CHAPTER 5

CELEBRATING A BIRTHDAY WITH NOTHING BUT A BOLLYWOOD SONG

You already have the important things in life.

Many of us struggle to balance tasks that make us happy with tasks that provide financial support for our family. Some even argue that we have to do this or that so that we may have things that provide comfort, which in turn will likely provide us with happiness. It’s a challenge I have struggled with myself, especially during our recent economic uncertainty.

However, I learned a valuable lesson while my wife, three-year-old daughter, and I were visiting my cousin and his family a few years ago. While we were celebrating a birthday with a Bollywood song and cake in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of India’s most congested city, I realized that happiness is not expensive. We struggle to find things that make us happy and keep us going, but sometimes these things are not found at the mall or on some far-off tropical island. Instead, they are right in front of us.

Friday evening rush hour in New Delhi is one of the worst times to travel, given the sheer number of cars, scooters, motorcycles, and whatever else is escorting passengers to the most popular destination in the world: home. Thick smog, fog, and plain old fumes descended upon us as, one Friday at dusk, we began our journey from one end of New Delhi to the other to visit my cousin’s family.

I was stressed about packing in the morning for the trip back to the United States, anxious to get home, and tired from the long week, and I wasn’t in the mood to sit through a bunch of traffic. This trip to my cousin’s place, to check on the family and see if they were OK, was something I had promised my dad I would do.

My wife and daughter had fallen asleep after the first hour of traffic and I was starting to doze off during the second leg. Amid the humming of scooters and the blowing of horns, I drifted off to sleep, thinking about the last time I saw my cousin, Rakesh, about fifteen years before.

At the time, he had just gotten married and was going to bring his entire family from the village where he grew up to New Delhi, where he was starting to make a new life as a tailor.

Rakesh’s first try at New Delhi came at the age of seventeen, when he left his mom, his two sisters, and a younger brother to seek out a job in the big city. Having lost his father at the age of eleven, he grew up fast, taking on the responsibility of caring for his mother and siblings. But there was no work to be found in the village, so his aunt suggested that he come to Delhi, where she had found him a job with a car mechanic and he could learn the trade.

He tried to become a car mechanic, learned a lot, and was getting secure enough in his job to bring the rest of his family to Delhi. But then the accident happened. A car he was working on fell on him. He was badly injured and lost part of his right index finger. Scared, scarred, and defeated, he went back to his village.

After a year of bouncing between jobs and trying to feed his family in the village, he became desperate. This time, an uncle invited him back to Delhi to train as a tailor in the uncle’s shop. Through pricks of the needle, hunger in the stomach, and the fear of not being able to feed his family back in the village, Rakesh learned to measure, cut, and sew. He grew in his trade by working for a year in the back room of his uncle’s shop, which was more like a cave, making men’s suits, women’s clothing, and children’s school uniforms late into the night.

When we left him that year, I was feeling very sorry for him. He was my blood, and although he was a few years older, I wanted to take care of him, even though in those days my own family was struggling to survive in the United States. I gave him whatever money I had, some $800. It wasn’t much, but it was what I had brought to India.

I didn’t know how he was going to earn a living as a tailor when there seemed to be tailors on every corner. How would he feed his extended family? Where would they live? He had a younger brother, a mother, a wife, a younger sister, and an older sister with a depressed husband and a newborn baby girl. How the heck was he going to take care of all of them by himself when he was just learning to sew clothes?

I didn’t know how to help him except to give him money. But how much was enough?

My mind was filled with worry for him when I awoke from my nap to the voice of our driver, who was asking me for further directions.

We finally arrived at Rakesh’s apartment complex around 8 p.m. Our car approached a set of five-story buildings with poor lighting, situated on congested, narrow back streets filled with carts selling all sorts of snacks. Yellow lanterns hanging on a makeshift snack shops lit the way as we finally located an unmarked building we could barely tell was inhabited.

Our taxi driver turned to the corner of the building and found a tight parking spot between a sleeping cow and some motorcycles. He agreed to wait for us while we had dinner. We used the light from our cell phones to find our way up the stairs to the tiny apartment.

The fifth-floor apartment was small. We sat huddled together in his living room, which contained a small sofa, a couple of old tables, and a handful of folding chairs. Surrounded by the extended family, who seemed overwhelmed with joy to have us visit, we felt a bit like museum pieces on display. My daughter, who had never met her Indian cousins, got a little scared and clung to her mother.

