Birthday Celebrations

Today is one of my roomie’s birthday. This will be probably the last birthday she will be celebrating with us. We decided to give her surprise… knocked on her door at midnight. She opened her door to find cake with candles and diyas lighted all around it in front of her door. Ahh… girls love surprises!!!

Birthday celebrations in general have very good memories for me… especially from the hostel days. It was like a tradition in our girls’ hostel to celebrate birthdays at the stroke of midnight… all the girls would gather together, we would cut cake, put cream on b’day girls face, give her bumps and have dance n songs...total halla-gulla. It used be helluva fun. (Yeah, no party would be complete without my performance off course) In fact our first ragging “assignment” was to celebrate one of the girl’s birthday. FE (that’s what they called first year engineering students) hostel was bit away from the senior hostel so we were asked to go on the terrace and shout as loud as we could so that our seniors could listen to it :-). And we actually did that. The principle’s quarter was nearer to our hostel than the senior hostel. He had to send security guard to silence us :-D.

Next year, we shifted to another hostel. There my room was quite near to the warden’s quarters so we were bound to get scolding from him once in a while but we were not the giving-up types. Yeah, he was the kadus types for first couple of months :-(.

There was one time when all of us had returned from vacations and were celebrating 2 of my roommates’ birthdays. The party was at its peak when the warden knocked on my room. He was fuming with anger, as usual gave us lecture on importance of being descent when you are staying in vicinity of your teachers and all.

Then all of a sudden, he asked one of the girls standing next to the door, “You go stand in front of my house and let these girls make noise. Then you will realize how much disturbing it is for us”.
Poor girl was stunned for a moment and next moment we know she was walking out of the room. Warden was not expecting this at all.
He called her back “N, kuthe chalala tumhi?” (Where are you going N).
She answered innocently “Sir, tumhich sangitale na ” (Sir, you only asked to go to your house).
(We still tease N for this incident.)
He didn’t know what to say for a moment. We all were trying hard to suppress our laughter.
He ordered the security guard with him to take away the music system. We burst out in laughter, the moment he left; only the owner of music system was in tears. Thankfully it was returned within few moments and the guard asked us to play it at low volume. Not to mention our party continued again in full swing though the music was playing at low volume :-).

Those were the days … :-)