The Bidayuh Managed Fine Without Birthdays

I cannot remember exactly when I stopped celebrating my birthday. I only know that it was decades ago.

There was no dramatic decision, no solemn announcement, no moment when I declared that birthdays were abolished. I simply stopped.

Perhaps that is how most things disappear from our lives. Not with a door slamming shut, but with a door gradually left open until one day we realise we have stopped walking through it.

The simplest answer is that I never asked to be born.

Nobody consulted me. There was no committee meeting, no questionnaire and certainly no official letter asking whether I wished to enter the world or preferred to remain peacefully nonexistent.

One day, you arrive — blinking, wailing — and before long, people expect you to be grateful for the opportunity.

Still, since I am already here, I eventually conceded that birthdays have their attractions.

There is cake. It is difficult to argue against cake.

There are presents, too, which seemed an excellent arrangement in my younger years: receiving gifts without having done anything particularly deserving.

Then I discovered that birthdays, as we know them today, were not exactly a universal human tradition. They were, broadly speaking, a Western custom.

Candles, cakes, singing and presents had not naturally grown from my own community.

So, I asked the elders.

The answer was simple.

Traditionally, my people, the Bidayuh, did not celebrate birthdays.

Babies were born, and that was that.

There were no gatherings around a cake. Nobody sang songs. Nobody took photographs of the birthday child looking slightly embarrassed while everyone else smiled. Nobody announced on social media that a person had successfully completed another orbit around the Sun.

And, in many cases, nobody even knew the exact date on which someone had been born.

This was not carelessness.

It was simply a different way of understanding time.

There were no calendars hanging on village walls, no smartphones quietly reminding us that Auntie Somebody’s birthday was approaching. Life was measured by seasons, harvests, weather, festivals, farming cycles and the rhythms of the community.

Someone might remember that a child was born during the great rains, around the time the padi was harvested, or shortly before a particular festival.

That was enough.

The precise date was not especially important.

Imagine asking a farmer in a remote village a hundred years ago for the exact date of his birth.

He might have said, “I was born when the river flooded.”

And the matter would probably have been settled.

My own birthday, however, was recorded.

By the time I arrived, the old world was already changing.

Our village church kept birth records and issued certificates to parents. Eventually, my parents passed mine to me for safekeeping.

Somewhere among my possessions is a piece of paper confirming that I officially entered the world on a particular day.

Without it, I might have only a vague idea.

Perhaps it was a rainy week. Perhaps the padi was being harvested. Perhaps somebody’s chicken had escaped and caused an entirely unrelated commotion.

That might have been sufficient.

The church did more than record births. It became part of the wider transformation of village life.

The official word for such transformation was, naturally, “development”.

Development is a wonderfully elastic word. Roads are development. Schools are development. Electricity is development. Better healthcare is development.

And, to be fair, much of it is good.

But development rarely arrives alone. It brings companions.

Along with education came new ideas. Along with religion came new habits. Along with modernity came new ways of understanding time, identity and what constituted a proper life.

Nobody announced that the village was becoming Westernised. There was no ceremony, no flag-raising, no loudspeaker declaring, ‘Attention everyone: from tomorrow morning onwards, we shall be modern.’

Change was quieter than that.

A new practice appeared here. A new habit arrived there. A new expectation settled into everyday life. Eventually, what had once been foreign became ordinary.

Birthdays were among those adopted customs.

Educated people in the village — educated largely through institutions shaped by Western ideas — began celebrating them. Others followed. There was little reason not to. A birthday was, after all, a gathering. There was food, conversation and laughter. Relatives and friends had an excuse to come together. Even the most committed traditionalist would have struggled to organise a serious campaign against free food.

And so birthdays became part of village life.

Perhaps the celebration itself was never the important part. The gathering was.

Human beings have always found reasons to assemble. We are social creatures, and if one reason disappears, we invent another. If birthdays had never arrived, we might have celebrated surviving Tuesdays, the annual functioning of our roofs, or the invention of comfortable chairs.

Give people a table, some food and an excuse, and they will generally manage the rest.

For a while, birthdays seemed harmless enough.

Then I entered my late teens, and something changed.

I began forgetting my birthdays. Or perhaps ‘forgetting’ is not quite the right word. I remembered. I simply stopped doing anything about them.

