And so there went December; a month bookended by birthdays. The festive season sandwiched between Jasper’s birthday on December 2nd and Dylan’s on December 31st. With hindsight I see that we should have had Jasper chopped out a day earlier for better symmetry. But there’s nothing I can do about that now, except stew on it. Every year. For the rest of my life.
I’m glad that only one of the people for whom I’m duty bound to arrange birthday celebrations is a child, because children's birthdays here in Mumbai are an absolute mind-boggler. For context, a local mums group I follow on Facebook regularly notifies me of cries for help from mothers who want to organise a ‘playdate’ for their children, something for which an MC-slash-entertainer is required, and often a venue too. In my book, a playdate is a get together of similarly aged children, orchestrated in order that the adults can enjoy exchanging parenting horror stories and useful tips. Often at a time of day when the sun is so far over that yardarm somewhere that wine is not only acceptable but, arguably, called for. Apparently, playdates are interpreted differently here. My curiosity gets the better of me every time I see one of these posts, which is roughly once a week, and I fall down the wormhole of reading the comments in case something inspires me. There appears to be one lady, Monica, whose army of loyal devotees sing her praises so loudly and so regularly, often without invitation and with such effusive language that her being unavailable sends other poor, un-Monica’d mothers into a spiral of despair. Comment after comment recommends Monica, until the originator of the post jumps in to say that Monica is unavailable. Sympathies and half-hearted ideas of renting out a play zone, or hiring a party planner fade to black as the responses lose steam and I lose interest. I don’t subscribe to this level of unnecessary stress where toddler entertainment is concerned. Jasper has had a couple of playdates since we’ve been here which have involved someone coming to our house in the morning and me making tea for the other mum which promptly goes cold while we manhandle our children to stop them from getting too rough, too affectionate or, in Jasper’s case, too close with a well-aimed cricket ball. A thoroughly enjoyable way to pass a few hours, even without wine.
Anyway, back to birthdays - surely a far grander, more involved affair than a playdate in any culture. For my own birthday, I have adopted a tradition of demanding a trip to the beach. You might think after seven years of living in tropical Myanmar that the novelty of being able to spend an October birthday sunning myself on the sand, rather than squelching through a soggy carpet of conkers on a drizzly, autumn walk to a cosy pub might have worn off. Well, it hasn’t. So, for my birthday back in October, we went to Goa. {You can read all about that here.} This year, I had the privilege of being the first person to receive an attempt at a happy birthday from Jasper, henceforth to be pronounced “Hatty Birdy”.
Jasper didn’t express any strong sentiment as to how he wanted to celebrate his 2nd birthday, which gave me relatively free rein to plan as I saw fit. I have long admired a parenting tactic deployed by some friends of ours back in Yangon who repeatedly lied to their twins about when their birthday was so that it fell on a Sunday every year; the one day of the week when a boozy hotel brunch was available to host the celebrations. I think they managed about 4 years of Sunday birthdays before one of the older children let the cat out of the bag. Sadly, I was unable to deploy this ingenious solution for several reasons:
The extended family follows Jasper’s life through a photo-sharing app (Tiny Beans) and the intercontinental shame would have been too great for me to bear had I shifted the all-important date for my own convenience.
Delaying Jasper’s birthday by any days has the knock-on effect of pushing back the putting up of Christmas decorations, something that I, as the self-appointed family flag-bearer for the spirit of Christmas, am reluctant to do.
Dylan missed Jasper’s first birthday so it seemed only right to celebrate this one as properly as we could.
Jasper has more friends than we do in Mumbai none of whom, to my knowledge, are especially into bottomless brunches.
