Is it a condition, an ailment, a disease, that a shadow cast upon a small bit of our day is an experience that at best can be likened to a carbuncled lizard outstretching itself in need of a good hard scratch in order to rid it’s poor self of that itch where it’s claws could not get to ? Old age regarded with a disgust reserved for the fly buzzing a deafening hole in one’s eardrums, and the only manner to shoo it away is with a distasteful, rushed squat of the hand? One’s life is too super-chaotic in any case, what with yoga mats and mind de-stressing Apps on your I-phone, instructing one how to inhale from the right nostril and exhale from the left, that one carries to and fro to work; with multiple stops in between to run a marathon of chores such as picking up one’s work-out wear from the drycleaners lest your personal trainer decides to dump you since one can no longer exercise without being fragrancy and deodorised?! And how about the halt to grab a bottle of Chardonnay to rewind after a long day?! Now when one went in for the life-saving services—provided by a swipe of your phone—a live-in, round-the-clock nanny, a dog-walker, a twice-a-week personal assistant to pay your bills, supply tech-support and even stack your groceries in the fridge, so as to free-up your time for family-time, then how is it that one’s parents, now on the wrong side of the senior citizen ladder, do not qualify as family ?! Or if they do, why is it that they feel they are clogging up your space. (Of course, here I must say that we, here in India, still have loving families bound together by affection of an unconditional kind but…but they are dwindling, dying figures. Memo to self: after putting down the pen, must swoop up the statistics.) Given, a son or a daughter, for the most, would take care of their aging Papa or not-as-agile Mamma without giving a conscious thought about it, despite the self-pitying term, “sandwiched generation” whining up in bucket-loads on talk-shows, or when a Bahu or Jammai Raja is in heavy need for a cathartic session but what does one make out of or do with sharp-elbowed grandchildren who show their disdain over their osteoporosis-doddering Dadi; who has taken a hundred years to thread that needle to stitch the straying button back on to his/her shirt besides asking for spectacles to be brought from her bedside table?! Yes, the same grandmother who had sat in the middle of the night cradling and cooing the colicky baby—now grown into a semi-human being—without a care for her fatigue and the fact that come morning, the Kitchen, with breakfast to be prepared, awaited her. Or the Nana/Dada needed a walker to assist him around, and what with his piles problem hogged up too much of bathroom space leaving the beloved grandkid wishing his phone could access to assisted death for the old man…Yes, the same gentleman who furnished you with your first X-Box, prior to which gleefully supplied you with an extra quota of weekly pocket-money without the knowledge of your parents, who would cozy you up in front of the fireplace in his cottage up in the hills during holiday season, now the recipient of irritability and isolation, what with him forever requesting you to locate his hearing-aid?!
How is it that grandma’s hair has gone so sparse that it can be seen as a bald pate? Women are not supposed to be bald?! And why the sag on one side of the face—is there nothing known as symmetry?!
Old Age, how should, therefore, it be described? A malaise, a malady, a disorder?! The poor, dear family of the very senior citizen, bearing the brunt, as in, high-levels of incurable aggravation? To furnish one further with the Rejection Script: how is it that grandma’s hair has gone so sparse that it can be seen as a bald pate. Women are not supposed to be bald?! And why the sag on one side of the face—is there nothing known as symmetry?! And how is it that saliva coagulates in the droopy corner of the mouth?! And when with a supercilious sneer the scanty stark white hair of Grandpa is viewed, the curl of the lip, seen clearly through his dim eyes, for him to, the very next day, get them dyed black, the disparaging snigger again is seen loud and clear. Urinary incontinence, a condition where one has to rush to the toilet lest one wets one’s pants can happen to anyone. Control over the urinary sphincter is weakened and is re-eally more common than people understand. It can plague, be a thorn in one’s flesh, even if one is in one’s fifties. So why the diaper jokes horse-laughing halfway down the hall?! For a packful of years, Baddi Mummy’s semi-toothless mouth has been hooed, hee-hawed and hissed at, then why banish the suggestion of dental implants?! Before speeding on, must stop for a second: why, in good heaven’s, call the alleged patriarch or matriarch Dadji or Nanaji-ji, a sign of deferential respect. And this fashion of Baddi Mä, an elevated status connoting your own Mum comes second?! Back to the wheezing, whistling sentences dribbling from the cracked left-over toothed aperture. Dental implants, unheard of—the verdict issued in an indignant spray. With the kind of money that would be shovelled in mouthfuls, an I-Phone X could be bought for the, your’s truly, grandkid. Has the Dota/Pota in question taken into account that the most elderly member of the hypothetical household shall be bearing the cost from her own funds?!
One talks of unpacking racism. Should not the first step be shoehorning our doyens back into the family?