One birth, two clerks and three birthdates

SOME years ago, fellow staff members brought a cake to the chamber of my boss to celebrate his birthday. The cake was cut and the pieces were passed around. After they had left, the boss said to me — his number two — with a smile and a wink, ‘My actual birthday is not today, but I didn’t want to spoil their fun!’ I smiled back knowingly, recalling my own three birthdates, including the true one.

During the recruitment of policemen in the early 1990s in Gujarat, one came across a strange phenomenon: many candidates shared a birthdate — June 1. The reason, I learnt, was that the school session in Gujarat commenced on that date. So, while enrolling pupils, this date was marked as the date of birth of any ward whose parents could not recall the actual one.

I acquired two false birthdates similarly. My first official birthdate (October 16) was given by an Army clerk. It happened when father made a claim for education allowance. He vaguely recalled that I was born in October 1959. The busy clerk made his job easy by picking the date randomly. It survived until I reached Class X.

However, while we were filling forms for the board exam, the school clerk asked a few of us to leave the DoB column blank. We didn’t ask why. I guess it had something to do with the minimum age of the examinees. Anyway, none of us missed the exam, but when I saw my marksheet, my date of birth had been changed to August 26. August, I could understand, but why 26th instead of the original 16th? Well, a clerk’s logic was inscrutable even to Kafka.

Meanwhile, no one, including I, bothered about my real date of birth and there was no tradition of celebrating birthdays in our joint family. However, just before my marriage, there was a scramble to search for my horoscope and fix my authentic date of birth. My mother recalled that I was born on a Monday and she also knew the exact date in the Indian calendar. But one could not be sure. Then, father found my horoscope prepared by my grandfather, who was the village astrologer.

The day and date of birth (Indian calendar) mentioned in the horoscope tallied with what mother had told me and the corresponding date in the Gregorian calendar was October 5. So, that was how I came to know the date of my entry into the world. The horoscope, however, served no purpose because after I met my future wife, no one from either side saw any need to consult the stars.

Nevertheless, the horoscope remains with me as a keepsake. Not as a documentary evidence of my date of birth, but as testimony to my grandfather’s neat and economical handwriting, in which he used to give the complete lowdown on matters of the family and the whole village on a postcard back in the 1970s.