It was a relief that Jasper didn’t offer an opinion on his big birthday bash because I doubt we could afford to execute against his brief. You see, contrary to my own childhood where many a happy birthday party was spent in the living room at home playing Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs with a handful of school friends, Jasper is growing up in a world full of far more flash and fanfare. For Jasper, the word ‘party’ is synonymous with the words ‘festival’ or ‘funfair’, without so much as a whiff of a game of Sleeping Lions when things get too raucous. It’s not his fault that his expectations are so high. The compound in which we live has a garden area where, 5 days out of 7 on lucky weeks, ferris wheels, bouncy castles, bumper cars, swimming pools and even the odd zip line are erected in celebration of a child’s birthday. And Jasper, with all the cool bravado of someone who believes himself to be invisible, or of someone who assumes that everyone and everything was put here on this earth for his enjoyment, gatecrashes every single one of these fun-party-festi-fairs. Sometimes he wears sunglasses which do absolutely nothing to disguise him. At peak party season (which seems to have waned now from its high point in November) Jasper would wake from his afternoon nap and go straight to his bedroom window to see what was being constructed in the garden. Traditional party hours seem to be between 5-9pm, which is befuddling in itself when the party is for a four year old, and so by 4pm when Jasper was on the lookout for his afternoon’s entertainment, preparations would be almost complete. The first few times he gatecrashed, I found it amusing. Then, on the occasion that I was the responsible adult accompanying him, I was mortified. My embarrassment had more to do with the fact that I was dressed in sports kit, all-too-conspicuously chasing after an unruly Jasper, while the invited mothers of the invited children glided elegantly between the activities and stalls allowing their nannies to wrangle their babies. With time and repetition I have come to realise that Jasper’s little blond head popping up at these events is not only expected but welcome, and I have reconciled with my conscience that before we leave India, Dylan, Jasper and I will throw one epic festival for all the people whose birthday parties Jasper has crashed through the years.
Jasper has developed a reliable modus operandi at these parties: to find a mode of novelty transport and ride it for longer than anyone else. He will happily spend 45 minutes in an aeroplane, a toy train or a ferris wheel. He’ll hop off every now and then to check out the bouncy castle or to investigate the snack options, but his priority is to get maximum value for someone else’s money from something that moves. He is small, incredibly quiet and surprisingly patient when it comes to sharing the rides with others, so I can understand why the parents who I have managed to identify and to whom I've apologised, are so agreeable to him hanging out and enjoying the entertainment.
Sometimes. the snacks even come to Jasper. Drive-thru french fries stop.
We were actually invited to one of these parties in early November. It was the 2nd birthday of one of Jasper’s fellow tiny terrors and it was themed as a pool party. On first receiving the invite, I volunteered to be on hand to hop in the pool with the kids, but as I watched paddling pool after intricate, bouncy-castle-come-paddling pool going up in the garden on the afternoon in question, I realised how strange my offer must have seemed to the mother. I had assumed a pool party would make use of the swimming pool. But how wrong I was. Why use what’s already there when an army of balloon-blowers, pool-fillers, popcorn poppers and ‘return gift’ present wrappers under the command of an event planner can assemble and disassemble an entire village of entertainment in less time than it takes me to bake a birthday cake. I was lucky to have spotted my error in time to change out of my swimsuit, but I was still green enough to make the mistake of wearing shorts and t-shirt instead of something a little more glamorous. On this occasion of being invited to a party, both Jasper’s nanny and I accompanied him, and as soon as we arrived there I realised my error. I felt completely lost without Jasper to play with. I found myself following him and his nanny around like a lost puppy, while other mums, most of whom didn’t live in our compound, chatted animatedly to one another. I don’t know if it’s the fluid but incomprehensible mix of Hindi and English that the mums often speak, or the fact that I am still a relative newcomer, or because of the cultural differences that I am still trying to navigate here, but whatever it is, I feel very exposed without Jasper in crowded gatherings. He is the perfect excuse and the perfect distraction for any kind of social interaction I might otherwise be required to fumble through. There must have been over a hundred people at this party, including grandparents, parents, children, nannies and caterers in the count. It was a sensory overload for me, and I dread to think what the flashing lights, DJ music, bouncy castle, swimming pools, swings, slides, balls and blue cake did to Jasper’s poor little brain. It took him over an hour to come down off his disco high, which wasn’t ideal when we only left the party at 7pm.
