Sushmita's Birthday Party in Jaipur

[To see pictures of this party click here:  Sushmita's Birthday Party Pictures ] Dear friends, It was a great get together. Forty of us came together to remember Sushmita. About 25 kids, the youngest was 2 years six months old and the oldest 16 years and then about 15 or more adults. The kids and all of us adults enjoyed ourselves all through the evening. Most of the kids arrived by 3 pm and stayed on till about 5.30pm. There was so much joy and cheer, innocent laughter and kid chatter. It was wonderful.  Four year old Aditya won our hearts by reciting poems, singing loudly Happy B'day Sushmitaji....May God Bless you and making cute remarks all through the party.  We began the party by singing songs. Antakshari became the best medium to break the initial frezze. After which we sang phool khile - phool khile which became the medium of introducing each one. . Gaurav, Viplav and Manas did small role plays. Manas sat in the middle of the sofa chair and enacted how he and Sushmita chatted. Then they showed a little excerpt from a play on child rights which Sushmita had directed and had been performed at the Jawahar Kala Kendra. They were a bit conscious as they had forgotten the play so we told them to enact everyday things like sitting in a class room in school. Vijay Parashar became the teacher and Gaurav and Viplav loudly wished him "Good morning Madam", which sent everybody into peels of laughter as Vijay was a man. We all laughed non-stop as the two Viplav and Gaurav were constantly prompting the "teacher's" dialogue to Vijay. Finally Vijay decided to send the class home and declared it chutti, that ended the laughter that had gripped us all  The drawings session followed the acting. All the kids got a drawing sheet and crayons and colour pens. Very attractive drawings were made. Two and a half year old Khush took a pen and scribbled on paper with great concentration, when we looked at what he had made the picture looked like the brain with an elongated cerebellum, as if just scooped out of the cranium. We were shocked to see the perfect shape he had made of the head. Ishan used only green and blue colours and painted a tree standing against a vast background of blue. It was like a tree expressing freedom.  The high point were the blot paintings. Gorgeous designs on paper made the whole thing festive.  Each child ran around urging the older boys who were putting up the paintings to put up there creations first. Yogiraj the Artist who worked for more than 20 years with Sushmita conducted that exercise, he was accompanied by his young daughter also training to be an artist. The big blank wall in the front room of Sushmita's house now has the really lovely, lively photo of hers. Below that Pappu had hung the HAPPY BIRTHDAY decoration. And a little later Hitendra, Ganesh, Amar Singh, Manas and a few others uses crepe paper and wrote SUSHMITA. The children's Paintings were stuck all around it. The wall is now an art gallery.  The paintings will be put up on the gallery that we will begin on the blog.   Then came the CAKE moment. The glass table was placed below Sushmita's Photo. The chocolate cake made by Purwa was kept on it. Somebody decided to put the mala of roses around the cake. The youngest two Viplav and Khush were given knives. Everybody sang HAPPY B'DAY. The lung power of the kids extinguished the flickering candle. The B'Day song was sung twice Cake was followed by Poha, Sandwiches and Custard. Nirja, Purwa, Pradnya and Pappu had especially cooked these items. Rashmi, Seema and myself stood on service and ensured that each one ate well.   Finally, we parted and left for our respective homes with a great feeling that she was with us all through. On getting back home, Pappu who works with me and misses Sushmita a lot, asked me as to why he had not done a B'day celebration last year. I told him how I had missed the B'Day and then Sushmita had called me sometime around lunch time and told me that she was coming for a cup of tea and also to remind me about something. On learning about her B'Day Komal and I had prepared a Special Dinner for her that day. But yes how she loved such parties and till her Mom was alive, Aunite would always remind me that I had to call all our common friends and do something for her B'Day. I hope we keep remembering her in different ways through the year and the years to come. It is gradually sinking in that the cup of tea session that both of us loved to have whenever I was around will never comeback. The sessions of laughter and gossip and serious talk will now only be memories. Sorry friends, The lovely evening must not end on a sad note. So let me arouse your appetite by sharing an excerpt from  a short story written by the eternal Romantic Sushmita Banerjee in 1977 called  Verbiage on Romance, to be published shortly. " Her yesterdays never smelt of lavender. They did not have that delicate nibbling  quality of short stories in women's magazines. Her yesterdays smelt of kachories and oily   samosas of tea in kulhads at railway stations. And flowers, yes, but not exotic orchids. In her garden there grew tiny juhis and mogras - what were they called in English? Once very long ago he had brought for her a rose from the creeper which sprawled on to the terrace of his house. The flower was different from the ones she saw in this city wrapped in cellophane. Perhaps because like an uniformed sentence his rose swayed undecided one its stalk. And perhaps that was why she did not like roses which seemed to be clipped phrased in a bouquet, politely summed up in a card. When she told him such things he laughed and said she thought too much. What was the sense of all this complicated bouquet and sentence and phrase........ A rose is a rose is a rose...................." Kavita Srivastava, 23rd August, 2010