Old, Older, Oldest

 OLD, OLDER, OLDEST

If I remember right, Atul Gawande's 'Being Mortal,' was about age, and also about dealing with the old. It is one of the best books I have read about the condition of OLD, but also about how to manage being old with dignity and compassion.

Twenty years ago, old-age homes were rare things in India. We look after our old at home, I used to say proudly, when yet another retirement institution sprang up around the corner from where I live in Croydon. Now there is one within calling distance and a few more within walking distance.Now, in India, they proliferate even in small towns, the new normal for that ageing uncle or recalcitrant father-in-law. I look into the lighted rooms of the 'homes' as I pass the institutions ( because that is what they are) and wonder whether that lady sitting at the window, or that other one with a uniformed nurse in front of her, are there because they want to be there. Or are they like that old jalopy you see discarded in the parking lots where cars go to die?

There are other options, I keep telling myself. In Kochi a group of us decided we were going to live in a communal oldies' house, just a few close friends. In Kochi you could get help to live like that, but in England it is a lot harder and more expensive. But, surely, packing them away out of sight in care-homes is a form of abandonment, I think.

I have dealt with the humiliations, the loss of control in two other blogs. (Older by the Day , 2016; and Being Old, 2015,) That was another age (no pun intended) ago and the frustrations have multiplied.  Little ailments linger, joints get stiffer, the senses -- hearing, sight, smell -- become inefficient, suspect. I would like to go for a long walk sometimes, to get my thinking gear oiled, but even a short walk requires a stick, and uphill is an effort.

I would love to get into a plane on impulse as I often did, and travel to South Africa, Norway,  India or Germany to see the friends who make me laugh, and in whose companionship I am secure. Not a hope. My last trip was a disaster and I took a week to recover from the stress and strain. Every escalator was a challenge and every wheelchair nurse an abomination.

I constantly wonder how I am curtailing the life of my children, with whom I live. Gawande's solutions are worth considering.

I would want to spend two days in a fortnight away from my family to give them a break, or even consider living with a group of friends of about similar age some of the time. I am still considering the options.

     

     

My Favourite Writer -- John Le Carre'

 My Favourite Writer -- John Le Carre'

I always wait for Le Carre' to write another book. I buy the hard copy as soon as they come out -- Kindle won't do. I have to hoard them for my granddaughter to read when she is old enough to know the difference between trash and quality writing. Now, le Carre's mellow, confident, honest, analytical, caring voice will not be heard anymore. What a loss! Irreplaceable as John Snow said.

Le Carre's voice had that rare quality of being 'just right' from the first sentence. The first page captures you and never disappoints. Spy-writing? Yes. But not entirely. There was social comment, unforgettable characters, an informed look at institutions, social as well as domestic, and above all a benign look at people, their frailties and strengths, their loyalties and loves. I think I would read Le Carre' if he wrote about the Stock Exchange.

Smiley, for instance. That part made for Gary Oldman. Cleaning his 'specs with the thin end of his necktie, the self-effacing cocoon inside which his crystal-clear intelligence operated, the soundless withdrawing from the wife's infidelities... The Smiley books are his best, if there can be a best.

The CONSTANT GARDENER was not a spy story, for instance. The spy element varied from book to book. The British embassies and outposts run by the aspiring, but not quite there, henchmen of the Foreign Office did not take kindly to Le Carre's take on them. For heaven's sake, they were the elite, weren't they? and he was taking their life-structures to pieces. 

When Le Carre' arrived in Kenya to research for the 'Constant Gardener' the local High commission quietly passed him on to their lesser brethren -- the British Council. He had been excoriating about the career diplomats and their lifestyles in many countries. The British Council asked my daughter, Radha, who was then an Assistant Director in Nairobi to 'look after him.' That translates to: take him around, introduce him to the local colour, buy him lunch at the five stars, entertain him ...

So, one afternoon, when she came home from work, she told me about John Le Carre'. She had just had lunch with him. When she mentioned that her mother ( I was at the time on holiday in Nairobi) was a fan, he offered to sign some books for me. And he did, a few weeks later.

When he did a 'talk' in the Barbican a few years ago, I went with Radha and her daughter. He spoke without notes, about his books, his people and places. 'When Communism is finished, there is Capitalism to fight,' he always argued. That is now.

When THE CONSTANT GARDENER came out, some in Nairobi argued that the character, Ghita Pearson, was modelled on Radha; this she firmly disputed. However, the general bubble in which the Foreign Office functioned was cruelly clear. The internal jealousies and promotion tactics, the off-hand liaisons of bored middle-aged Lotharios promoted beyond their competence, the abrogation of long-learned moral structures because your family is not looking over your shoulder, the deliberate distance from all things local... I am reminded of what one very bright Ugandan said to me about a project I was managing in Kampala. Even I knew there was nothing I could teach them. 'Just give us the money and go, Anand,' he said, not unkindly. And he was a friend. Our behaviour in foreign places can be excruciating.

