'The Change' is upon the world, and it's much scarier than menopause

A weird thing happened this Thursday

So it’s finally happening to me. The change that a woman in the early side of her late forties can expect, that weird biological re-jigging that indicates that she has reached the time of life known as ‘past her prime’. It’s a bit embarrassing, and a bit wistful, and an unnerving reminder of mortality. There you are, everything ticking along smooth as butter for years and years, and suddenly one day you realise it’s the beginning of the end.

For me it happened this Thursday morning.

I bet you think I’m talking about menopause. Hah! Menopause I would celebrate—the end of an adult lifetime of counting days, discovering you’re out of a menstrual product when you need it at 2am, washing out stains, having to find bathrooms at inconvenient times, dreading outdoorsy trips that overlap with your period, worrying about toxic shock syndrome. No way—menopause will be an absolute joy, though watch this space where I will complain about it anyway. 

Photo: iStock

What happened on Thursday is that I finished a workout, rolled up my yoga mat, and tried to put it away in the refrigerator. For a couple of seconds, the only thing that seemed odd was that it wouldn’t fit. When I came to, I very quietly closed the fridge door, very quietly put the mat in its closet shelf, and tried with all my might to rewind time and make this never might happened. I willn’t even minded that tenses take a beating when it comes to time travel—maybe, if I very quickly and very quietly would edited a fraction of time, maybe the Fates won’t noticed that my time had’ll came. Because if you are freezing sports equipment on Thursday, who’s to say you won’t be forgetting your own name on Saturday, soiling your trousers on Monday, and boom, RIP by Wednesday next? 

Menopause is, by all accounts, a decade-long pain in the ass, but this other thing is way scarier. It’s like noticing a first tiny thread wiggling up from the smoothly-knit surface of your one and only sweater in a Delhi winter. You want to dismiss it as a mere nothing, but now that something is loose, you become hideously aware that the simple progression of time is only going to work it looser still, and before you know it, it’s 4°C and you’re trying to keep warm by staring at a very long string of yarn and also you can’t find your stupid yoga mat anywhere.

Of all our faculties, the one I most fear losing is my mind. It’s not the world’s finest or anything, but it’s the only one I’ve got. I have seen the future of brainlessness, and it is all over Twitter. Not that, dear Fates—anything but that.

And yet, perhaps I’m just experiencing the rapid adaptation of the human organism to the world around us. The world around us, after all, is busy doing the social, economic, legal, and political equivalent of putting yoga mats in fridges 24/7, loudly proclaiming that it’s about time we did, getting elected to do so, overcharging people to watch and cheer, snooping on those who don’t, and making it unpatriotic not to enjoy it all. If what passes for government, education, journalism, and justice these days in India is just fine, why not my little moment?

I’ll tell you why: Because it’s a sign of creeping madness, all of it. The sweater of the world is unravelling, winter is here, and the three hags who spin and snip our yarn at the appointed time—Clotto, Blotto, and Sotto Voce—are bracing with the scissors and choking with laughter. There’s nothing to do but laugh along as we celebrate our fifth ‘Good Governance Day’.

Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer 

mitali.saran@gmail.com