The Big 30

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 30^th 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.