Needless to say, Jasper’s own birthday party did not follow this formula. For starters, it was only an hour long. 5-6pm: the perfect time for us to load the littles up on sugar before they had an hour to burn it all off on the football field. An hour that took Jasper up to his bath time and the others up to their dinner. As well as being short, his party was small. I reserved a section of the poolside cafe where we installed a few bunches of balloons purchased pre-helium-ed by a shop on the road outside our compound, and laid out a few snacks. The theme was balls, obviously, which led to my first melon-balling experiment (a huge success), and some sports-themed cookies which I ordered in. I made Jasper’s cake - a cricket pitch - and printed out the now customary string of slightly creepy, family bunting. This year, the smiling faces of absent family were photoshopped onto the cartoon bodies of sportsmen and women, where last year they had been jungle animals - with an absent Dylan front and centre. We were around thirty people in total, mostly just Jasper’s friends and their mums. We sang ‘Hatty Birdy’, the kids ate cookies and cake, and then we dispersed. After just half an hour, Jasper took up residence in a cosy corner of the sofa, from where he watched the rest of the proceedings with tired eyes and a shell-shocked expression. He was totally overwhelmed by seeing all his friends in one place, (some from school, some from the compound and some that we had met elsewhere) and by being the centre of attention. I was exhausted from hosting even a small number of mums and can’t even imagine what it’s like to handle grandparents too. But, I was also incredibly happy. I was touched that everyone came, relieved that it had all gone smoothly (with much thanks to Dylan for background management), and very proud of my homemade cake - something so rare that a few days later mums were still coming up to ask me if it was true that I made it. I confirmed the rumours with a puff of my chest and a mental pat on my own back.
Dylan’s birthday was far easier to host, but considerably more nerve-wracking to plan. He did have an opinion on what he wanted, and that opinion was to see the movie Avatar. In the UK, or Australia, or even Myanmar this would be a relatively simple request. But here in Mumbai, movie schedules are not released further than a week in advance, and for some reason the schedules for New Year’s Eve didn’t come out until two days before. Avatar is now the first international movie that I have known to have longer than a single week’s run in Mumbai, which was an enormous relief given that it came out here in mid December. Usually even the hottest Hollywood hits are bumped off by Bollywood blockbusters in a matter of days. For the week running up to Dylan’s birthday I was digging around on apps and websites for clues that the movie would still be showing on his birthday. I even went into several cinemas to ask if the concierge staff had any insider info, which sadly they did not. The reason for my anxiety was that I had absolutely no plan B. Dylan’s request was clear and unequivocal: “I only want to see Avatar. I haven’t been to the cinema since before COVID, and all I want in the world is three hours in a darkened cinema without the little guy.” It wasn’t that Jasper had done anything wrong, but Dylan’s work hours and stress levels mean that he has little if any time to switch off each week, and being ordered around by little Jasper Bossypants doesn’t count as mental downtime. By the grace of the movie gods, Avatar was still showing, and what’s more, it was on at a sensible time for people who are woken at 6am every day by a little monster. We settled into our plush, recliner chairs at 10am, having scheduled our gold class snacks and drinks to be delivered halfway through the movie as elevenses. We dutifully rose to respect the national anthem at the start of the film, something we were used to from visits to Thai cinemas back in our Southeast Asian days, and were surprised to be served a full 10-minute intermission in the middle of a plot twist not long after our food order had been delivered. This was an incredibly civilised cinema experience. Besides the comfortable seating, the PVR Luxe screen boasted a priority waiting lounge, a full kitchen from which we were grateful nobody in our session ordered the small plate labelled “Getting Fishy with it”, and staff who wouldn’t have been out of place in a business class flight cabin. After our three hours of peace and quiet…oh hang on, not that. After our three hours of bone-rattling explosions and mindless escapism, we emerged refreshed and renewed to eat lunch and return home to see out the rest of the year as a family. We sang 'Hatty Birdy' and ate some of Dylan's homemade carrot cake which Jasper is proudly telling everyone 'mummy cook in the oven'.
New Year’s was a low key affair, as it has been for many years. Of the seven times Dylan and I have witnessed the passing of one year into the next together, for only two of those have we been awake. The first in Sri Lanka, where the hotel we stayed in put on an incredible evening of traditional Sri Lankan dancing and dinner timed perfectly to culminate in a pyrotechnic digestif. The second time wasn’t entirely by choice. Between 2020 and 2021, Jasper’s midnight feed fell exactly at midnight and so I sat on the balcony of our apartment, boob out to the cool, December air, watching the spattering of uncoordinated fireworks over Yangon, with Dylan by my side. This year, my eagerness (but failure) to beat Dylan at his newly gifted Pachisi game (the precursor to what we know as Ludo) meant that we were still just about awake enough at midnight to learn that India, or Mumbai at least, doesn’t really do New Year. A faded flutter of fireworks came and went without much pomp.
But that’s OK with us. For this family, 31st December is more about saying our final ‘Hatty Birdy’ of the year and anticipating the first 6am of the incoming January than it is about late nights and fireworks.
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