The Giant Leap Into the Late Twenties

My birthday for me is the single most important day of the year, and I start planning for it from January 2^nd every year. You would think that as I got older, this whole birthday fancy would reduce and I would start treating my birthday like any normal adult person treats theirs. Far from that happening, it became the other way round, with the birthday gaining more importance with each passing year. So much so that last year, because I was turning 25, and my birthday was almost in the middle of the week, I decided to celebrate it for a whole week – which meant dinners/ lunches/ coffee dates with friends, movies, plays, shopping; something or the other for every day of the week.

However, this year, the birthday excitement was thankfully a lot more toned down (by my standards, not by normal adult person standards, of course). Maybe it was the overdose of birthday celebrations last year. Maybe it was that turning 26, which symbolises Entering the Late Twenties, seems to cry out for a sober celebration, if at all a celebration is even called for.

Which is all to say that toned down celebrations were planned for the day: the morning at a spa, lunch with Nike, a house party for 25 people in the night. The next day, we were going to drive off to spend the weekend in a nice resort out of town, so as to extend the celebrations into the weekend. Yeah, not such toned down celebrations after all; for all my lamentations on the awfulness of turning 26, I just couldn’t pass up a day which was all about me, me, me!

Of course, nothing went as planned. At midnight, despite my protestations that I didn’t expect a cake, and didn’t even want one, I realised I did indeed want one, and got rather upset when there really was no cake. So Nike took me to this rather lovely 24 hour poolside coffee shop, where I cut a sinful chocolate pastry in lieu of a cake, drank a chocolate milkshake, and generally overdosed on chocolate.

Since my friends seemed to have taken it into their heads to wish me at midnight as per their respective time zones, I ended up sleeping only early in the morning. Which meant that I was over an hour late for my spa appointment. I spent over two hours getting pampered at the spa, and generally feeling good about myself – not that it requires a spa to do that!

All this time, I had left my phone in the locker, and got to retrieve it only after the 2 hours in the spa, when I sat down for a haircut. I saw a gazillion missed calls from Nike and worriedly called him back – the brilliant man had locked himself out of the house, and after trying to reach me for the last two hours, had given up and gone to sleep in the car. Of course, this meant that I had to short cut my hair cut (tee hee!) and rush to the man’s rescue – more appropriately, he rushed to his own rescue as he drove up to the spa to pick me up.

I told myself, not very convincingly, that rescuing the man was more important than fulfilling my dreams of sashaying in beautifully blow-dried hair at the party, and decided to focus on lunch. At which point Nike suggested that we go to Nandhinis. Yes, the Andhra meals place. For my birthday. Yes, you read that right. I said ‘okay’ in a brave but shaky voice. Let it not be said that Nike has not learnt his lessons in all these years – we ended up going to a nice, cosy little restaurant called Woodstock instead. * Evil grin *

When we got home, our watchman informed us that the cook had waited for us for over half an hour and had just left. This was a crisis! What would happen to food at the party? Some people might dismiss food as not important at a party, but it just wasn’t done to expect them all to survive on a liquid diet that night, however great that might be. So we gave chase to the cook, found her at the bus stop and brought her back home.

The rest of the evening went swimmingly well. The cook did an excellent job. Everyone turned up. I looked great in my wine-coloured dress (Yes, I do say so myself). We ate, drank, made merry, and played Taboo till Nike went into his obsessive, trance like Taboo state. He was forcibly dragged to the table to attend to the cutting of the cake. And then the straps of my lovely dress snapped. Poof! Like that! Thankfully, I was far too ‘happy’ to let it bother me; also, I always buy atleast two pairs of new clothes for my birthday. Wearing normal non-new clothes was, of course, out of the question.

We played charades for a while, and then started dancing. Actually, it would be more appropriate to say that the girls danced, while the guys sat around and watched. Now that had an almost dance-bar-ish feel. We danced till about 4 in the morning, and then played another round of Taboo, where everyone fell over everyone else in an attempt to grab the cards lying all over the floor, and Nike indiscriminately abused everyone. The party ended at 5am.

Of course we didn’t go anywhere the next day. Nike kept throwing up all day long. And I was exhausted. But it was a good party. And it was a great day. So, that, dear readers, was to tell you that turning 26 isn’t always a bad thing!  

P.S: We did make that weekend trip the next weekend though. And it was awesome!