Last week, it was my birthday. A friend asked if there was a party. I mournfully said, "No, I'm sick. So it's just my mother, sister, uncle, niece, brother-in-law and two friends
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Last week, it was my birthday. A friend asked if there was a party. I mournfully said, "No, I'm sick. So it's just my mother, sister, uncle, niece, brother-in-law and two friends. Well, maybe three." "That's a party in my book!" said my friend. In my book it's a sober family dinner. When it comes to birthdays there are two kinds of people: those who love it, remind people it is coming up, revel in the wishes, the presents, the love, the new clothes. They throw parties. They call up anyone who forgot their birthday and berate them. And, well, those whose feelings are on the spectrum from ambivalence to hate. Like Garbo, they vaant to be alone. They switch off their phones and feel depressed or pretend they believe in the lunar calendar and something called adulthood.
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It's pretty obvious which kind I am. Since it is obvious, why don't I go ahead and state it in a fashion usually found in political commentary pieces. I belong to the first category, yaniki, people who look forward to and fully enjoy their birthday. I liked taking chocolate éclairs for the class as a kid. I like cooking too much and too well for too many people all crammed into my flat drinking pink drinks and acting like Babloo Dabloo while bachche sing Happy Baarday to You. I admire people with more sophisticated birthday observational techniques, but in my heart, I do not understand them.
Birthday party scenes proliferated in films of the 1960s, full of glittering saris, seething undercurrents and sad songs on pianos. I assume that's what made the standard birthday party celebration with cake and candles and parties popular. I always assumed this was a Western tradition - which geographically speaking, it partly is. It's origins though feel quite Indian in a nazarbattu kind of way. Birthdays began to be observed by Egyptians and Greeks as a way of warding off evil. The Egyptians believed evil spirits were attracted by important days, like birthdays (hello Sleeping Beauty). So they gathered around the birthday person, lighting candles to dispel the dark, using noisemaker toys to ward off the spirit, bringing gifts and celebration to fill the air with good spirits in a sense and ward off the evil eye.
The Greeks believed that a spirit presided over the birth of each person and had a mystical relationship with the god on whose birthday that person was born - corresponding to the days of the week. So tributes to the particular god was offered on birthdays. Moon-shaped cakes, lit with candles were offered to the lunar goddess Artemis, recreating her radiance. Blowing candles out was a way of sending up a wish to the gods. It all feels very familiar to other Indian rituals.
The idea of notionally guarding the life of the birthday person is a beautiful one - full of cherishing and community. It is as if a group of people comes round to hold the dread of an individual, perhaps the very dread that gathers in the souls of some birthday haters. It is the dread of aloneness, of not mattering, of loss, and ultimately, of death, a dark truth, nestled like a seed inside the miracle of birth, dispelled only by a momentary celebration of love, beauty and life.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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