Why I will call buaji on Daler Mahendi's birthday

I hate birthdays. The gifts are never good and the early-morning phone calls are frankly too many. I also hate birthdays of my kin because there are no gifts and the early-morning phone calls are still too many. What on Earth are you talking about, you may ask.

I am talking about this unexplained habit of Punjabis to not only wish the birthday boy/girl on his/her day but to also wish his/her father and mother, children, spouse, uncle and nephew, aunt and niece, friend and siblings... you get the idea. I am especially blessed because I had to love my chachi-chacha as much as I love my parents. So on the birthdays of my Dad, Mom, brother, Chachi, Chacha, their daughters and the children's spouses, I am flooded with phone calls.

And mind you, a true Punjabi will consider it bad karma to not make the above phone calls on every birthday. Now while I have accepted that I am doomed to Punjabi hell for all eternity where I will probably have to receive and make phone calls on Daler Mehendi's birthday too, my family members refuse to come over to the dark side and feel deep karmic satisfaction on waking me up at 6 in the morning on everybody's birthday.

You must be wondering about the logic of 6 a.m. calls and if you did not then, well you are now so I will tell you. This habit has lingered in my two buas since those days when BSNL had low STD calling up to 6 or 7 a.m. and to make use of cheap calling rates, the buas would invariably call us at 6 a.m. ALWAYS. See for them, 6 a.m. is well into morning. They have bathed and prayed and had their morning chai and मट्ठी and are ready to take on the world. 6 a.m. for the rest of us is that unholy time when you are expected to rise from under the soft and warm covers and rise from over the snuggly pillow, AND shine brighter than the bleak sunlight and shine through the depressing vacuum in the pit of the stomach that one tends to associate with early morning.

Which is why I hate my birthday and your birthday and everybody's birthday.

A few days back I was told through our highly unreliable channel of grapevine that one of my buajis is very unhappy with me and does not wish to talk to me.
Reader Alert!
The Kakkar and extended family grapevine use a highly complex code that translated this message into the following order by buaji:

Shweta must visit me today and spend not less than half an hour listening- with pretend or real interest about what is- as youngsters would say- "up with me these days".

So I reach buaji's house the same evening and am greeted with the incredibly out-of-tune singing of a few Sikh gentlemen on ETV Punjabi's Bhajan Hour.

Besides the depressing vacuum in the pit of the stomach that one associates with early morning, there is another nasty sensation- that of a sort of shrinking of the heart and inward pulling of the veins of the ears that one tends to associate with any form of devotional singing on TV, and that one especially tends to associate with the audio-visual unpleasantness of three or four elderly Sikh gentlemen wearing identical navy-blue turbans and sitting before musical instruments of choice, singing gurbaani or the shabad kirtan. It is downright depressing and when one thinks of the ETV Punjabi's devotional program, one instantly thinks of the English dementors that suck all happiness out of the soul.

So in the backdrop of this excruciating noise, I greet buaji and ask her how she has been. Within the next few minutes I am hit by two unpleasant realizations: one, I forgot to wish her for her daughter-in-law's birthday recently, which explained the grapevine code. But I would get over this. I would ask her to talk about her son and daughter-in-law in Australia and she would calm down and forgive me. But it was the second realization that hit me harder than the monotonous pitch of the shabad kirtan: I had chosen a Thursday to visit her.

Thursdays are bad. And not just because you cannot eat eggs that day. And not just because you cannot cut nails on the one day that you seem to remember to cut them. Thursdays are kirtan days at the Dargarh- a religious order that my buaji and other family members go overboard in following. Buaji is part of the कीर्तन मंडली there that meets on Thursdays at the temple, gossips a lot, sings devotional songs a little, eats fried food a lot and then calls it a day. The members of the कीर्तन मंडली reach their respective homes and thereafter spend the evening calling each other and gossiping about members of the मंडली among themselves. Well among all of them except the member who is being talked about, of course.

As anticipated, I crossed the first hurdle of forgetting to wish her on her daughter-in-law's birthday easily. I used an antidote that was made of a large portion of questions about little details of her son and family's lives and a small portion of giving information about her brother, i.e. my father who is gruff on the phone and so with who, buaji does not get to talk too frequently. It worked like magic and all traces of displeasure were gone in a few instances.

Now if you are wondering if there is a point to this story, here it is. I mean in the next few paragraphs. THE SECOND REALIZATION. कीर्तन मंडली and Thursday कीर्तनs. My Buaji likes to keep a healthy stack of ten-rupee notes in her wallet and over the years this stack has become quite obese. The कीर्तन मंडली also offers what we call अरदास, which is the process of offering 10, 50, 100, 500 or 1000 but mostly 10 unless you are in really deep shit but we digress now so I will end the sentence and tell you the money is offered as bribe to have the Gods grant the wish that the devotee makes.

On that day, buaji was given responsibility of the collected अरदास money and I saw with dismay as she extracted her wallet from her purse and retrieved a 100 rupee note from it. And then another one.

I will put in the 200 and take 10s for this amount from the अरदास bag, she announced, untying the knots atop the bag. Now the answer to why this announcement by buaji caused me dismay lies in the fact that the women at the कीर्तन मंडली always seem to have really greasy hands and so when her phone rang for the customary gossip post-कीर्तन, she handed me the bag and began her chat as I started the tedious work of taking out one ten rupee note at a time, unfolding and un-scrunching it. Maybe it was the background music from the Bhajan Hour on ETV Punjabi or maybe it was the weird smell of oil from the bag of greasy notes but after the 7th note or so, I fell into a kind of daze. Somewhere in between buaji hung up the phone but never got back to the most boring job on the planet where I was sure I was a temporary substitute. Eventually I finished piling the stack of notes for her, which the blessed woman made me count thrice before putting into her wallet (how she fit the notes in her overstuffed wallet has since been listed as one of the unexplained mysteries of life).

In the process of the above stuffing, she found a 500 rupee note in her wallet. So she took it out and looked at it, deep in thought while the Sikhs on TV continued their monotonous melodies. Then she thought some more and finally said- "change ते किन्नी वी हो, काम आ जांदी है. इक्क कम् कर, पंज सौ दी change कड्ड दे.

I am never again NOT calling buaji on everybody's birthday. Including Daler Mahendi's.