MCCLINTIC ATTENDS HIS COUSIN'S DAUGHTER'S 3RD BIRTHDAY PARTY

I arrive in a bad mood, and decide to sit on the couch, not talk to anyone, and stare at the football game on the big screen TV. I'm quite happy to do this.

Charu, an attractive married family friend with one daughter, comes into the living room munching on pistachios and tells my father and me a joke. I reluctantly listen, largely because she's attractive (I used to flirt with her back before I was convinced that she wouldn't leave the box). She tells about half of it in English, and half in Punjabi, but I get the gist, which is that there is this man who is making a cross-country bus trip and is squirming in his seat the whole way. When someone asks him why he's squirming, he looks in his pants and finds an ant. Very angry, he broods on how he will punish it. Killing it instantly would be too easy. He wants to make it suffer. Charu's punchline is bipartite, which to me seems to be her first mistake. She delivers it in awkward rapid-fire: first he tells the ant to walk back across the country, then he changes his mind and makes it live in Detroit. She erupts in high-pitched machine-gun laughter, and my father in low-pitched. They look to me for my reaction. I find the joke unfunny. Nonetheless I force out something that resembles a laugh, but also a cough, gag, grunt, or snort. I think I need to recalibrate.

My father has one of his own. "What do rednecks do for Halloween?"

No one knows a thing.

"Pump kin."

This I like immensely. Everyone except Charu laughs.

Then my cousin's husband, Arun, father of birthday girl Anushka, sits next to me, slaps my thigh, and says, "So McClintic, tell me about hepatitis A. How is it spread?" Arun has a bushy mustache and wears glasses. He's on his way to India tomorrow, and stacked with pathogen prophylaxis.

I savor the explanation. "The transmission is fecal-oral."

I leave it out there in the open air, trusting that someone will riff on it in some way. Unsurprisingly, it's my father, who tells Arun that what this means is that you do not buy samosas from the samosa vendor who goes to the bathroom, doesn't wash his hands, then rolls samosa dough on his thigh. Everyone laughs again. I realize that I enjoy scatology. "Don't eat samosas that are made in the bathroom," I add, probably unnecessarily.

The gauche talk ceases when the kids -- there are six of them, ranging from 2 years to 10 years old -- come into the living room in a dense group to play "Put the Round Pink Circle on the Clown's Nose." It's a variation of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey," I guess. The kids take turns blindfolding themselves and finding the clown poster. One of them, a short 2 year old with a small head and huge eyes who looks like an amalgamation of Chauncey Billups, Carlos Arroyo, and my dad's colleague manages to place the circle directly on the clown's crotch. The birthday girl, a good Hindu, puts it on his forehead. Aseem, a tall 10 year-old, places it on his head. In the end, no one gets it perfectly, so they all get candy.

I enjoy watching the kids go for the elusive nose. The game seems simple and pleasureable, so much so that I almost want to participate. The whole thing is a welcome diversion from the adult talk that has sprung up in all corners of the house. Some dude I don't know, who probably thinks I don't know anyone and am lonely, introduces himself forcefully. For a moment I think he's going to stab me, and I flinch. We exchange names, then neither of us says another word. The kids are pretty and having fun. I spend the next twenty minutes being amused by them.

Then I smell dinner. I fill my plate. I take an almost religious pleasure in the food. Chick peas, mattar paneer, roti, chicken, rice, other stuff. Most likely all really bad for you, but incredibly good. I stare at it longingly and lovingly. With everyone else engaged in similarly devoted forms of eating, the place takes on a silent, meditative quality.

But, quickly, sadly, it's over. Full, I get sleepy and doze off. When I wake up, I hear people talking about how nice some wife is to some husband, how she fixes his outfits for the week and how they have such a good relationship, how they're good friends, how they care about each other, etc., and I feel the doom-and-gloom descending again like a bold gray cloud. I take a pillow and lie down on the floor. I glance at the TV. I glance at the clown poster. Someone has placed the circle perfectly on his nose. It seems way too late to me, and the rest of the night becomes a dazed series of agreeable expressions.

The only thing I remember is when Anushka sits in front of her cake with a big "3" on it and we sing to her and then she spits on the candle and cuts the cake and scoops up a little icing with her finger and sucks it clean. She has a round face with fat cheeks. She's wearing a pink flowerly dress and a pink tiara. We clap and we kiss her, take pictures of her, and she looks out of the corner of her eye at us a little bit shyly and then lowers her head into her chest. Then she giggles, jumps up and down, and looks delighted.

"Anushka, tell everyone how old you are," someone says.

She looks at her mother. "Tee," she says sheepishly.

Tee! Tee! Everyone repeats it at least once. Then cake! Cake! Everyone eat cake! The portions (big cubes), plates, forks, ice cream (mango kulfi), are parceled out quickly, and quickly, and quietly again, we go for the fat.