Freed From Youth
by Sumana Roy
I’ve become aware that I now notice those freed from youth . . .
ᵟ
A child touches his shoulders, thinking it a statue by the lake. There’s something about the living, not just movement, but alertness, which, even though invisible, gives them a form, like wind does to a flag. The man has lost that. The child’s parents too think it’s a statue—they only ask their little boy to not go too close to the railing, the horizontal iron pipes that separate land from water. They say nothing about not touching the man—the statue. Perhaps the man, too, has forgotten that. He does not move, like statues do not, when birds alight on them.
It is only when the boy wants to share his chewing gum with the statue—trying to force the mouth of the man open—that the man moves. Only his mouth does, as if the rest of him could be still for as long as the earth remains. He spits it out immediately. Only the child sees him do that, and mistaking him to be a ghost, runs screaming to his parents. “Bhoot, bhoot!”
The parents laugh. They are behind the stooping man. The man might be older than the lake. They have come to see only one of them.
ᵟ
Every morning, while shaving and looking at himself in the mirror, always with frustration that he didn’t have enough time to do so, he sees the tiny patch of light filtering in through the aged ventilator fall on his head; each time he feels the same kind of nervousness—that the curse of being a man was upon him, that he’d begun balding. He adjusts his hair immediately, his method being the time-honoured one of hiding, as if a patch of skin without hair was precious and needed to be hidden from bandits and robbers lest it was stolen from its owner. Every morning he feels reassured when he discovers that it is only a patch of anaemic morning light teasing him, that his hair is still where hair is meant to be, and that destiny had postponed his moment of baldness by at least another day.
At night, dreams turn his scalp into a forest, its balding patches dead cheetahs in a national park.
ᵟ
“Will you marry me?” she asks him often, her words for “Hello” to inaugurate a phone call.
She knows he will have no answer, for there is none. He is already married. It’s one of those things that can’t be repeated, she’s been told. Like a firecracker that can be used only once? she’d asked him once. The joke went damp on him. She didn’t hear any sound from the other end of the phone.
Neither of them knows why the statement, with its long history of imagined happiness, pops up from time to time. It is odd, like the mention of a dead parent. It is awkward also because it is a rhetorical question.
She’s seen marriages the way she’s seen pets in the houses of her friends. They are safe and beautiful in these private spaces. No one likes to see a marriage cross a street—there’s the possibility of being run down by a speeding vehicle just as street dogs might rag a pet. Perhaps that is what it is—no one likes to see a marriage outside its nightgown.
They are no longer young—something has started shrinking inside them.
Will you marry me? No one asks that question at their age.
The question is like the wrapping paper of a gift—there is something inside the box; what, one never knows. That is why marriage, like a gift, is always a surprise. Is it this that she wants—a gift, really, only a gift?—when she asks him that question, “Will you marry me?”
It’s been years that they have been together, long enough to know that marriage is no glue, and that it is no answer to a question. They have turned it into a running joke. They take it out for walks in the most awkward weather. “Will you marry me?”
But she is serious today. Something’s snapped inside her. She expects the question to stitch the wound. When she closes her eyes after waking up, a rehearsal of sleep as it were, she finds it turning into the likeness of a refrain in her mind. A short film forms inside her eyes, a collage of all the situations, real and imagined, where this question was asked. It’s not difficult, for she is not really imagining but collecting images, from photos and films, gossip and literature. In most of them, the man is shorter than the woman—she strains her eyes to see whether she is seeing wrong, for this is one of the givens of the romantic situation, of course: the man has to be taller than the woman. Then, in a flash, the instant that turns sleep into wakefulness, she sees it—the man is on his knees, asking the question. It is perhaps the only time in the life of this relationship that the woman’s answer will matter. “Yes.” Does a woman practice saying yes—that “yes”—all her life? She wants to be the woman saying “Yes”. It’ll make her feel delicate. She’s never felt delicate in her youth; if only old age would give her that.
