Birthday

What’s in a birthday! A day to remember when your cries widened the lips of your family members in beaming joy! And count the numbers year by year. The day I was born the sky was rent with lightning, it rained daggers stabbing the earth to bleeding slush as though Krishna came slicing the jailed womb of my mother. May be it was a hospital labour room, dingy, bloody and screams of women deafening the nurses and midwives to indifference. I don’t remember. Never had the urge to ask my mother. But I remember the celebrations since my fourth year. Mother would dress me in new clothes, dot my forehead with sandal paste and vermillion over my eye brows, father would take me to a temple – Nilakantheswar; we would walk along ridges of farmland and some puja would be performed. Neighbours would be invited in the evening. Mother would serve some delicacies and the celebration would end.  The next morning the same books, school, class and my own inventive devices to get more from life.

My disenchantment with my birthday came in my tenth year. How is a birthday special? How is it different from the rest of the days in a year?  Every moment children are born and so do birds, beasts and insects. Everyday the sun is born out of the dark womb of the night, every evening it dies beyond the horizon. This coming hither and going hence runs in symmetrical perpetuity balancing birth and death in the human condition. How is birth different from death except being two states of life. Without death life is not complete and without birth this daily encounter with death’s multiple doubles can never manifest their wrathful forms. I am born to die so I should rue the day I was born.

On my tenth birthday I had my birthmate, a beautiful torn-frocked neighbour in my street run over by a speeding bike. Her left thigh bone was perhaps fractured. I put her in a rickshaw and took her to the city hospital. I had no money to pay the fare; the rickshaw puller sent my fourteen generations to hell. The expletives still ringing in my ears, I lifted the girl and ran to the Doctor who was kind and attended to her immediately. After an interminable hour she appeared, smiling tears half hanging from her black, bleary eyes: No fracture only a crack. But she should not walk for at least ten days. How do you feel Namita? She looked at me for a second- I ‘m hungry, she said, tears rolling down her cheek. I leaned her on my shoulder, matched my steps to her limp. I had no money to feed her. My failed malehood wailed.

It was Namita’s birthday too – celebrated with pain, hunger, bruised and bandaged in life’s march into time. I told mother to give her some food and she did after remonstrating my action. I did not eat. Birthday also comes like sandstorm in a garden. Flowers droop, saplings become rootless, trees bend in shattered pride. I left the house and walked barefoot up to the station.  The horns of the train wailed hunger in my ears, the crowds of self- immersed men and women bargained their passage home. My blistered feet turned homeward, my birthday was a famished noon tide. The shores of life seemed devastated by their own storms. I gulped my tears and returned home -no school, no nothing.

I have forgotten my birthday, even the month and year. I have grown, perhaps mature to be indifferent to all Namitas of the world. If you are born, you have to live a life. There is no rule, no Samhita to direct the course of your life.  You have to live to die one day: but how? The how should be answered by you only. You make your calendar, sleep with dreams of tomorrow, cajole your dreams to come every night, shuffle your fancies and place your cards face down. But I've had to show my cards, often losing the stakes. I have become a pop singer. I play the Mandolin in birthday parties.

When rich brats hire posh hotels, invite friends, classmates, neighbours, teachers, relatives and place Black Pagoda Cakes on well decorated tables I raise the pitch and pace of my Mandolin. I lead the dance, the children and grownups in their Ritu Jain designer fineries , clap and dance, their jewels shine, their well made up faces  broaden with loud laughter, their feet, although missing beats and steps , claptrap to  long applause. No one looks at me except the videographer yet I create the rhythms of joy for those boys and girls who enjoy their birthdays floating in the gathering like Champagne glasses on the toasting hands. Dinner, drinks, music, and cake cutting, teasing, praising, jealousing- all go on in varied sequences. The Mandolin gets subdued, the drums go silent, and the light fades. I return on my bike to my shanty.

Namita knocks at midnight plus after her hotel room stints, her garish make up blurred by tired limbs and says- I’m hungry,  Do you have…

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty