While Abhimanyu’s calendar birthday is still a few days away, his birthday according to the Tamil calendar was earlier this week. To celebrate, we dressed him in a shirt and dhothi and performed a puja to bless him with a long life.

It is also common practice for a child’s first birthday to shave their head, so my dad got out his kit and we got Abhi good and bald. Then we took the hair to offer at our local Balaji temple in Malleshwaram.

It was not the smoothest process. There was much screaming (Abhi) and hand-wringing (grandparents and great-grandparent). But in the end, everyone agrees that he looks just as cute now, if not cuter.