Birthdays
A friend of mine, a lawyer with whom I used to work, left Kyrgyzstan and took his family to live in Moscow. Thanks to email we have an easy way to keep in touch. He has a great sense of humour and often sends me amusing photos and links to amusing stories on the internet. He is also a source of the occasional wry and witty comment himself … like the message “I thought you would like to congratulate me on my birthday, which was yesterday.”
Birthdays are very important here.
To forget a birthday is a great faux pas. Even if you haven’t seen someone for the whole year, it is customary to seek them out and “congratulate” them with their birthday: “S dnyom rozhdeniya!” A small gift is in order … nothing extravagant … just a token to show attention … Oh, and then there is the obligatory toast: “I wish you health, happiness, good fortune, that your business flourishes and everything goes well”.
It’s important to do something to commemorate the event. Sometimes there’s a party, and sometimes people go out for a meal – even if times are hard and it is only for manti in a simple cafe with one or two close friends and a small bottle of vodka. Tell someone it is your birthday and everyone is pleasant to you!
To be invited to a birthday party is a great honour – and not one to be turned down lightly.
I remember on occasion I had a meeting with some grand government official and I turned up at the appointed time and place and, as is often the case, was kept waiting in the antechamber. Eventually she emerged from her office full of apologies. It was her birthday, she said and some of her student friends had come, unexpectedly, to congratulate her. “OK. No problem! I understand. I’ll come back another time.” “No, no … come in and join us.”, she said. So I did. We sat round her desk and they swapped stories. There was cake … and vodka …I really don’t like vodka that much, but in honour of the occasion I drank the obligatory toasts and offered my own. When every got up to go, it was already quite late so we agreed to postpone our meeting to the same time the following day. I turned up at the appointed time and place and, as is often the case, was kept waiting in the antechamber. Eventually she emerged from her office full of apologies. It was her birthday, she said and some of her colleagues had come, unexpectedly, to congratulate her. I wasn’t phased by this, even though I thought her birthday was yesterday … “OK. No problem! I understand. I’ll come back another time.” “No, no … come in and join us.”, she said. So I did. We sat round her desk and they swapped stories. There was cake … and vodka …and once again I drank the obligatory toasts and offered my own. When every got up to go, it was already quite late so we agreed to postpone our meeting to the same time the following day. You can probably guess what happened the next day … yes, exactly the same. “Rosa,” I asked, “how many Birthdays do you have?”. “Ian,” she replied, “my birthday is Saturday, but I have lots of friends and can’t see them all on the day itself, so we celebrate it all week.”
And I thought it was only the Queen and Jesus, (here there are two Christmases: December 25th and January 7th), who had two birthdays!
Just about everyone celebrates their birthday. Even firms celebrate their birthday! Occasionally we get a phone call from agencies which publish business directories and after they have asked for the name of the company, contact details, (address, telephone and fax numbers, email and web addresses) and the name of the director, they often ask for the company birthday. We had to celebrate the anniversary of the opening of the hotels … and the tenth anniversary of the founding of the company.
It’s probably only the Jehovah’s Witnesses, (and there is quite a sizeable community of them here in Kyrgyzstan), who don’t celebrate birthdays here. Oh, and me … I’m not a spoilsport but, it seems to me that when people get to my age, they normally want to forget them and, anyway, I think they are like Christmas celebrations, mainly for the kids. Also, just like Christmas, it can be a time of stress and if things do turn out badly, then they seem to be that much worse because it ruins what should have been a great day.
Not that I get much chance to overlook my birthday … March 8th is a holiday here: International Women’s Day. Even though it is supposed to be an “international” holiday, we don’t celebrate it back in the UK -0 although I notice that in recent years there have been some attention paid to it in the press.
