The setting was the pristine club for air force officers near the Jaipur polo ground in New Delhi. Dancing on stage were a friend’s parents whose 85th birthdays we were celebrating. Alongside was a retired general who was 92, moving as if he were 20 years younger, and a feisty 70-something lady, making light of her hip replacement and twirling someone’s walking stick with the abandon of a Fred Astaire. I pointed out to my friend that her father’s cheeks were looking flushed, but felt nannyish when I saw him make his way across the party in pretty sprightly fashion and sit down to lunch at 3.30 pm.
A couple of Mondays ago, I noticed a convoy of cars dropping people off at the front gate. I called a few days later to tease my landlords for throwing such large parties. It turned out they were celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary, which left me momentarily speechless. At an aunt’s 75th birthday party last month, the co-celebrants cutting the cake, designed to look like a Larousse cookbook, included a lady 99 years old. It is impossible to recreate in print the joie de vivre on display at these parties. At lunch on Sunday, I realised that the spectacularly bold saris were worn by women in their 70s or older — an astonishing gold and black ikat in one corner, fuchsia pink in another while a friend’s always elegant aunt mugged for the cameras in oversized party goggles and a punkish purple wig.
All of which made me wonder whether 80 is the new 60. Have the advances of medicine, the affluence of post-liberalisation India and the bonhomie of living in bustling cities given this generation of elderly an elixir of youthfulness? Certainly, their parents would not have lived life at this pace. Recently, a daughter posted on Facebook a video clip of her 92-year-old mother performing classical Indian dance. In contrast to their counterparts in the West, the well-off elderly in India are more likely to be surrounded by children and grandchildren as well as dutiful and often doting servants and drivers, all of which keeps them young(er) and mobile. I was invited to dinner on Diwali by a friend’s mother, who informed me that theirs was a casual affair involving mostly family and there would be no “intellectual talk”, only cards and lots of laughter. I arrived to find a home adorned with buckets of yellow and orange marigolds, the tables covered with Chanderi silk tablecloths. I don’t play cards but could not help be amused that her teenaged grandsons, as predicted, won almost every round, as if they were Robert Redford and Paul Newman in The Sting.
Try to reciprocate such hospitality and one discovers that 70-somethings have a social life that makes one feel staid by comparison. A group I know go to the movies regularly together and are a handy filter of what not to see while also alerting me to when Malavika Sarrukai is dancing at the India International Centre or Kamani. My favourite school principal, who is 80 and lost his wife several years ago, splits his time between India and Australia where his girlfriend lives. A friend recently took her mother to a spa as a 75th birthday treat. When her glamorous mother confessed she had neither had a massage in her life nor done yoga, some of the guests were left wondering why they were at the spa at all. An 80-something friend requests Tints of Nature hair dye whenever my brother or I travel to the US.
Part of what keeps me connected to this generation is that many are transplants from the Calcutta of my childhood or somewhere else — just as I am. The stories they tell are better than my generation’s; they have usually seen more of the world. An elderly friend told me about Jackie Kennedy visiting her home in New Delhi in the 1960s. I shall be vicariously name-dropping that tale to my grand-nieces decades hence. The best gastropub in Kensington? The museums to go to in Washington DC? This generation of grannies has the answers because they frequently visit their children overseas.
A couple of years ago, a friend and I visited the artist Krishen Khanna, who turned 90 this year. When we arrived at what I would have thought was nap-time on Sunday afternoon, Khanna practically bounded up the stairs from his studio and regaled us with anecdotes of quitting Grindlays to be an artist. M F Husain was waiting outside the bank and yanked Khanna’s tie off in celebration while the staff union complained that a senior Indian banker quitting for such a whimsical reason would make it harder for the others to crack the glass ceiling. I contrast these experiences with the forwarded jokes of the WhatsApp groups of my college batchmates, many of whom are professionally accomplished and yet feel impoverished. To rework Susan Sontag’s wise line; old age is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. We all have it coming. One of the richest blessings of living in India is witnessing how the elderly celebrate life rather than retreat from it.
Twitter: @RahulJJacob
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