TODAY is my birthday, my eighteenth, I am told. Inside, the party is raging unabated. Curry permeates the air in a thick nauseating fog. Fat aunts hover over the kitchen table, concealing layers of duplicitous skin like stripped bacon in a bun. Forehead polka dotted, fingers ringed in carats unfathomable. Their greased skins are sweaty with the burden of oil and vanishing lotions and get-fair-quick promises. They poke about what was once my kitchen. It is swarming with enough obnoxious half-breeds as to warrant a drastic change in immigration policies. they raid the room with a mission; salt-free, low cholesterol chips washed down with a two-litre of Diet Coke.