She gets up from bed and brushes her teeth, practising saying the question even in her toothpaste-foam mouth. She thinks of it once, phoning him in this state and asking the question. That imagined possibility makes her feel proud of herself—she is unique, no one’s ever asked this question in such a state. But she eventually decides against it. The illegibility of sounds, the foam-annotated words, might make him say “What?”
What if he said, “Have you really gone old?”
ᵟ
“How did you survive all these years?” I ask her.
Age is a slow poison. Like sunlight, it’s invisible and inevitable.
The heart, I hear, is what keeps men alive. It beats. Beating, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, life is motion, movement. And the lungs? They move too, without making one conscious. Just the gentle drawl of the chest, via the middlemanship of the nose—there is life in those ins and outs. A few months ago, this eighty-seven-year-old woman had told me how she now spends her mornings practising how to breathe.
“How did you survive all these years?” I asked her.
ᵟ
How nails grow. And how parents age overnight.
There is a phrase in Bangla—“jhop korey”, the sound of “suddenly” in it.
And yet, age is the only thing in the universe that doesn’t happen at random: love, yes; disease, yes; birth, yes; death, yes too. But age? No, there is an inevitability about ageing, like water flowing down a mountain. Both are disciples of gravity.
What do you miss about being young? the morning milkman asks my neighbour sometimes. By the time the woman—I’ve heard that she is in her early eighties—starts speaking, the milkman has left.
I think it is speed. Youth is breathlessness, rush. It is natural that people want to remain young forever nowadays. Life is so fast—how can one afford to stumble at a traffic crossing? When I was young, a child, no more than twelve, I could identify old people from the way they walked. Children do not know that they have legs—they only walk because legs are like Mallory’s Mount Everest. They are just there, to be conquered, to be used. Only in adolescence do humans discover the presence of their legs. An infant’s legs can take fall and jump, tear and bruise without questions. Children do not question pain. After school, our legs become detached from our selves. They become the third person who live inside us—after the heart and rectum.
In Lamahatta, a woman walking up the hill—a stick in her right hand, the stick taller than her—stops when she sees me. She holds parts of her body and taps them, as if putting them in place, like the way one puts things in order in a lived room. Her voice is loud, as if I’m not her only audience, that someone farther away could also be listening. She speaks in a mix of Nepali and English: “Every body part gradually abandons this island—this body. My body. This body that I once gave my name and my being is now a machine without a mechanic. Doctors try to fill in but gradually everything returns to where it must have come from. My life has become a borrowing: first hair, then teeth, then . . . I’m now a warehouse of spare parts: dentures, pacemaker, steel plates in limbs . . .”
I felt almost certain that she isn’t speaking to me, that I have only happened to fall on her way, when I catch her shouting again: “I own two wigs. I bought them in the 1980s, after Indira Gandhi’s death. I liked that woman, I admired her for her hair and her courage. They were related, her hair and her courage. We were born in the same year: 1917 . . .”
At a restaurant, a man who holds his walking stick as he eats, almost in the manner of a fork, tells the waiter: “I think of everything that I could have eaten in my life . . .”
Why didn’t you? the waiter asks.
“Every time I look at a menu card now, I feel like it’s an accusation—why didn’t I, why didn’t I . . . And now food goes through me like cars stuck in Bangalore traffic . . .”
“Age is an incurable disease. On afternoons, I sometimes switch on the television. Beautiful women enter my room. They remind me of how the light in the world shrinks with age. When I was very young, I fantasised about wearing sunglasses: I needed protection from light. the world was too bright. Now no light is enough/all light is too little. I can’t make out figures in the corridor. Age makes everything a stranger.
I can’t recognise myself in old photographs . . .
The world is now a dark corridor where silhouettes look familiar and strange at once. Even relatives, who are now occasional visitors, have the air of possible thieves: they all come for something, even if not to steal. Everyone offers pity, they have become incapable of giving company. In that sense, old age is so different from childhood. An adult can offer company and play with a child, but as one grows older, only the company of the same age group is most interesting . . .”
This is a page from a man’s diary. I’m not sure whether he’s a bachelor or widower. When I ask him whether he lives alone, he says that he was born a decade before India. “Do countries start forgetting things as they grow older, like humans do?”
