand new uniform for all that.

There was this propensity to send me out wearing brand new clothes on a birthday. As I grew older, I started taking stances: first stopped carrying chocolates – and then stopped wearing anything conspicuously new. There were studs at school who would otherwise taunt me as mamma’s boy. To align myself with the new found definition of smartness, I ceremonially stopped carrying tiffins to school, on my fourteenth birthday.

One of my dad’s friends, a great connoisseur of photography, used to click images of me on every birthday. It all stopped on my fifteenth, and I thought it was my acne, but all that is another story.

My mom was already complaining about the strains of adolescence I was showing.  From chocolates, the sops and treats had moved to more grown up stuff as I brushed adulthood. Jhumur used to show English movies – and had a bar as well! By my eighteenth, I had already started smoking and even tasted alcohol.

Birthdays happen with a bang at IIT. A rickety latch can barely save you from a barrage of sadist hooligans attacking with military precision at midnight. Even doors get smashed, before everyone, you don’t remember how many, deliver “bumps”. Lest “pain in the back” ends you up in the infamous B C Roy Hospital, there have been instances of people packing pillows into their pants in an effort to avoid the vagaries of the ritual. Hiding in a junior’s room is also a temporary solution – but it only delays the inevitable. You get all of it, with interest. Material loss starts with having to offer a fag of a costlier band, continues with a providence for a round of dirty drinking, and may require you to stretch even higher in search of truth.

Cost of treating increased dramatically as I started working. Costlier brands of smoke and Scotch became norm. Costlier restaurants came into fashion. This is when your vegetarian friends come to your rescue.

On my twenty seventh birthday my to-be wife presented me something for the first time: a T-shirt. I was yet to propose her, and lo! By my twenty-eighth I was already married. My sweet wife arranged a get together with close friends – managing everything from marketing to cooking the meals, from inviting the guests and making the house over.

By then I had realized, “With great happiness comes great responsibility”: I had quit smoking – for good.  My thirtieth birthday just followed my sweet little daughter – then only days old. By my next birthday, my liver, long overtaxed – got a respite. I pledged alcohol to be only social.

I turn thirty three today. As you get older, your thought slows, and you age even faster.