Old and New

“Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.” 
So remarked former American President Herbert Hoover. But there is a charm attached to every phase our lives – the innocence of childhood, the passion of youth and the wisdom of old age. Much has been said and done about childhood – the memories, the friends, the eagerness to grasp new things; youth is again a topic of endless discussions and conclusions. But it is the old age, the time of sunset, which fascinates me.

 

An old person is wise; so he chooses the wisest person present to speak to, and they resort to long explanations which are wearying for most of us.  The younger lot feels that the senior people are in a mission to straighten out other peoples' affairs. There is a fear of recital of endless details, and the numerous yawns, endless descriptions and awkward silences before the aged narrator finally gets to the point.

There are endless descriptions of aches and pains, more so if the listener is a medical practitioner, and they increase with the increasing years. And on no account can they be wrong!

 

But there are deviations. A few of our old comrades behave unconventionally as the years roll by.

 

Take the example of Mr X. Widowed a couple of years back, he lives in respectable harmony with his son’s family. They are well off, and take excellent care of the old man. But Mr X has wings that cannot be trimmed down. His fondness for food and erratic eating habits has made malaena a biannual affair in the family. Otherwise a staunch atheist, the episodes of illness make Mr X seek out all the religious scriptures in the vicinity which must be read aloud to him by his granddaughter. He fears that if he dies suddenly without God’s thoughts in his last hours then he will be reincarnated as a boar! Now it is another matter that the wall opposite the head-end of his bed is adorned with Victoria’s Secrets’ models!

 

Now Mrs Z is another story. She abhors doctors. She prefers her own concoctions to the bottled remedies that are sold across the counter by dubious looking pharmacists with ear studs. The old lady has chronic bronchitis; once her younger brother, who is a renowned doctor, gave her some potent cough syrup. But our lady is wiser. In consultation with her nonagenarian neighbour, who had brought relief to countless childless couples by prescribing those ‘fertile’ emulsions of cow-dung and some mysterious oil, Mrs Z literally held her grandchild at gunpoint and asked him to fetch a live toad for her. Bewildered, the shocked lad did as he was told and managed to catch a struggling emaciated toad from the nearby marshes. Mrs Z, with an angelic smile, took a black thread and tied the hind legs of the poor toad, and hung the ‘live pendant’ around her leathery neck. Being a fair lady, she continued taking the cough syrup to appease her brother too. A week later, when the brother came, he was happy to find that the cough was gone. But he was surprised to see Mrs Z with a muffler around her neck in the peak of the summer season. Upon some gentle persuasion, the grand old lady took off the muffler to reveal the real remedy; the cough had disappeared, but the live remedy was croaking happily!

 

Don’t ask me what happened to the toad after that, please!

 

Yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to a strand or two of grey hair on the temple, I was not prepared to discover the fine wrinkles at the corners of my eyes. The laughter lines look more pronounced, the creases on my forehead have become permanent and my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel that the graveyard is reckoning me. And suddenly I realize that there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty. There are people who I have hurt and haven’t yet said ‘sorry’ to, and I rummage my address book for their numbers. There are those places I meant to visit, and I do not know if I will be able to. And last but not the least, there are faces that I need to see before I call it a day...