ᵟ
A child touches his shoulders, thinking it a statue by the lake. There’s something about the living, not just movement, but alertness, which, even though invisible, gives them a form, like wind does to a flag. The man has lost that. The child’s parents too think it’s a statue—they only ask their little boy to not go too close to the railing, the horizontal iron pipes that separate land from water. They say nothing about not touching the man—the statue. Perhaps the man, too, has forgotten that. He does not move, like statues do not, when birds alight on them.
It is only when the boy wants to share his chewing gum with the statue—trying to force the mouth of the man open—that the man moves. Only his mouth does, as if the rest of him could be still for as long as the earth remains. He spits it out immediately. Only the child sees him do that, and mistaking him to be a ghost, runs screaming to his parents. “Bhoot, bhoot!”
The parents laugh. They are behind the stooping man. The man might be older than the lake. They have come to see only one of them.
ᵟ
Every morning, while shaving and looking at himself in the mirror, always with frustration that he didn’t have enough time to do so, he sees the tiny patch of light filtering in through the aged ventilator fall on his head; each time he feels the same kind of nervousness—that the curse of being a man was upon him, that he’d begun balding. He adjusts his hair immediately, his method being the time-honoured one of hiding, as if a patch of skin without hair was precious and needed to be hidden from bandits and robbers lest it was stolen from its owner. Every morning he feels reassured when he discovers that it is only a patch of anaemic morning light teasing him, that his hair is still where hair is meant to be, and that destiny had postponed his moment of baldness by at least another day.
At night, dreams turn his scalp into a forest, its balding patches dead cheetahs in a national park.
ᵟ
“Will you marry me?” she asks him often, her words for “Hello” to inaugurate a phone call.
She knows he will have no answer, for there is none. He is already married. It’s one of those things that can’t be repeated, she’s been told. Like a firecracker that can be used only once? she’d asked him once. The joke went damp on him. She didn’t hear any sound from the other end of the phone.
Neither of them knows why the statement, with its long history of imagined happiness, pops up from time to time. It is odd, like the mention of a dead parent. It is awkward also because it is a rhetorical question.
She’s seen marriages the way she’s seen pets in the houses of her friends. They are safe and beautiful in these private spaces. No one likes to see a marriage cross a street—there’s the possibility of being run down by a speeding vehicle just as street dogs might rag a pet. Perhaps that is what it is—no one likes to see a marriage outside its nightgown.
They are no longer young—something has started shrinking inside them.
Will you marry me? No one asks that question at their age.
The question is like the wrapping paper of a gift—there is something inside the box; what, one never knows. That is why marriage, like a gift, is always a surprise. Is it this that she wants—a gift, really, only a gift?—when she asks him that question, “Will you marry me?”
It’s been years that they have been together, long enough to know that marriage is no glue, and that it is no answer to a question. They have turned it into a running joke. They take it out for walks in the most awkward weather. “Will you marry me?”
But she is serious today. Something’s snapped inside her. She expects the question to stitch the wound. When she closes her eyes after waking up, a rehearsal of sleep as it were, she finds it turning into the likeness of a refrain in her mind. A short film forms inside her eyes, a collage of all the situations, real and imagined, where this question was asked. It’s not difficult, for she is not really imagining but collecting images, from photos and films, gossip and literature. In most of them, the man is shorter than the woman—she strains her eyes to see whether she is seeing wrong, for this is one of the givens of the romantic situation, of course: the man has to be taller than the woman. Then, in a flash, the instant that turns sleep into wakefulness, she sees it—the man is on his knees, asking the question. It is perhaps the only time in the life of this relationship that the woman’s answer will matter. “Yes.” Does a woman practice saying yes—that “yes”—all her life? She wants to be the woman saying “Yes”. It’ll make her feel delicate. She’s never felt delicate in her youth; if only old age would give her that.
She gets up from bed and brushes her teeth, practising saying the question even in her toothpaste-foam mouth. She thinks of it once, phoning him in this state and asking the question. That imagined possibility makes her feel proud of herself—she is unique, no one’s ever asked this question in such a state. But she eventually decides against it. The illegibility of sounds, the foam-annotated words, might make him say “What?”
