Happy birthday!

November 10th and 11th have always been a special part of my life. Two people who make up all my childhood memories celebrate their birthdays today and tomorrow. Many years have gone by now and we never speak as often as we should but some relationships, I have always believed, never need to be reinforced by contact. These two days in the year always sets the clock back for me as I think of all the wonderfully ridiculous things that we have done and how there was never a dull moment thanks to three overactive imaginations always at work.

As my birthday gift to the two of you, here is a trip down memory lane…

• The summer school/crèche idea that we pioneered in Sri ram avenue with business foresight rare for such a young age and our absolutely brilliant pricing strategies for the school. “No, of course, we can give you a discount” “So do we give each child two erasers or one?” I still wonder why the plan fell through. :P
• Our trips to the ‘secret’ garden with lemonade and biscuits to discuss absolutely ‘critical’ matters sitting in a dark and dingy hut worrying what was going to crawl out of where and then being absolutely heart broken when we discovered our ‘secret’ garden was the most preferred walking trail of more than half the residents of the colony and that it wasn’t so secret after all.
• Playing hide and seek and all of us running to the terrace of Kleen systems and hiding there every single time.
• Making up secret languages and driving the third person mad by pretending it was a real language with one person begging to be taught the new code.
• Strutting around the colony refusing to socialise with any kid other than each other presuming we were the ‘elite’. 
• Swimming for 2 hours in Emperor's club and then eating Chilly Gobi and Panner manchurian like world starvation was at end.
• Making prank calls to half the world and finally being sheepish when we were busted by the telephone department.
  
• Solving elaborate detective mysteries with our heads full of Famous five and Secret seven.
• Playing WWF cards with a vengeance and grinning like idiots when we saw that our next card was going to be Hulk Hogan.
• Finding cow jaw bones during our many excavation sessions and then going into a tizzy of excitement because we were certain it was a dinosaur bone, and then spending an hour under the sheets with a torchlight to add to the ‘allure’ to discover which dinosaur it was by comparing the bone to each dinosaur in our dinosaur cards pack. It is only now I can understand why our mothers reacted the way they did when they saw us with bones of dead animals on the bed.
• Playing cricket with Kalavathi Ma'am's wall as the boundary line and arguing about who should scale the wall to get the ball from the farm.
  
• Making elaborate make believe dishes and making a reluctant boy pretend to eat them all.
• Hosting grand insect cum craft exhibitions and actually charging people to see our tomfoolery.
  
• Creating a new e-mail ID each week with no one to mail but each other but the excitement never ceased. “Put a dot between my initials.” “Put Cool after my name”
• Burying each dead pet with a grand ceremony and a funeral that most undertakers would be proud of.

And they go on…

It was not that our relationships ever lacked the numerous fights and the enormous tantrums but we still had one heck of a time and a childhood that most people would envy. People often ask me if I felt lonely as a single child. I always meet them squarely in the eye and say “Lonely? I grew up with a brother and a sister.”

Anjali and Govind, Happy birthday! Wishing you both the very best in life.