The Birthday Parties

Nina and Varsha’s birthdays fell within a week of each other, in January. The whole concept of a birthday party was alien to Ba, never having given one to any of her kids, let alone knowing exactly which day they were born. The question was, who would order the cake, put up decorations, organize the games and get new party dresses?

Enter Shashikala.

Shashikala, a well-known actress and famous for her roles as a vamp in Hindi movies, was a good friend of the family. She would traipse into the house, her two daughters and a trail of perfume in her wake. She took command. Balloons and streamers. Cake and wafers. Party dresses and conical hats. She would organize and arrange, order and direct everyone and everything around her to produce the ultimate kiddie party.

My dad’s only job in all this was to get the projector from Central Camera and order movies of Laurel and Hardy. The reels would come a day before, five or six of them in big silver tin cases. We all sat on the living-room floor in the diwankhana, our pretty, fluffy dressed fanned around us. Friends, family and neighbors, all invited. The younger kids sat on their ayah’s laps, ayahs who hoped their young charges would not cry, resulting in both being expelled from the room.

Vishnu, servant extraordinaire and general factotum, would set up the projector, threading the film, weaving the celluloid through a veritable maze of buttons and clips, winding, twisting, and turning, snapping shut the clips that would hold the film. It would often slither out of the allotted retaining clasp and the projector would start spewing film - celluloid flailing and thrashing around, a snake in the mouth of a mongoose. A disappointing Ohhh! would reverberate through the room, with Vishnu shouting for the lights and patiently starting the whole weaving process again. The lights would be dimmed again and the show would go on.

Nina and Varsha’s show that is.

My birthday fell in September. No party, no presents, no balloons. No Laurel. No Hardy.

No Shashikala.

September was when the cursed Leipzig Trade Fair took place. And it always took place towards the end of September, when Dad had to make the trip to East Germany. Vishnu would get his bags ready, and off he went, my party the last thing on his mind.

It’s not that he didn’t love me; after all, I was his favorite child. This, in itself, was bigger than any dumb parties or presents, I would reason.

One year, the reasoning quotient ran out and I remember throwing a fit. He cancelled the Leipzig trip and I had my party. He never let on what it cost him and gave me my shining moment the September of that year.

Whereas we were always gently discouraged from having friends (cousins being company enough), attending their birthday parties was charitably allowed. Lobo would drive us there and wait patiently outside, socializing with the other waiting drivers. At the really affluent parties, the hostess would send the house servant out with platters of the ubiquitous wafers and cake for them as well.

Even here, I ran out of luck. The birthday parties I got invited to were boring as hell, where everyone sat on the couches in our stiff, scratchy dresses, staring vapidly at one another, till the mother decided we should play some games. We would sit on the floor and play Passing the Pillow and I Wrote a Letter to my Lover.

I kid you not. Seven year-olds singing about writing letters to lovers. I didn’t even know what a kiss was, let alone a lover. These days any four-year old will not only describe it in lurid detail, but also which boy they french-kissed.

The game involved a circle of kids on the floor and one girl skipping behind them, singing “I wrote an letter to my lover, and on the way I dropped it,” and surreptiously dropping a handkerchief (substituting for the lover’s letter) behind one girl.

I am bored out of my mind just describing it.

Of course, Varsha got the good parties. One year her friend took her to the circus (her father owned Eagle Flasks). Another friend invited her on a ship (her father owned a steamship company).

And I skipped and hopped and dropped handkerchiefs, all the while believing I was having the time of my life.