The Age of Innocence

Ten years ago when I was roughly thirteen years of age, the object of my affection was, supposedly, a white panche-clad balding seventy year old man from the neighborhood. In those days, everybody carefully cultivated their own running jokes. This was mine. He was a short, wiry man who unsmilingly considered the world that passed outside the walls of his large compound with a cool and easy countenance. He would silently observe the goings on and occasionally summon one of us to deliver dreaded sermons of scrambled wisdom from over the years.

He was that species of old men which anybody with the baroque childhood that being young in Jayanagar in the late '90s entailed, will easily identify. Ostensibly retired from a job in the government, fairly well travelled, well read and speaking crisp, perfect English. My first encounter with him was when he called to me, as he did with a wave of his hand to show me his vast collection of postage stamps a few days after he had moved in to two houses away from mine. I was suitably awe-struck.

Perhaps what made him so adorable in such a curiously quirky manner was his taste in tobacciana. This erudite, impressive gentleman had a special preference for beedis. In the middle-class, reasonably conservative social and cultural background that all of us shared, beedis were glorious non-sequiturs. I can't possibly know what his own family made of it but to the rest of us, devoted teenaged observers of the neighborhood, it was hilarious. Not only was it shocking that anybody on 10th Main should smoke in public, that an otherwise respectable old man should resort to the delights of street urchins was a scream. I never found out what he was called. To us, he was and will be beedi thaatha: The first man I ever loved (some might say he is also the last).

In one of the recent noisy Twitter shenanigans(you will agree there are many) that I partook in, I declared after an exhausting session of competing with several boys at posting pictures of strikingly beautiful women, that it was impossible to mark, enjoy or appreciate men in the same way. Sometimes, to evaluate a woman by the colour of her eyes, the joy in her lips, the gentleness of her curves may simply be enough. These things are so easy and apparent. Men are different animals. How do you explain to everybody the allure of solemnity, of a nervous reticence, of the way a certain man holds a cigarette (or a beedi for that matter) and the silent intensity that the best of men exude? Do you really fully understand the pleasures of pages dedicated to photos of men reading, or the meme-fication of brooding, thinking lookers and laconic t.v serial killers or of the eternal attractiveness of the Darcys and the De-Winters?

In a way, the only things that make men attractive is their ability to think and, when appropriate, shut up. And this they only acquire with age. This universe, however, is cruelly consistent in how unfair it is to us, helpless captives of the fairer sex. The reminders of countless unsubtle aunts notwithstanding, where the clock ticks, there's a bomb waiting to go off. I remember the day I turned eighteen. I had broken down and cried. For what irrepressible joy, I fail to remember. Perhaps it was like I was crossing some important milestone but had missed the point entirely. Or I was worried about stepping into official adult-dom (dum dum da dum) and felt horribly unprepared. I didn't know back then, of course, that nobody is an adult until s/he has to undergo the bathos of staying up on cold nights and mulling serial cold-blooded murders of people with management degrees.

What was your favorite year? Mine was age sixteen. It was the year of living. It was hard to believe that anything was impossible. Quite another thing that life afterwards has with great kindness worked overtime to prove me wrong.

 In the last few years, all my heroes have fallen or bid farewell or simply disappeared. When you are a child, you think that everything will remain just as it is. Growing up is standing around and watching as those eternal presences fade away. They will shove you out of your house, raze it to the ground, build a glossy electronics store on the very earth you called home. They will will you to stop them. You will stand there and think only about your tax returns.

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I've been thinking about this for nearly a week now and what I feel about it wasn't clear until I went back to the neighborhood I grew up in. I dragged a patient friend to the leafy, beautiful lanes of my childhood a few hours ago. I showed him my school, the places we took walks in and the places we borrowed books from and the temple which Anna religiously drove past before he went anywhere else.

Don't you sometimes surprise yourself by how much you miss what the city felt like in those years? The same boring Bangalore that had limited means of entertainment and a visit to Lakeview for ice cream was the foremost indulgence?

On one side of the rain-soaked deep-blue tar road lies the house of my childhood, homes of my first friends and the house in which beedi-thaatha lived. Many houses have added a floor or two, gotten flashier facades and a few have been torn down completely. Those years evoke a sense of wideness and space. Shivering as we were on this surprisingly cold December evening, I understood what I miss most about the Bangalore of then-- the humility and simplicity that silently vanished in the roar and blinding lights of a big city; I miss how this place was witness to the romance between its people and its open spaces.

