I just had a birthday last week.
As a child, I loved my birthday. It was one of the few times in the year my family indulged in a cake from Flurys, then the ritziest patisserie in Kolkata. I always chose the same one though: a zoo-themed cake with little marzipan animals. My friends came over and we played Pin the Tail on the Donkey with gusto. Some years, we had a piñata, which I whacked with even more gusto. Before mobile phones, only special occasions were deemed worthy of photographs: vacations, graduations, birthdays. The timeline of my childhood can be measured through pictures of birthday parties.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
As I grew up, I fell out of love with birthdays. When I lived in the U.S., I remember the carefully timed early morning call, the whole family in India lined up to wish me. Then I would go to work where, at best, I would get a bland automated email from HR. Birthdays became lonelier affairs around people who didn’t know me well enough. Meanwhile back in India, my oldest friends would still stop by home and demand a birthday treat from my mother, my own absence being deemed irrelevant. In time, I even removed my birthday from social media because I got tired of the barrage of birthday greetings from people I barely knew.
I had no birthday rituals. Not even a bowl of sweet payesh, a sort of rice pudding which many Bengali friends seemed to have. One year, in London for my birthday, my aunt made payesh using her precious stash of fragrant “special occasion” aromatic Gobindobhog rice. I didn’t tell her my mother never bothered with it; she was happy outsourcing birthday tradition to the Flurys cakeshop. Now the most prevalent Indian birthday tradition is to smear each other with gooey chocolate cake. It gives me the shudders.
There is a theory that that tradition comes from Mexico, where the hapless birthday celebrant has their hands tied behind their back and their face pushed into the cake while people chant “¡Mordida!” (“bite!”). I’m just thankful it was not part of my growing up.
Now, like everything else, birthdays have become the subject of fraught cultural debate in India. Some complain we need a back-to-the-roots movement for birthdays because instead of wholesome all-Indian traditions like early morning temple visits and payesh, we just ape Western customs. I honestly never thought too much about the origins of birthday rituals. Later, I learnt that birthday cakes with candles might have something to do with Artemis, the moon goddess of the Greeks. The Irish give you birthday bumps. The Chinese eat longevity noodles while Spaniards pull your ears, once for each year. We, sadly, chose face-painting with cake!
Perhaps, it’s also a reminder that as India has prospered, we care less about wasting food because we feel with the years of socialist deprivation behind us, we can now have our cake and eat it too. Birthdays are less about the simple act of remembering and more about ostentatious show-and-tell. I hear pet birthdays are the new craze. A Pet cafe in Bengaluru in Bengaluru, I’m told, hosts three-four pet birthdays weekly with curated menus, theme décors and mega budgets. The dog does not even know it’s its birthday.
Who knew your birthday was a marker of your inner circle. We remembered the birthdays of our closest friends by heart. My mother served as a birthday almanac for the family. At every month’s beginning, she rattled off the names of all relatives’ and their upcoming birthdays and entered the dates into her diary so she’d remember to call them. (She also listed the birthdays of those long dead.)
She was hospitalized at the end of last May. When I opened her diary after she died, I found she’d already entered the June birthday of my cousin’s daughter, a call she never got to make. The birthday girl herself had only met my mother a couple of times. Their relationship was all about that birthday wish. When she heard Ma had died, she told her mother ruefully, “One less person to call me on my birthday.”
She understood there was something special that someone remembered her birthday without the help of a Google calendar or Facebook. And I realised that’s what growing older really means. Having fewer people around who remember your birthday just because they truly care.
They put the happy in a “happy birthday”.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW