Ignore at own peril

Ira Pande

IT is now fashionable among the well-off, especially among the two-income couples, to build or buy homes in various parts of the country. I know of several who are barely 50, but have a house in Delhi (or whichever metro they work in), a cottage in the hills and a flat in Goa. Parties that were once held at home are now organised as weekend getaways in the hills or at a beach. Then there are those who inherited farmhouses (often acquired from slush funds their parents had collected from dodgy deals as black money) where sybaritic pool parties take place. To us church mice, living in our modest retirement flats in middle-class colonies, these are lifestyle trends to shake one’s grey heads over.

I know of a young couple who has rented a huge farmhouse for their spoilt pedigreed dogs because the condo (upgraded name for flats) they have does not allow pets on the premises. When we go to our own hills in Kumaon, large swathes of pristine forested valleys and dales have been cut up into tiny plots (to circumvent local land laws that prevent outsiders from colonising Pahari lands), and hideous flat-roofed ‘cottages’ that are most unsuitable for our monsoon, have come up. Their owners hardly ever spend more than a few weeks a year in these monstrosities. And when they do, they want to replicate the life they have in the plains: so you can hear loud complaints about how fancy grocery items have to be lugged up and how the mutton (from our hardy Pahari goats) is not tender and like the one ‘one gets in Khan Market’).

The story is the same in Goa: carloads of young people come from Mumbai or wherever, often in their own private planes (now that foreign travel is tricky), and hold riotous rave parties on the beach where drugs and booze add to the weekend merriment. In both places, these party animals are completely unaware of the sullen resentment of the local folk, whose hard lives have to deal with the escalating prices of food. There is another fallout of this: the tantalising glimpses into such lavish lifestyles release a deep envy among the young children who are hired to clean up the mess by these Huns when they leave. Their anger and frustration at their own difficult lives have terrible social consequences, but let’s not even go there.

I could go on and on but what is the point? All my rantings are not going to change these hedonists. Only when they grow old and have lost their own children to the lure of the West, will they realise what damage they have done to their own lives. Before I sound like an old grouch, (or worse, like a jealous onlooker) let me show you another side that I was privy to when I met some old schoolfriends for a gossipy lunch recently. Most of them were titled memsahibs who studied at posh public schools, had little interest in further study after they graduated and were married off into equally privileged families when they were still mentally underdeveloped. The first few years went by in a whirr of parties and roistering and then came the problems that money brings. Some have lost their fortunes to unwise decisions, others have lost their children to drugs and alcohol, while still others are resigned to the fact that the children who went abroad after school to study, married and settled down there. They are unlikely to ever return to occupy all those grand homes the parents had earmarked for each one.

Today, so many of my generation have come to the sad realisation that all the wealth and jewellery they have is becoming a burden they can no longer look after. The houses in the hills need constant upkeep and, in any case, going there regularly is now slowly getting impossible, given their stiff knees or dodgy hearts. They were all asking each other whether moving to an assisted-living community may not be a bad idea. To have to deal with unreliable domestic help (their old faithful retainers have passed on), getting generators and water pumps serviced and the fear of being killed as they sleep at night are driving them to consider options they never thought they would ever have to contend with.

To all such elderly folk, I want to ask whether they had never been told the story of the “Ant and the Grasshopper” and, later, the episode of the “Enchanted Pool” in the “Mahabharata”. In their wanderings after their exile, the Pandavas find a beautiful pool in the forest one day. Each one goes to quench his thirst but never comes back. Finally, Yudhishthira goes in search of his missing brothers only to find that the pool is guarded by a fearsome Yaksha who allows one to drink from his enchanted pool only if they are able to answer his questions. He turns to Yudhishthira and throws a volley of questions at him, such as: what is higher than the sky? Deeper than the underworld?

The final one, after all such questions have been answered successfully, is: What is the greatest wonder? And the answer is: we all know we will die one day, yet everyone believes this won’t happen to him or her.