What if he said, “Have you really gone old?”
ᵟ
“How did you survive all these years?” I ask her.
Age is a slow poison. Like sunlight, it’s invisible and inevitable.
The heart, I hear, is what keeps men alive. It beats. Beating, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, life is motion, movement. And the lungs? They move too, without making one conscious. Just the gentle drawl of the chest, via the middlemanship of the nose—there is life in those ins and outs. A few months ago, this eighty-seven-year-old woman had told me how she now spends her mornings practising how to breathe.
“How did you survive all these years?” I asked her.
ᵟ
How nails grow. And how parents age overnight.
There is a phrase in Bangla—“jhop korey”, the sound of “suddenly” in it.
And yet, age is the only thing in the universe that doesn’t happen at random: love, yes; disease, yes; birth, yes; death, yes too. But age? No, there is an inevitability about ageing, like water flowing down a mountain. Both are disciples of gravity.
What do you miss about being young? the morning milkman asks my neighbour sometimes. By the time the woman—I’ve heard that she is in her early eighties—starts speaking, the milkman has left.
I think it is speed. Youth is breathlessness, rush. It is natural that people want to remain young forever nowadays. Life is so fast—how can one afford to stumble at a traffic crossing? When I was young, a child, no more than twelve, I could identify old people from the way they walked. Children do not know that they have legs—they only walk because legs are like Mallory’s Mount Everest. They are just there, to be conquered, to be used. Only in adolescence do humans discover the presence of their legs. An infant’s legs can take fall and jump, tear and bruise without questions. Children do not question pain. After school, our legs become detached from our selves. They become the third person who live inside us—after the heart and rectum.
In Lamahatta, a woman walking up the hill—a stick in her right hand, the stick taller than her—stops when she sees me. She holds parts of her body and taps them, as if putting them in place, like the way one puts things in order in a lived room. Her voice is loud, as if I’m not her only audience, that someone farther away could also be listening. She speaks in a mix of Nepali and English: “Every body part gradually abandons this island—this body. My body. This body that I once gave my name and my being is now a machine without a mechanic. Doctors try to fill in but gradually everything returns to where it must have come from. My life has become a borrowing: first hair, then teeth, then . . . I’m now a warehouse of spare parts: dentures, pacemaker, steel plates in limbs . . .”
I felt almost certain that she isn’t speaking to me, that I have only happened to fall on her way, when I catch her shouting again: “I own two wigs. I bought them in the 1980s, after Indira Gandhi’s death. I liked that woman, I admired her for her hair and her courage. They were related, her hair and her courage. We were born in the same year: 1917 . . .”
At a restaurant, a man who holds his walking stick as he eats, almost in the manner of a fork, tells the waiter: “I think of everything that I could have eaten in my life . . .”
Why didn’t you? the waiter asks.
“Every time I look at a menu card now, I feel like it’s an accusation—why didn’t I, why didn’t I . . . And now food goes through me like cars stuck in Bangalore traffic . . .”
“Age is an incurable disease. On afternoons, I sometimes switch on the television. Beautiful women enter my room. They remind me of how the light in the world shrinks with age. When I was very young, I fantasised about wearing sunglasses: I needed protection from light. the world was too bright. Now no light is enough/all light is too little. I can’t make out figures in the corridor. Age makes everything a stranger.
I can’t recognise myself in old photographs . . .
The world is now a dark corridor where silhouettes look familiar and strange at once. Even relatives, who are now occasional visitors, have the air of possible thieves: they all come for something, even if not to steal. Everyone offers pity, they have become incapable of giving company. In that sense, old age is so different from childhood. An adult can offer company and play with a child, but as one grows older, only the company of the same age group is most interesting . . .”
This is a page from a man’s diary. I’m not sure whether he’s a bachelor or widower. When I ask him whether he lives alone, he says that he was born a decade before India. “Do countries start forgetting things as they grow older, like humans do?”
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant.
