The Birthday That Keeps Coming
Every year the calendar insists on a day he no longer needs.
My father would have turned sixty three last Tuesday, and Gupta Bakery still has his order on file. I know because I called them the way I have called them every March for twenty years, and the man on the phone said, "Pineapple, no icing flowers, half kilo, happy birthday to Sharma ji," before I could get a word out.
I did not correct him.
I said yes, pickup at four thirty, and hung up, and sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet where we keep the good plates.
Nobody teaches you what to do with a dead loved one's birthday. Death itself arrives with instructions. There are rituals, thirteen days of them in our house, and relatives who come with food and leave with your good containers. There is paperwork, which turns out to be its own strange mercy, because it gives your hands somewhere to be. But then the paperwork ends and the calendar keeps going, and one morning you flip the page and there it is. March 4. His day. Printed months in advance by a calendar company that had no way of knowing.
When he was alive, the day ran on rails. The same pineapple cake, because he distrusted chocolate the way other men distrust politicians.
The same argument about candles. "A man my age should not be blowing on food," he said every year, and every year my mother lit them anyway, and every year he blew them out in one theatrical breath and looked around like he had won something.
The first March after he died, my mother declared a policy. "We will treat it like a normal Thursday," she said on the phone, in the voice she uses when she has been crying and wants you to pretend otherwise. So I treated it like a normal Thursday, except that at four thirty I was standing in Gupta Bakery holding a pineapple cake I had ordered without deciding to, and at five I was eating one slice in my parked car, and at five twenty I was pushing the rest deep into a public dustbin like a man disposing of evidence.
I drove home smelling of pineapple and shame and told nobody.
The second year we tried it her way properly. No cake, no calls, no mention. The day sat in the middle of the house like a piece of furniture no one would look at. I phoned her at night and we talked about my cousin's admission results for eleven minutes and then she said, "Okay, beta, sleep," and we both stayed on the line for a second too long before hanging up.
Ignoring the day did not shrink it.
It just made us liars for twenty four hours.
The third year is the one I want to tell you about.
It was nine forty at night, the day nearly survived, when the landline rang. Nobody rings the landline anymore except the bank and one particular aunt, so I almost let it go... Then I picked up and a big, happy, static-wrapped voice said, "Put the birthday boy on the phone."
It was Prem uncle. My father's hostel roommate from engineering college, calling from Winnipeg, where he has lived since before I was born. They spoke maybe twice a year, always on birthdays, always too loudly.
Nobody had told him.
I had to say it standing in the corridor in my socks. There is no good sentence for it... I said, "Uncle, Papa passed away. In November, year before last." And then I listened to a seventy year old man go completely silent across nine thousand kilometres... and the silence had a texture to it, like wool.
When he finally spoke, he did not say sorry.
He said, "That fool sold his watch for me."
In 1984, Prem uncle's mother fell sick in Patna and he did not have the train fare, because it was the end of the month and they were students and everyone was poor in the specific, cheerful way of hostels.
My father sold his wristwatch, his one good thing, an HMT his own father had given him, and put the money in Prem's hand and told the whole hostel he had lost the watch playing cards so no one would make it a thing.
I was thirty four years old and I had never heard this story.
My father wore cheap watches his whole life and I never once asked why.
We stayed on the phone for an hour. Prem uncle told me my father wrote poems in college, terrible ones, in a brown notebook, and read them aloud on the hostel roof after exams. My father... The man who read only newspapers and electricity bills. Somewhere between the watch and the roof I stopped crying and started writing things down on the back of an envelope like a journalist.
That was the night I understood what the day was for.
The dead keep having birthdays. We are the ones who stop knowing what to do with them.
A birthday is the one day of the year the world will still say a dead man's name out loud, but only if somebody arranges it. So now I arrange it. Every March 4, I call one person who knew him before I existed and ask for one story I do not have. It has become the ritual the cake used to be.
His sister told me he cried at the movie Anand, every single time, and denied it every single time. A retired colleague told me he kept a fistful of orange toffees in his office drawer for the tea boy's son, for years, and logged them in his home accounts as "misc." His college junior told me he once failed a surprise test on purpose because the boy next to him was about to fail alone.
I never found the brown notebook. I looked, the way you look for a thing you need to exist. So I did the next thing. I started writing my own. The first March after Prem uncle's call, I finally wrote about the grief instead of around it, which it turns out is the entire difference. Most of what I write now is really about memory, about how a man can live in your house for three decades and still arrive after his death in installments, story by story, from other people's mouths.
Last year I entered one of those poems into a monthly poetry contest, mostly because he would have found it hilarious. His son, rhyming about him, in public. It did not win... He would have enjoyed that part even more.
This Tuesday, the birthday came again, the way it keeps coming, indifferent and punctual. I picked up the cake at four thirty. My mother came over, which she had not managed in three years. We put one candle on it, a fat white one from the puja drawer because we had nothing smaller.
"A man my age," she started, doing his voice, and could not finish the line.
"Should not be blowing on food," I said.
So we blew it out together, on his behalf, and sat in the sudden dark of the kitchen without reaching for the light switch. The smoke went up from the wick the way smoke does, in no hurry at all, absolutely certain of where it was going.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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