The date arrived, and I carried on with life.

No announcement. No special plans. No cake.

Certainly no candles.

I have always regarded candles with a little suspicion. When you are six, six candles look cheerful. At sixteen, they still seem reasonable. But somewhere along the way, the cake begins to resemble a small controlled fire.

Birthdays are supposed to celebrate life. Yet the candles quietly remind us that time moves in only one direction.

Congratulations. You are older.

Thank you. I had noticed.

When we are young, birthdays point towards the future: vast, mysterious and full of possibilities. Then adulthood arrives. The possibilities remain, but they acquire bills. We begin counting expenses, deadlines, responsibilities and days until payday. The future becomes less mysterious and considerably more expensive.

Meanwhile, survival occupies more of our attention.

Society celebrates achievement, ambition and productivity. There are prizes for winning and certificates for accomplishment. But few rewards exist for simply making it through.

Nobody gives you a medal for surviving a difficult year.

Yet perhaps they should. Despite uncertainty, disappointment, exhaustion and life’s occasional absurdity, remaining standing may itself be one of ordinary life’s greater achievements.

Many people spend years simply keeping themselves afloat. They work, worry, struggle, adapt, recover and begin again.

Then another birthday arrives.

Sometimes there is little energy left for celebration. The date can feel less like a festival than an administrative notice: another year completed; please proceed to the next level, which appears to contain more responsibilities.

This is not necessarily pessimism, merely observation.

Of course, many people genuinely enjoy birthdays, and I do not quarrel with them. If someone wants cake, balloons, music, fireworks and enough food to feed a small kingdom, I wish them well. Life contains enough difficulty without becoming suspicious of harmless happiness.

Birthdays simply never acquired that magic for me. The older I became, the more artificial they seemed. What, exactly, were we celebrating? The passage of time? It passes whether we applaud it or not.

Perhaps survival. That seems more worthy, although survival is sometimes less heroic than it sounds: often just stubbornness, habit, or having no alternative.

Eventually, birthdays became dates on a calendar to me.

Nothing more.

Friends remembered. Relatives remembered. Sometimes social media remembered for everyone. I accepted the greetings graciously—thank you, very kind, much appreciated—and carried on with my day.

Perhaps that sounds cynical. I prefer to think of it as practical.

A person does not need one designated day each year to appreciate being alive. A good meal on an ordinary Tuesday can be meaningful. A conversation with an old friend can be meaningful. An evening in which nothing goes wrong can feel like a minor miracle.

None of these things requires candles, a cake, or everyone singing while you wonder whether you should smile, clap or simply wait for it to end.

There is something amusing about the contrast between the old and the new. My ancestors probably spent little time worrying about birthdays. They had crops to grow, families to care for, houses to maintain and communities to sustain. Life was measured by things that needed doing.

We, meanwhile, have developed elaborate rituals around a date that reminds us we are ageing. We invented calendars to remember birthdays, then anti-ageing creams because birthdays reminded us that we were getting older. Human civilisation has a curious habit of creating problems and then building industries to solve them.

Still, from time to time, I look at my birth certificate. It tells me I arrived on a particular day, connecting two ways of seeing life: one measured through seasons, harvests, weather and shared memory; the other through dates, records and anniversaries.

I belong to both.

Perhaps that is why birthdays never quite settled in my mind.

I understand them. I understand their appeal. I understand why people enjoy gathering together to celebrate another year of someone’s life.

But I understand another way of seeing existence: life need not be divided neatly into annual units, and being alive may matter more than keeping its accounts.

So, I stopped celebrating my birthday years ago.

Not from anger, rejection of modern customs, or dislike of cake. I want that recorded clearly: I do not dislike cake.

I simply no longer find the occasion particularly meaningful.

I was born. It was recorded. Time passed. I grew older. None of these facts requires a party.

Perhaps surviving deserves recognition throughout the year: difficult Mondays, long Wednesdays, uncertain Fridays — and Tuesdays.

After all, Tuesdays arrive far more often than birthdays.

‘Perhaps surviving deserves recognition throughout the year: difficult Mondays, long Wednesdays, uncertain Fridays — and Tuesdays.’

DISCLAIMER:

The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the New Sarawak Tribune.