Slowly, the girls and women in the family brought out glasses of water on a tray, with snacks to munch on while dinner was being prepared. Amid the wonderful aroma of the dinner cooking in the tiny kitchen, we started to feel the warmth of their offerings, the kind way they suggested that we eat . . . and eat . . . and eat.

With a smile that had seen lots of pain and suffering, Rakesh explained how he had fared over the previous few years. He seemed to be doing well in his work and business.

“Aren’t you worried about competition from China and all the orders that are heading there?” I asked.

Deep down, he was probably as scared about an uncertain future as anyone, but with a wink he said, “I don’t need all the orders. Just one.”

Since I had last seen him, he had brought his entire family over from the village and started out on his own. Living and working out of a tiny one-bedroom apartment with his extended family, most sleeping on blankets on the floor, he began a business of making school uniforms. Getting a school contract to sell uniforms was not easy, but over a few years he managed to get a contract here and there, and he just kept at it. He got his younger brother to go out and procure more contracts from schools and his business grew. They soon managed to save some money and got a bigger apartment, which still served as both home and workplace for them and their three employees, who slept in makeshift housing on the roof of their building.

While Rakesh and I were chatting about his journey with work and business, I watched his two sons and two nieces go over, pick up my daughter, and start playing with her. It felt great to see their sheer delight with their little American cousin. They played with her, wanted her to eat chocolate, and showed her all the things they had around, including a torn old black-and-white photo of me as a baby.

In showing my daughter photos of her dad in younger years, it seemed they were trying to foster an understanding that we were all the same. However distant we might live, we were still the same blood. We were family.

Dinner was served with great affection, warmth, and care, and everyone’s eyes were on my wife, my daughter, and me to make sure we didn’t have any need that went unnoticed.

After a meal that was as rich in butter as hospitality and love, Rakesh’s wife brought out a small cake with seven candles on it to celebrate her son’s seventh birthday. With his older brother and four other cousins joking around him, Rakesh’s son blew out the candles. He was a slim boy, wearing nothing but torn slippers and a blue long sleeve shirt with vertical stripes. According to custom, everyone took turns feeding the birthday boy a little piece of cake, symbolic of gifts that have a more lasting meaning than something purchased at a store.

Then Rakesh’s older son, age eleven, brought out the latest Bollywood music. All the kids broke out in dance and sang along. The rhythm of the song transported them to the hills of the Swiss Alps, where so many Bollywood films find their backdrop. They were in heaven. They sang, they danced, they showed us a few moves.

The melody was uplifting but also melancholic, and it brought back my worried look and my concerns about Rakesh’s ability to find financial security in the future. I asked him, “Rakesh, do you need anything? Can I help you in any way?” I didn’t want to offend him by talking about money, but I wanted to let him know that I was there for him.

Casually rubbing the remnants of his lost index finger, Rakesh eased further into his chair, beaming his smile as he looked around the room. Full of happiness, joy, and cake, his family celebrated, joking around with one another, laughing at little things, dancing. My wife and daughter joined the dance in the middle of the tiny room, lit up by the family’s smiles.

Rakesh paused and looked back at me, not with the eyes of a desperate man who was unsure where his next meal was coming from but with the eyes of one who was at peace despite the problems at his doorstep. With a deep smile, he said, “Thanks, but this is all I really need. Isn’t it?”

His words hit me at the core of my being, and as my eyes started to well up I responded, “You’re right, my brother. This is all we really need. Happiness of our kids dancing to a Bollywood song, celebrating life with a birthday cake.”

I was well aware that he was still struggling financially, but that was OK for him because he had something more important.

Our departure was around midnight and lasted an hour as we stood around the car hugging, smiling, and promising to stay connected. As our daughter drifted off to sleep on the drive back, my wife and I looked at each other with joyful tears and realized that what we had felt in that tiny apartment was a pure moment of joy, brought on by nothing more than a family gathering over Bollywood music and a birthday cake.

My cousin was truly living his life, despite the seemingly overwhelming challenges he faced each day. He moved forward with nothing more than the family that surrounded him, affection, and the occasional celebration. They put food on the handful of plates they owned and got through it with an attitude that was hopeful and carefree.

I realized that moments of joy are not necessarily found in the crockery surrounding the cake but in the tiny celebrations of life with family, friends, and a Bollywood song.