The great eve

Tomorrow being the 16th anniversary of my forced marriage with the world, my house was full of tension this evening. There was an almost solid sense of anticipation hanging in the air like a drunken moth. Occasionally, a drunken moth would hit someone in the face and fly away towards its lightbulb Mecca. You could tell my parents were really looking forward to it:

"Stop eating and start studying!"  "Take the food out and put it on the table" "Stop looking into space, there are heavy objects that aren't going to move themselves"

At least seven people had wished me loud, enthusiastic, heartfelt HAPPY BIRTHDAYs (sometimes accompanied by warm hugs) even though it was a day early. I'm at home, staring at something random, when I get a call from a close family friend.

"It's your birthday?"

"Actually it's tomo-"

"Happy birthday!"

"Thank you, but it's tom-"

"Do you know how I can install a BSNL to connection on my landline?"

Soon after, my uncle and grandmother came to have dinner. This usually heralded long involved arguments and debates over which type of Hindi films were better: the older generation or the newer one. My grandmother would try to convince my ather that bikini-top saris and backless cholis were not good for films, and my father would argue that the only reason they hadn't come into fashion earlier was that the actresses were generally too flabby to wear them. Then, either my uncle or my mother would redirect the combined critical wrath of the family to the taste of some relative whose taste in films is as deplorable as is humanly possible.

There is a break as we watch some twaddle on TV in honour of Amitabh Bachchan's 66th birthday: he lumbers around on stage, not really moving the lower half of his body, while nubile young desi women weave and prance around him, giving proof that sex and sexegenarian can go together.

The time that follows, for a few hours, roughly uptil 11, is the kind of time you'd imagine being an integral part of heaven. It's one of those indescribable spells, when time becomes molten and flows around you like a mercury Yin-and-Yang figure. You lose track of everything else that is "going on" in your lifr. You are truly and in every sense living in the present with no thought of either the future or the past, enjoying the fluid moments as they float around you, and being happily unaware of the preciousness of the moments you are experiencing until later, when the nostalgia for that same happy obliviousness to time.