by MUKUL DUBE
A bed-ridden elderly woman in New Delhi. PHOTO/Rajeev Bhatt/The Hindu
“Nana [maternal grandfather in many South Asian languages], if you go and live in this ‘home’ place, will you meet other old men who give scooter rides like you do and who take pictures like you do? Will they make cheese omelettes like the one you just made for me?”
I told the child that I was looking for an old people’s home for my mother, not for myself.
“You have a Mummy, Nana? But Nani doesn’t have one.”
I said that the Nani [maternal grandmother] in question, a class-mate in what seems like another lifetime, did indeed have a Mummy once, an affectionate smiling one who would stuff me full of biryani and kheer and other goodies whenever I visited.
“Why doesn’t Nani have a Mummy when you have one?”
The bigger questions of life and death were beyond me. I passed them to my class-mate, who hushed the child and who, I am sure, will have dealt with them skilfully later.
I had been speaking of the trouble I had had with live-in maids with experience of what the manpower trade calls “patient care”. In two years I had had eight such women, I had said, each of whom had left without any such thing as prior notice. I had described how the agencies from which I got these women just did not bother about you after they had taken your money.
I had said that I was no longer young and that I did not feel able any more to cope. That was why I was looking around for an old age home that would take in the old girl and look after her well.
I had described how two homes nominally devoted to old age had turned me down. One had said that it did not take in people over 80, the other had said that it did not admit the bed-ridden.
I had expressed my puzzlement. Did they want only grey and wizened young athletes? What did they do with those who had been taken in but who had become frail and feeble? Did they perhaps have a well into which such people, the really old ones, were thrown?
Perhaps I had spoken also of how the fag end of my own life was being consumed by the need to look after a person who was no more herself, one who did not leave her bed and treated it like a toilet.
“But you are old, Nana, so your Mummy must be many times older. Why does she still wet her bed? Do you wet your bed?”
“Meri nani, I give up. Please ask your Nani.” The child had bested me. I had no answer that would be both adequate and appropriate.
Mukul Dube can be reached at uthappam@gmail.com