THE BIRTHDAY DRESS

My birthday is always followed by Durga Puja-sometimes a week, sometimes a fortnight and at times even a month later. I remember my father would wake me up on Mahalaya, at an unearthly hour every year, with the words, “See the other day you were born and now it is Devi Pakhsha”. Half asleep, half awake we would all listen to the voice of Birendra Krishna Bhadra reciting the Chandipath interspersed with the ethereal agamani songs like “Bajlo tomar alor benu….” with their all pervasive melody wafting softly through the entire house.

Pujo to me is that time of the year when the day begins with the fragrance of the shiuli flowers in the air, rows of the wispy white kaash phool in the distant fields, the whole para or neighbourhood resonating with the beats of the dhak, loudspeakers blaring the latest Hindi and Bengali songs. Pujo also means crisp, new clothes…and the number of new dresses you had meant a lot when we were kids. So every year I would wear my birthday dress for a little while and keep it away, neatly folded, to take it out again on Shasthi, the day of the Mother Goddess’s bodhan or welcome, marking the first day of Durga Puja.

My earliest memory goes back to my fifth or sixth birthday when I was given this lovely orange dress. That year my dress for Pujo was a bright red one. Both came from New Market. Both came wrapped in little card board boxes, brought by my father from Calcutta. Both were equally pretty. The orange one was an A-Line dress with some frills and fancy buttons and short butterfly sleeves. I remember coming home from school in the afternoon, quickly changing into this dress and sitting down for an elaborate meal. That day the food would be laid out on the floor, not the dining table. An embroidered ‘ashan’ or small rug would be placed (this one was special since it was hand embroidered in colourful geometric patterns with wool, like a little carpet, by my grandmother). I would be made to sit on it with all the food spread out in silverware and this was one day I would eat with a silver spoon. Among other special items there would always be payesh or the rice pudding, a must in every Bengali’s birthday celebration.

We never had parties due to some superstition of my grandmother, in whose family some tragedy had befallen one of the members after one such event. So birthdays remained a family affair and I regretted missing out on unwrapping presents like my other friends. It bothered me to no end that I had carried this gift and that gift for my friends but I missed out when my turn came since there were no parties in the evening. When we moved to Calcutta there were always family dinners at Peter Cat, Kwality or Mocambo in Park Street. The cake or sometimes a box of assorted pastries came from Flury’s , at that time one of the most well known confectioners in the city, which my father would pick up on his way back from office. I was made to feel like a princess that day.

We were allowed to carry toffees to school but the Convents I went to never allowed us coloured dresses. So I could never flaunt my birthday dress. I know this will not make much sense to today’s kids who attend International Schools where they follow the American concept and, even if they do have school uniforms, they very often take the form of smart casuals or bright T-shirts with track bottoms. We were never that lucky and had to be content with our knee length blue skirts (which started off as navy blue but with regular wash in surf water gradually acquired various other shades of blue) long white socks,  stiff white shirts, and funny looking ties which were pre-knotted and even had buckles. In our school days the PT dress was a little smarter, comparatively shorter, with a sash which flaunted the House colour. At the end of the day, the birthday dress, seen only by the family, would be packed away and taken out again for Pujo, a few days later, adding to that year’s Pujo collection. The birthday dresses bought by my mother would always mysteriously be a size or two bigger since she bought them, may be, on a five- year plan but this orange dress, fortunately bought by my father, was of a better and smarter fit.

Strangely, I still follow the practice of putting away my birthday sari and taking it out again during the Pujas. After completing fifty summers, twenty four in my parents’ house and twenty six in my marital home it is difficult to now say where I truly belong.  After my marriage, it was my mother-in-law who made the payesh on my birthdays. I still remember waking up earlier than usual on some working days to sounds emanating from the kitchen, wondering who was in there so early, only to discover my mother-in-law crushing the cardamoms and cashew nuts. After her the task of making the payesh for everyone’s birthday fell on me though my husband, nowadays, insists on making it for me.

I must stop digressing and get back to that cute little orange dress which I continued to wear for a couple of years till it acquired a micro-mini length for me, since I was growing tall, but I always managed to slide in. No stitch ever came off, no button went missing and the colour remained as vibrant as on the first day despite my having worn it so many times.

One winter morning, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, while leaving for school, I saw my father sitting on a cane chair in the verandah having his tea, and a little girl, aged about five or six, all covered up in a coarse material, with only a tiny face visible. She had a nice chubby face with pinkish chapped lips and cheeks. She was also having tea in a steel glass with biscuits. Later, my mother explained that she was my Baba’s ‘little pet’ whom he had discovered sitting on the steps leading to the verandah, shivering in the cold. He had made her come and sit under the roof in the grilled verandah and had asked my mother to give her some tea and biscuits. This had been going on for the past few days. She would come in through the grille door, sit for a while, have tea with biscuits or ‘chapati’ and after some time she would leave. They could not make out much from what gibberish she said and neither could she make out much of what was said to her. May be her mother worked in some house close by, or she belonged to one of the labourers’ families living on the roads, or may be just a little beggar child, though she never asked for anything.

One day my father asked my mother to give her some of my old clothes and she gave her the little orange dress I had long outgrown and which now lay in one of the old metal trunks.  It had become a familiar sight every morning seeing her around the same time wearing that orange dress, which would show a little beneath the rough, thick shawl that covered her, sitting on the verandah with my father having her tea and biscuits. Her chubby face and curls reminded me of the cherubs. Then one day she stopped coming as suddenly and as mysteriously as she had appeared.

My father, a self- proclaimed atheist, who always admired the temples from outside, but never entered the sanctum sanctorum; my father, who let my mother touch his forehead with the puja flowers but never tasted the prasad; my father, who avoided going for pujas but never shied away from helping another human being, could not help saying that the girl was a little ‘angel’ who had chosen to visit us. We really do not know who this little visitor of ours was but I still feel I am connected to her in some way , as if our lives and fates are intertwined somewhere, by that orange birthday dress. Hope her life too has been as blessed as mine.

DS