Today we celebrate my father’s 76th ‘fake’ birthday! It’s the day his primary care teacher ‘Master Chaju Ram’ chose while admitting him to his class! How he settled on this date (or year) is unknown but the family feels that perhaps the common thought of the time was that any child seeking admission to the 1st grade was at least 5 years old (Keep in mind that this was post-partition India, when the family was a refugee, so things were in disarray)! Also, during those times, official or anecdotal records of the year of child’s birth were neither kept nor was it of important to the people. I know many instances during weddings the age of the bride was more than that of groom (including my own paternal grandparents). I fathom that maturity/wisdom was of importance and not the age! Regardless, we did some major sleuth work (with my mother as the chief investigator) and based on family stories & recollections that ‘Kirat was 3 days old during ‘jyethi sangranth’ (full moon during the desi/nanakshahi month of Jyesth)” and/or “when cousin Amrit was born, Kirat used to crawl”, we determined that his actual birth was May 12th! So, he is a man of two birthdays…and we will celebrate his ‘real birthday’ next month or will we? Growing up, today’s date of April 6th is the only one we have known to be his birthday, thus its pretty much seared in our DNA, so needles to say it will remain the ‘actual one’ for sure. Dad, wish you a very Happy Birthday and we all love you to the moon and back 🙂
Erudite Kahani 