A birthday I am not likely to forget. I woke up in a lovely house and ate toast, fruit and tea with a friend of a friend of my step mother's. She gave me a little cute box as a gift and wished me success and good luck and many good years. She dropped me in town (Baroda) at my friend Dan’s hotel – the super funky Presidential Towers. We ran off to escape his very sweet if overwhelming Parsi host family. We found these cool murals, which two guys in charge were delighted to be able to show off to us (at least it seemed to me). We then went to the Baroda Museum which was large and interesting but not well cared for. There we saw everything from a whale skeleton to old Chinese dishes, sculptures and paintings of wealthy folks. From there we went to the Landmark – a huge western style bookstore and more. Unfortunately we only had Coffee Day as a food choice and we were starving. We bought books and then we went to see a movie: Sorry Bhai. It was perfectly horrible, but also entertaining. We both alternated all day between missing our loved ones and marveling at India.
I was delighted to spend my birthday with a friend. During the movie, at the intermission, there were two amazing old-school style commercials. I’m not sure that I can explain them, but they were hilarious. I still don't know whether they were real commercials or jokes, they seemed to have been produced in the early 70s. We left there and rushed to the hotel to change for the wedding. I had bought myself two new nice kurtas and dressed in a good old salwaar kamiz. Unfortunately it turned out to be not nearly the shiny, flashy, colorful, sequined dress of nearly all of the other 500 (my guess) women attending the wedding. One young woman asked me why I was not wearing a sari, and I said: because I don't know how (kind of obvious, I thought). We got on a bus with others going to the wedding and I got a small taste of what Dan’s life has been like since September. Firoz (his host mother) is hilarious, loud and loving and a little overbearing. The wedding reminded me a lot of a Jewish wedding I went to in Brooklyn so many years ago. I mentioned to Dan the resemblance of the two weddings and he said that, yes, Parsi weddings were a lot like Jewish weddings. At one point the goofy DJ began playing I just called to say I love you and Dan and I learned that it had been both of our favorite song years before. Then they played Stand by Me and I told Dan that that was our song, that our friends had sung it at my wedding. Then my rickshaw came and Dan and I had to say goodbye, and I rode off to wonderland – also known as 'Amaltas' after the tree with the big long beans. My host's brother was having a 28th wedding anniversary with a few other folks. They sang happy birthday and happy anniversary and we blew out a single candle together. There followed some interesting conversation (politics, Mumbai, prohibition and Bt cotton) and some mango wine appeared.
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