Birthdays.

It's the birthday of two of my friends...both different, independent, rather opposite of each other. And I've just come back from the birthday celebration of one of them. A group of friends, lots of noise, cake and bumps and the kind of hooliganism only Indian college students can do. I remember narrating these typical birthday celebration stories when in Sweden to all the firangs. So proud, so excited I always sounded, and of course we demonstrated it all too at Ayush's birthday, that even the wild Italians and Spanish folks bowed to our wildness and celebratory spirits. Dirty, filthy, wild. total fun.
Even now I'm returning from an equally wild celebration, smeared in cake and curd and iced tea. There's something energetic about the smiles, the affection, the masti that's not worth missing. Yet of late I find myself nostalgic, silent, sidelined even on the birthdays of people I'm close to. I just like observing it all from a distance, sometimes smiling, mostly wondering. We celebrate growing older - more rustic, less innocent, more cynical, less flexible. That's remarkable.
I am thinking about my own birthdays. All 20 of them, as much as I remember. I'm trying to remember one I was happy on, feeling content and loved, and can't. They haven't been bad per se, except the last one which was AWFUL, but I don't love them. No I don't.
When I was three or four, I remember having a small birthday celebration at home, with a few of my colony friends and a lot of relatives, but more or less birthdays have always meant chachu and cousins coming over for dinner at my place, and that being it. My bday comes in the christmas vacations, ans thus there never has been a school celebration. When I was in 8th, my twelfth birthday, that one was pretty bad. It was a Sunday. I was at a cousins' place since Saturday night, and both mom and dad were busy with something that week where they had to go morning through evening. Bro was home too. The whole day I waited for my parents to visit me, to come and take me where they were, to call me, to wish me...it's not the same with a couple of relatives and cousins, and I had to wait till 10 pm that night till they finally came where I was. Of course I got no present, I have never got many of them on my birthdays.
Then there was the next one, the thirteenth. A particularly cold winter that year meant not much of the routine 'celebration' at home happened, but I do remember giving a small treat alongwith a couple of friends at McD's a week later. These friends were supposedly close, also primarily the only ones, and they also have bdays near mine. I remember carefully choosing their birthday gifts and spending all my saved pocket money on them plus the treat which mainly accomodated their friends. I also remember the present I collectively got from them, or rather was left for at the security guard's, which was a couple of ugly cheap negro dolls.
The fourteenth never happened, almost, for hardly any of my 'friends' remembered it. the fifteenth was almost exactly the same as the thirteenth and the sixteenth, when I was in class 12, was slightly better when one of my friends showed up at my place in the evening and we had a good time. Also this time, some friends had cared to call, at least within +/- 3 days of the bday itself. I was delighted. The only presents I got was a sweet birthday poem, and a pen stand. I still have them.
I've always been better-than-average with dates, especially birthdays, and by the time I was 17, I had a large circle of acquaintances and people I knew, spent time with and had wished all year on their bdays. As a percentage thus, the number of people who actually called me that day was touchingly high. Most of them have even forgotten my today, but that's a different matter. The calls were the only good thing about that day, but it was good enough.
And then the last three, each of which was outside home, outside Delhi. I've never had a birthday with friends, never had a birthday in IIT, never had birthday bumps and smeared cakes.
My 18th has been by far the best, though some associated incidents happened that made me curse it for a lot of time. Still I got a few calls while in Mumbai, I got a couple of presents, and I got a wonderful dinner with a friend too. Blessed. The 19th wasn't any special, even in Mumbai with a few friends, and the last one in Sweden was so terrible, so lonely I wished I never turned 20 at all. I had nobody to even talk to all day; not a single person even wished me in person. Three phone calls and 200 orkut scraps+10 chats don't make up for it. I had nothing to do, no mood to even eat alone anymore and terribly missed a lot of people who weren't even available online at the time. I roamed about the streets of Stockholm alone in the dark, sitting by the lakeside and capturing the last memories of the landscape. A lot of my friends forgot, but that's pardonable. My parents wished me at 2 PM IST when I called them to wish me, but that's also understandable. Everything is, except the fact that I was really sad that day. I came back, parents made up for it, and the only present I got was from my roomy. But being back home and at IIT was a present in itself.

I can't help it, getting so unnecessarily nostalgic. About un-memorable things.
I just have too much time in my hands. Duh!