Today I looked at the phalanx of hardbacks on my bookshelf, all written by Le Carre' and thought, I'll just have to read them again. And again, and possibly again.

Buying Local

 Buying Local

The politicians don't sound too sure of what they appear to be saying -- buy from your local shops.

The last time I heard this was in the mid 1940s. Gandhi was telling all of us Indians to shun imported goods and buy only from the small retailer, things made in India. We all knew we couldn't defeat the British Raj by our puny push-backs. However, we obeyed.

   It was not difficult to obey. Shopping as a pleasant pastime had never existed in our minds.When a need arose, whether it was for Kirby grips for my short hair or a new bath towel because the old one was in shreds, we asked the master of the house, many times, and eventually we'd get that bath towel, and that Kirby grip. Maybe. Sometimes we tore strips off old rags and tied our hair with that.

   My father and I wore Khadhar  or Khadhi, as it was sometimes called. This material was home-spun and rough and thick. I was never a petite, slim person and the khadhi skirt made me look fat and graceless. But we persevered. My father, slim as an Arecanut tree, looked like a clothes-horse in anything he wore. I clearly did not get my genes in this respect from him.

  Not enough with wearing the damned things, a charkha appeared on our veranda in due course. Accompanied by thin cotton slivers. I was taught to sit down like Gandhi did and spin thread. I never got the hang of it -- my thread got knotted and broke. My father did not do much better. Thankfully, he gave up quite quickly on that.

  Not having money to spare helped. Clothing stores being nearly empty and cloth being rationed during the war years helped. When my father was arrested for being an activist, my fervour increased. The Khadhi habit persisted until I started wearing saris some time when I started College. My father continued, like a few others to the end of his life.

   It may not be much - but we can all do a little to help the local retailer, by buying from the small shops. The supermarkets can look after themselves, but we need to show solidarity with the local butcher, florist, fruit and vegetable vendor... 

   As they say, 'every little helps.'

The Reading Addiction

 

This Reading Addiction

Here I am, again, trying to write. Ben Okri, he of the Famished Road  fame was on TV (6/6/20) talking to the news anchor about James Floyd's death. And I think, there are writers like me and there are writers like him. So many more like me. Yet, we are compulsive writers too. If we don't write we feel dispossessed, as though we have been ousted from that intellectual and emotional domain we occupy.
   My problem is that I have to feel strongly about something for me to venture an opinion. (Friends who have suffered from the 'strength' of some of my opinions, will vouch for the fact that this happens much too frequently. Sorry.) At the moment I am staggering under the weight of happenings that make my thinking frenetic and confused. I  don't know where to begin. So I consider the writers I have really respected, and learned from. A more pleasant exercise -- you could call it a cop-out.
   Penelope Lively wrote Moon Tiger and won the Booker Prize some time in the eighties. Every little section in a chapter, sometimes consisting of a paragraph or two, like the brother and sister dancing, oblivious to all around them, with a faint suggestion of incest; much later the sister, in a car with the brother and his wife, and her total contempt for the woman...
   There was also Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in the year Indian writing in English nudged all others out and declared ownership of that language. And later, Arundhathi Roy with her The God of Small Things, which reinvented the English Language so powerfully. All over the Commonwealth, countries claim their own version of English: Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie... The list is a long rainbow list of wonderfully evocative writers.
   Many, like Rushdie have woven long stories flitting in and out of the realms of fantasy. I am not a great admirer of fantasy, but that image of yellow moths crowding round the naked woman as she walks, keeping her covered, has stayed with me for decades. Put that alongside, the brutal dinner-conference, generals moving pepper-pots around on the dining table to visualise the steps in the assassination of a President – no fantasy in that. Kashuo Ishiguro is another writer who cannot be boxed into any genre. There was ‘Remains of The Day,’ and much later, ‘Don’t Ever Leave Me.’ Remembering those books, I want to find them again on my shelves, boxes, loft, wherever they are, and dive into them.

  Which – leaves me with a selfish thought. After a die, all these and many more amazing writers, will keep on writing, and I have never heard of a library in the eternal silence. If there was, I would start believing in it.

The University Entrance Quagmire

 The University Entrance Quagmire

How does one negotiate this quagmire? There is so much muck thrown in there, of different ilk, that most parents struggle to traverse it.

In the days of a previous life when I taught Secondary school, the Careers Department would interview each child and try to help them through the maze. The end of the school year, with exams approaching, and teachers teaching less furiously, I would have time to spare. Especially as the A and O level exams finished early in the year. 

Students would come up to my table and talk to me. J was one of them. She was a lovely child in a group where most of the students were out to create as much disruption as they could. I asked her what she wanted to do after she left school. 

'I'm going to be a doctor,' she said without hesitation.