How do you have the heart to clear your vegetable garden to build a garage, or an extra room? How can you sell the walls on which are pasted your memories to the highest bidder, real estate be damned? Where there were vast front yards, now stand multiple cars and staircases and ugly appendages to once-beautiful houses; those ridiculous bright colors of paint. How could you?

As my friend and I walked in (still) beautiful, beautiful First Block and I jabbered on non-stop about how this grocery store and this chaat-gaadi were important monuments to my childhood, I realised that I was attempting to drag him by the collar through the forbidden woods of my nostalgia. I was desperately trying to recreate my times of then for somebody else's appreciation-- In the manner that numerous insufferable old people had done to me in vain. It has arrived. This is the end of the beginning.

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 In contrast to what were –in retrospect--exciting, eventful decades of growing up, this time of ageing and decay is undramatic. Nobody tells you of the ordinariness that clubs you in the face with clumps of identical days and of how you can never really wake up to your insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Or of the times when you stay up at night and between wholly entertaining, gleeful indications on Facebook of unlikely people getting laid (to answer the question on the back cover of that potentially life changing American Gods, No, nothing is sacred any more.) you read tiring updates of acquaintances going to university somewhere, working towards causes they (still, miraculously) believe in, travelling to new places, having ridiculous looking babies and to all of this you frustrated-ly batter the steering wheel of your motorcar-present for its stubborn refusal to, just, move.

I spent an important chunk of my birthday dinner doubled up on the floor in the booth of a fancy restaurant's restroom clutching my stomach, with only cold fear in response to strange new pains. It was a malignant mound of flesh. Certainly. What else can it be at this ripe age, after all these years, nay, months of shameless profligacy? I have since discovered that the tumor that will eventually kill me is a relatively common condition called stupidity and that I have with erring judgment befriended a consciousness of my mortality. My oldest friend A will remind me that I've always known that beast. In our countless walks around Second Block, I would worriedly list ominous symptoms I was experiencing; preludes to what I was sure were deadly diseases and A, sipping from her plastic cup of steaming filter coffee would unsympathetically tell me that there was no way I could have Alzheimer’s at age fourteen and that I really, really had to stop reading Reader’s Digest.

It is a common accompaniment to the miasma of ageing, this fear of dying. It isn’t like the grim reaper could arrive and disrupt any grand plan, for there isn’t any. But this deal isn’t the kind of dance you’d want to be whisked away from, unnoticed. I will never know if writing such things in a place like this dilutes how I feel about it but I have on more occasions than one, in the cruel December of this year marvelled at how some people can go away, never fully comprehended and their specialness so simply misunderstood. It doesn’t feel very good.

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For reasons not completely known to any of the parties involved, when I was age six, I walked right into a wall. Or so the story goes. This resulted in a permanent scar (dent, most people call it; ‘lobotomy scar’ on one occasion) on my forehead.  “This hospital here,” I proudly pointed to my now slightly impatient friend “is where I got my head stitched up.”

I remember how Amma would take me to the doctor every week to have the dressing replaced. We had reached a quid pro quo understanding that I would avoid bawling in exchange for a bunch of chocolates. It has occurred to me only recently that I, like the young of most species, was an obnoxious brat during my growing up years: Demanding attention all the time and fully aware of the potential of a tantrum effectively thrown. I’m slightly ashamed that after marathon introspection sessions and endless soul-searching, it took the odd instance of all the good that was done being summarily ignored and more demanded consistently, the way it is done when you’re not twenty any more, that I discovered how thankless it must be to be a parent. Let’s put it this way. Why do people have children? Why would you want to change nappies in the middle of many nights during the best years of your life, put your life on hold indefinitely, be embarrassed repeatedly at PTA meetings, make great personal sacrifices, spend your life’s savings on the brat’s education only to have him drop out of college and lay his head on the bosoms of a marching band of girlfriends and cry over the shitty childhood he had?

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For various reasons, this has seemed like the first real year of being all grown-up. And as it goes with these matters, the more one knows, the less one understands.

In the course of a walk, I may have accidentally uncovered the dangerous evolutionary function of nostalgia. I think Mother Nature programmed it as a course-correction device. An instrument that will cut this overreaching species to size occasionally with dutiful sang froid. It works tirelessly to make the past seem perfect and the future, uncertain; to foolishly convince humankind that everything that has already happened actually happened for a reason. Because it is indescribably humbling to realize that all you want at the moment is to be returned to the life you never really liked much in the first place.