25th March 2014
It feels like I am standing in front of a monstrous, rather
intimidating metal door, which, in exactly 12 hours, is going to creak open and
usher me into my dirty thirties. Now, if you know me well, you will know that
usually each year around my birthday, I am like an Energizer bunny on a sugar
rush. I begin harping about it weeks in advance. Long hours are spent cooking
up elaborate plans for the day. And, finally on D-day I find myself hopping
around on one foot, too steamed up to do anything constructive except talk to
family and friends who call to wish, knowing well how much I love talking to
them especially today. The aftermath is just as dramatic. For days I go through
withdrawal pangs because I am aware that I will have to wait an entire year to
feel this insane exuberance again.
This year though, my high spirits are streaked with wisps of
trepidation. What are my thirties going to be like? Are they going to treat me
just as kindly as my twenties? Have I done everything that I wanted to do with
the first 30 years of my life? Questions like these seem to crawl out of the
cracks in the aforementioned metal door, making it look all the more daunting. The
past decade suddenly seems so enchanting right now. Throughout my twenties, I eagerly
accepted a life which evidently had a predilection towards embarking on adventure
filled circuitous routes instead of taking the placid, comfortable,
straight-line ones. From uprooting and moving at the drop of a hat to being in a pseudo arranged long distance relationship with the man I married to backpacking through India and Europe on a shoestring budget...I lapped up life’s quirks with the gusto of an experienced swashbuckler.
I wonder if I will be able to say the
same about my thirties! Peeking out of the bedroom window, I realize that the
weather is mirroring my internal conflict. One moment a golden orange sun
appears shining like a beacon of joy and the very next moment it is snuffed out
by a swathe of thick grey clouds. One minute I am enveloped in a blanket of
rich yellow sunshine endemic to a perfect Michigan summer and the very next
minute I am drowning in the dreariness of winters here.
As the arms of the clock slowly tick tock their way to the
12 o’clock mark, my fears are set aside for the time being. The phone suddenly
comes to life and starts emanating all sorts of beeps and whirs. It is already
my birthday in India and I am now officially crowned the queen of the day.
There is the familiar ring of Ma and Papa’s call on Skype. Surprisingly,
Pranay, my brother, calls just then. He is in between classes in college. I put
him on speaker phone so that Ma and Papa can hear him too. Just as the
abundance of love and blessings start to form a lump in my throat, the clipped
beep of Facetime yanks me out and I find myself chatting with a friend who is
about to call it a day in London. We share gossip and a few laughs before I
notice that another friend who is on her way to work in Mumbai wants to talk. I
take her call and we speak into the wee hours of the night, catching up on the
highlights of the past year, giggling like teenagers while reminiscing about
stupid things we did together in college and sharing lurid details of our
present-day lives. At some point we hang up as she needs to get to work and I
need to get to bed.
26th March 2014
It is difficult for me to respond to the high pitched blare
of my 6 am alarm thanks to last night’s shenanigans. Because Ma is Ma, she
remembers to call me at the exact time when I was born 30 years ago (4:30 pm
IST). Everything she says is drenched in love and I feel blissful warmth spread
within. With her words safely tucked in, I make my way to work. It has been
all of 7 months since I started working here and I do not expect a hullabaloo.
But I am proven wrong. I walk in to see a big colourful streamer stretched
across my cubicle. It reads ‘Happy 30th Birthday’ and there is a
bucket of chocolate sitting on my desk (a result of my constant whining about
the urge to jump into a tub of chocolate). The day passes by in a haze and I
remember the best bits of it – my team in Germany singing the birthday song for
me on a conference call, binging on Chinese food for lunch with my friends at
work, my best friend being super excited for I have finally joined her on the
‘thirties’ bandwagon, the flight to Austin, tucking into a scrumptious lemon
cake upon arriving there, long conversations with friends and family scattered
all over the world and spending the last hours of my special day with my most
special person – Arjun.
I may not have achieved everything that I thought I would by
the time I turned thirty, but that does not bother me any more. Because, I have
learnt that in the end it does not matter if you have the pretty house with the
quintessential white picket fence, the fancy job and the picture-perfect family.
What matters is the people whom you love and who love you back – the people who
are flawed just like you, the people whom you can bare your soul to, the people
with whom self-deprecating humour does not bring out a flurry of
holier-than-thou advice but instead leads to peals of uncontrollable laughter.
In short, REAL people, your OWN people. I am lucky to have a truckload of them and this makes me a very happy thirty-year old today.
