Birthday disasters

I just turned 34 on 26th March. Its one of those nondescript ages you have in order to pass on to a more important one. I always hated my birthdays because I have found out on reflection that most of the difficult times in my life have happened on or just before my birthday. Take the earliest really bad one for instance – I think I turned 10 – that was the night the guy who was sharing a flat with us in Kuwait (we called him Uncle – a really nice person) got back from India after his marriage with a chickenpox afflicted wife. Only my dad would have been so generous as to allow him to stay in a flat with three children and expose all of us to the risk of infection. The worst happened – all of us fell ill. That was only the beginning. My dad lost his job because in the Gulf, if you apply for leave it makes no difference. If you are dying it makes no difference. There are no laws about firing – you could find on any day that you are no longer employed by the company. So he lost his job and a terrible three years of mostly unemployment was before him. We survived somehow.

The next difficult one came when I was 13 and had to leave Kuwait and all my friends and the school which I loved to return to Kerala. Most birthdays after that were forgettable till maybe 13 years later when I had to leave the US though I had become fond of California – it was also the time I learnt that dad had cancer. A year later my dad passed away the day before my birthday – that was the worst experience I have had till date – I have disliked my birthdays more than ever after that loss.

True mostly my birthdays have been either forgotten or not really noticed but that of course was better than struggling through bad ones. This time around it was quite a disaster. All my friends (I have only fiveJ) called me or sent a message. So that was the good part. The bad part is that I have been under house arrest since nine days because the house is getting repainted at an astronomical cost. I cannot leave the house for a minute even to get groceries. I cannot go out for a walk. I cannot eat lunch with privacy or lie down in the afternoons. I can’t find a place without dust. But it’s for a good cause and I am coping. But it is sad when you can’t even step out for your own birthday. It’s even sadder when your husband forgets his wallet at home and does not bring you even a single flower or a piece of chocolate because he didn’t have the money. I would have simply borrowed a few bucks and gotten some flowers but then that’s just me – I guess a guy doesn’t borrow money even for emergencies.

So I got no gifts – I was woefully short of ingredients to make sweets to give the kids at least and I couldn’t go and buy them because of the painting. So I gave up and just went with the flow. The whole afternoon was spent in moving stuff downstairs to upstairs and I couldn’t get a break but at least my husband came early to help with that. While we finished getting one room ready and he was giving the kids a bath, a real heavy and completely unseasonable downpour started. The guy who’s been waterproofing my roof for the last five months (yes I have tolerated the banging and thumping noises all this while – he’s a one man army and therefore takes forever) had blocked the terrace drain with sacks of cement despite my husband telling him several times not to. So the water gushes in from under the door – piles into the newly painted room flows musically down the stairs and fills the hall. To cut a miserable story short, my husband went out in the blinding rain, cleared the drain and stopped the gush. The next few hours were spent in mopping up. My back felt like it was broken in at least three places. The promised trip out to dinner had to be cancelled because of my pain and the rain. I didn’t sleep a wink that night imagining the rain would come in again through some freak repeat of the day’s horror. Of course the positive side is that I now have sparkling clean floors. A birthday to remember you say - more accurately, a birthday to forget – I never liked the number 34 anyway.