Mmm. I was trying to break it gently. 'Will you get the grades needed?' I asked, J was an average student, and she would get three or four O levels, but she would not get A and B grades. She had the kind of personality, which would make a great G P. Kind, considerate, caring. In my mind I wished her well. But -

She must have read my mind, I thought when she added. 

'I'll get a place at Barts. 

'My brother qualified from there. He is working in Canada now, but he'll come back to make sure I get a place.'

I left the job that year and a few years later I met some old students at the hair dresser's. So I asked about their year-group. J, apparently, was now two years into her medical course at Barts. And I thought this happened only in India!

Later I came across teachers in fee-paying schools who had graduated from Oxford or Cambridge, and easily got their charges into their old colleges. As for predicted grades, I tend to take them with a large pinch of salt. If the teachers like you, your predicted grades (they genuinely believe they are being impartial) tend to be good. If you are untidy, unruly and uncouth, you got damned. So, I'm glad Universities will now look at actual exam passes. 

No one doubts that the system is unfair and complicated. However, it is good to know that the marsh is being dragged and some of the muck cleared.

Kerala Marriages -- 2020 Style.

 I came across photos of two marriages in Kerala, from two weeks ago. Since then I cannot decide whether to laugh or to cry.

The bride was drowning in gold necklaces. Her wrists were not showing in the photo but she had an inch-wide band of gold on her upper arm. She was a pretty girl, about twenty years from the look of her, and she was almost tilting under the weight. 

I looked at the pictures of the shamiana (the tent where the ceremony is performed). On one end the bride and groom were placed on a raised dais -- no escape. She was gaudily attired in bright red and held a bouquet of large red roses in her hands, compounding the image of a sacrificial offering. Did this level of gaudiness and excess come recently, or was it a gradual descent into opulence displayed and waste sanctified? In a country where so many do not have enough to eat or survive? Especially today, with Covid restricting movement, so many families who live on daily wages have no income at all.

I looked at the decor in what appeared to be a large hall, a venue probably dedicated to weddings. The walls were pasted with flowers and red cut-outs. There was something like a half-circle of a frame behind the couple who were on show, made of coloured cloth and wire and tinsel. The whole thing looked silly and laughable.

In my youth marriages of all communities were quite sparing in time and cost. I used to quip that it was a quick approval of the elders for a couple to copulate and live together. 

I got married on a September day in 1957. Nair weddings take place in the night and I remember the tent was made of bamboo and coconut fronds. The ceremony itself took about ten minutes. Garlands in front of the sacred lamps while the swami chanted, three times round the lamps holding hands. Now you are single, now you are not, off you go, The event took place in our front yard and the women crowded round the windows to watch. Dinner after, on plantain leaves, seated on grass mats on the floor.

My trousseau consisted of eight cotton saris and one wedding sari. The wedding sari was a white Benares silk with a gold motif. It became off-white over the years and the gold dimmed, a lot like my marriage, I used to think. Jewelry was sparse and barely noticeable. Looking back, what was remarkable was how quickly the life-changing event was accomplished.

A new fashion is for rich families to schedule weddings in Colombo,while Sri- Lankans come to Chennai to get married. All very strange and inexplicable.

Now, if only the money spent on these public spectacles was distributed to the very poor, for their education, for their food and their general survival. I hope it will happen.  Perhaps the government could get a law passed capping the wedding extravagances.

Euphoria for U S

Euphoria for U S

 I am so full U S election-related thoughts , I am uncertain where to begin:

I am concerned that the Trumpet is planning rallies -- his favourite modus. Hope the Proud Boys and the White Supremacists will not think this is a call to arms. If Trumpet incites,even by a hint...

When Biden started winning I kept hoping that he would consider the 'Bad Cop' problem in the U S immediately. I am relieved to notice it is one of his four immediate targets. Bad cops, of course, have to be managed by the local precinct heads. Why are they staying schtum about this? Don't they care about what is happening on their patch?  The 'shoot first and look afterwards' practice seems to be common practice in some Southern states. How many black men and women have to die before the government takes responsibility and punishes the cops and the precincts? I am glad Biden and Harris have flagged this one up. A strategy is needed to stop cops using blacks for target practice, before the event rather than after.

I am delighted that America will now come back into the comity of nations, return to the W H O, re-sign up to the Paris climate agreement . Climate change must be the most serious threat to our world, and we are painfully slow to react to it. We are sleep-walking into a global calamity. Individuals can do much -- take their cars out less, use paper bags instead of plastic,plant tress... Countries can invest in green energy, in retraining for this , in fulfilling the promises they make over white wine and roast meat in the climate conferences. Thunberg is correct to call it hypocrisy.

What is our own blond horror going to do about this? When are we going to stop worshiping fossil fuel? Can we believe anything Boris and his small coterie of Tories say?

A pinch of honesty from all concerned would be a beginning.