Stephen’s birthday was very fun,
if not a little disorderly. We had a
series of surprises for him that all sort of failed, but it was exciting
nonetheless. The first surprise that we tried to pull off was a scavenger hunt.
Ben T orchestrated it and made it a good mix of hard and funny. I guess this
one didn’t fail, per say, since Ben T did succeed in making a good scavenger
hunt, but Stephen never ended up finishing it. This was mostly because Stephen
ran out of time to follow the clues since he wanted to be on time for Hindi
class. The ironic thing is that Ben T purposefully designed it that way (trying
to make Stephen late) so that our group could get prepared for surprise number
3.
The second surprise gone wrong was making brownies. I started making
brownies at the program house and made it through the first batch alright. Unfortunately,
the electricity went out before the second batch had even baked for a few
minutes, so I biked to our Hindi class with a pan full of brownie batter strapped
to the back of my bike (the cooked brownies were also in my possession). Luckily, our Hindi guru-ji has a stovetop
oven. Unluckily, it is virtually impossible to control its heat. We did end up
making semi-decent brownies, even if they were a little burnt on the outside
and gooey on the inside.
The third failed attempt at a
surprise was at Hindi. The original plan was to have everyone get to class
early and be waiting for Stephen to come in at which point we would surprise
him with brownies and tell him class was actually canceled so that we could
take him out to dinner. In classic BYP India 6.0 fashion, however, everyone
except me, Alex, and Jenny were late (i.e. came after Stephen arrived). Plus,
we couldn’t go into the classroom since the class before us was running late,
and the second batch of brownies wasn’t ready yet. In any event, we took him to
Ming Garden for dinner and ate some really good (and equally inauthentic)
Chinese food.
Our last try to properly
surprise Stephen also ended up not working. At the end of dinner we each left
in a few minute intervals, telling Stephen we had to go home for one reason or
another. In reality, we all biked to his homestay and set up the cake and
present that we got for him. That part of the plan went beautifully and we even
remembered to park our bikes around the corner so that he wouldn’t see them.
The catch this time, though, was that Stephen’s host father had just come home
from dialysis and was too weak to get out of the car. Some of the boys had to
help carry him out of the car and into the room where the party was going to
be. It was during this time that Stephen came home and saw us all before we
could surprise him.
The party itself was really fun.
We danced and sang to music, ate a lot of cake (we accidentally ended up with
two cakes because both we and his host family bought cakes), and drank mango
juice and soda. Stephen fed his host
family and us cake as per Indian custom and Kushi and Pari (his host nieces)
smeared cake on his face. The party had to end a little early because his host
dad was getting tired and all of the loud music was quite jarring for his
delicate state. He was so weak that the boys had to carry him upstairs to his
room afterwards.
As a present we gave Stephen nice fabric to make a
new kurta along with matching thread and fancy buttons. In the end, we had a
really enjoyable time and I think Stephen still liked all of the surprises,
even if none of them were particularly good. 
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