To mark the holiday, it is usual to give female acquaintances flowers or small gifts and everyone jokes that my mother decided to give herself a present when I was born. (I don’t suppose that there aren’t that many people who have to celebrate their birthday by giving presents to lots of other people – but I do.) When addressing women – even strangers (for example, shop assistants – or when asking for directions in the street), it is customary to “congratulate” them on the holiday by starting the exchange with the phrase “S’Prazdnikom”, (or “S’Praszdnikom Vas”). At mealtimes it is usual for a toast to be drunk “to the ladies”, with a speech praising their beauty, wisdom and hard work – and wishing them health, happiness and long lives.
Anyway, as a result of the holiday everyone remembers my Birthday. I can’t escape it.
Some people say that I am very lucky having my birthday on a holiday … I can have a great celebration. I think they are wrong, however. It would be better to have been born the day before … then I could really celebrate and spend the next day getting over any hangover!
Maybe it’s because I am not fond of birthdays, but I’m not very good at remembering them … ask Tony, my brother, or any of my friends back in the UK. I have them written down in the diary, but that doesn’t seem to help. When it comes to remembering the birthdays of people here, however, it’s a lot easier. My staff, all being local and knowing how important birthdays are, keep their own tally and come and make sure that we mark the occasion accordingly … arrange a small present and a cake.
On one of the few occasions that I did remember my brother’s birthday, I tried to order a copy of newspaper for that the day of his birth from one of the national dailies … a great idea for a birthday present, I thought. There was, however, a problem … we were both born on Sundays … and the paper, being a “Daily” wasn’t published that day. Instead they sent him a copy of the next day’s paper … and, as it happens, I think that was actually better, more interesting, because it recorded what else was happening on that day, apart from his being born.
It’s not that I have aversion to birthdays because I had a bad experience, or anything like that. Generally I enjoyed my birthdays as a child. I do remember, however, that, as I was approaching 30, there were two films which did have a detrimental effect on my attitude to the marking the milestones as one got older: One was “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, in which the Katherine Ross character says something like: “I’m single, twenty six and a schoolteacher. Then there was I’ve reached rock bottom” – it was not a very encouraging thing for a young, single, schoolteacher to hear. Then there was the Dudley Moore comedy “Thirty is a dangerous Age”. The name says it all! With a title like that, it must have alienated a whole generation – and every subsequent generation afterwards – as they approached that particular landmark! All of my friends of a similar age seemed to enter a deep depression as the dreaded three-zero approached. I like to think that I took a much more sanguin approach to the great event.
I certainly approached 40 with great aplomb, even if I say so myself. To be fair, I didn’t really have much choice. I had already adopted the attitude that “I want to forget my birthdays” and had planned to ignore the event. It didn’t help that was it was my 40th … as I still remembered the 1960′s TV adverts for Sanatogen vitamin supplements, which “fortifies the over forties”! This didn’t exactly fill me with confidence and optimism about getting older. That year, however, my birthday fell on a Monday … a school day. As it happens, I discovered that some of my colleagues had learned that my birthday was approaching and that it wasn’t just “any” birthday … it was the big four-zero. Someone dropped me a hint that there was a plan afoot to mark the occasion. OK, I thought, I don’t have much choice about this … so I spent the weekend preparing … ordering cream cakes, (I think the Baker went into apoplexy when on a Saturday morning, he got an order for an extra two hundred and fifty cream cakes to be ready for nine o’clock Monday morning) and “real” coffee … individual coffee filters, instead of the more mundane instant coffee. (It was a working day – so we couldn’t have vodka … and, anyway, at that time, I didn’t drink vodka). So, at the regular staff meeting at the start of the morning on the great day, I managed to spike the guns of my friends, and made an announcement … “If you are free at break time … I think you might like to come down to the the Staff Room”, before they were able to put their plans into operation. Nothing about: “It’s my birthday … I’m forty! … come and have some cake!” … just a sense of mystery. Because I had got in first they didn’t feel able to destroy the sense anticipation and suspense that I had created, I had succeeded in avoiding any potential embarrassment that they might have planned.
I wasn’t so lucky when it came to the big five-zero. As I said, everyone here knows when my birthday is and they had plenty of time to prepare for it … so I just had to grin and bear it.
I’m not sure if I am looking forward to sixty.
Bishkek