An Unexpected Birthday

When I was a child, I used to wait for my birthday. I do it now too but, it is just that I don´t make it very apparent. I was born on 31st October 1984, the very day Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her bodyguard. I was born two or three hours before that incident happened and riots soon broke out in New Delhi. Obviously, that was a very unfortunate day in Indian history. But as a child, I used to feel important and unique telling people that- I was born on a historically important date.

Seven years passed without any major happenings in the field of birthdays. I just used to think birthday means cake and some extra attention. But one day my father took me to a new school in the village and principal told him that I was 5-6 months underage to be enrolled in class 3rd. That´s where, I got my fake/official birthday. I almost forgot about that till I had to write it as my ´date of birth´ in my 10th class board exam form.

Once, I went to my grandfather´s (Nanaji) place. My Naniji had this problem of ´Mahila Mandal´. These ladies used to organize meetings, supposedly to discuss some social work. But these discussions easily transformed into general chatting and a forum for criticizing their daughter in laws. Now there is Naniji and there in ´Mahila Mandal´, where do I come in picture? I´ll answer that question in next paragraph.

What happened was this- Naniji told my mom that she wanted to organize a party for all those old ladies and she also needed to have one occasion(more of a pretext) to satiate the general curiosity. She herself came up with this brilliant idea- ¨lets celebrate Ankur´s birthday, day after tomorrow¨. Nobody asked me and now my birthday was being celebrated. I thought, I already have two birthdays, I won´t mind having third. Then the whole preparation was done. Nanaji himself prepared, delicious barfi. Everybody wished me happy b´day. It was all going well, at the very moment my father also arrived. He had an expression of surprise (more of confusion) on his face. Later he thought, he must have forgotten my birthday. It is just that, he did not verbalize his confusion in front of everybody. Otherwise this funny situation would have been even funnier.

Now after so many years, I kept celebrating my original birthday. This year it was different. My parents were here, we went to Ooty and happened to celebrate my birthday there. Here comes the climax of story-

Few months afer that, one fine day, I reached office and found balloons on my desk. Just to make it very clear- it was none of my birthdays on that particular ´fine´ day. First thing that came to my mind was- these must have been for the person sitting next to me. But this possibility was simply ruled out, when I noticed that these hydrogen balloons were dancing proud and erect on my name plate. Second thought was- I must have done something, which made company earn lot of profits and they want to congratulate me for this. However it was highly improbable. I being extremely optimistic at times thought- ¨these balloons are just the trailer, a cake will follow soon.¨

But I kept waiting for the cake and it never came. Now to my irritation, every person passing by started asking- Is it your b´day today? and I said smiling- ¨no, I think there has been some mistake¨. After repeating this statement n number of times. Some of my friends, started making some allegations like- ¨I am hiding my birthday, because I don´t want to treat them.¨ Now it was too much. What they could not understand was, it was not my birthday for a simple reason that, I was not born on that particular day.

Why such a thing happened, I don´t know – may be some human error or some wrong entry in the employee information system or a practical joke. May be housekeeping people thought, because I was on leave on my actual b´day. They just celebrated it on any random day so as to complete their responsibility to celebrate one birthday per person per year. I also got presented with a birthday card on end of the day!

I am not interested in knowing the reason. In fact, I quite enjoyed that day. The point is when I never questioned my original birthday, why should I question an unexpected and surprise birthday? Birthdays are fun and I am lucky to have many of them! :)