Kiddo Birthday party

Five-year-olds leave me, well, stupefied. My darling nephew celebrated his fifth birthday in complete style on July 5 at a happening food joint in Pune with his friends from school and day care. They were all from similar family backgrounds, and like my nephew spoke fluent English and broken Hindi and all were familiar enough with birthday party routines and what they should be looking for in them.
They headed for the tattoo counter soon after they handed over gifts cutely saying `happy birthday’ with my nephew nodding his head mumbling his thank-yous. They knew the games they were going to play and didn’t need instructions. In fact, they smartly checked the person who was doling out dos and donts asking him to start the game without telling them how to play it (“we know the game”, girl in pretty pink frock and spaghetti straps squealed at him).
The kids called the eldest in the group “boss” and teased a misbehaved one as the “bully”. I watched them all from a distance, as they jumped, played their power ranger games and gaped at their excellent vocabularies, wondering how evolved the kids were. One of them came and asked me who I was, as I was neither a mum watching over her kids nor a kid myself to which I asked him to find out. He didn’t have to. He said, “you are birthday boy’s masi,” to which I smiled and said yes.
I saw a strange level of confidence among the children. I call it strange because I do not think I was ever even remotely close to this kind of a confidence level at their age or even much later, tugging to my mother’s sari-pallu and being coaxed to eat.
While coming back to Hyderabad, sitting by myself in the train I realized how different our childhoods were. My elder sister and I had birthday parties but they were at home, with mummy with the help of a domestic servant and a few friends from the building managing to cook for the lot. The evening parties ended with my sister and I running up and down the building with plates of food to be given to neighbours. And come to think of it, I felt shy of that too __ of ringing the doorbell and telling the smiling aunties that it was my birthday and that I had got cake and chole for her. And I almost always rehearsed another line that I was made to say several times, "Aunty, please return the plate now only". This, I was explained, was to ensure that they don't have to think of what to fill our empty plates with when sending it back. However noble the intention, the thought of repeating these lines made me squirm.
I am sure the confident five-year-olds some of whom were instructing their mothers not to mix their noodles with manchurian will perhaps even do a better job at asking for empty plates without squirming.