UNWANTED: The author feels English society is too stiff and cold for the elderly

Doctor Ravi Kapoor’s father-in-law, Norman, got chucked out of an old folks’ home in England, when he tried to pinch a nurse’s bottom. Now the “lecherous old sod,” as Ravi prefers to think of him, has moved in with him and his wife in their house in London. But Kapoor is up to his neck in problems — he is overworked and sleep-starved, and now journalists are hounding him after an old British woman died on a trolley — unattended for two days — in the hospital where he works. And the last thing Kapoor needs is another assault on his personal life. So after a week of unendurable patience — with Norman cluttering up the house with cigarette butts and pornographic magazines — he asks his wife, “Can’t we just send him somewhere far away?” Luckily for them, one of Ravi’s enterprising cousins, Sonny, from Bangalore, drops in around this time with a great idea: why not pack him off to India?

Okay, so this is a fictional account — part of the plot of British author Deborah Moggach’s latest novel, These Foolish Things (Chatto & Windus), released in Britain earlier this month. But the social problem which the author deals with — that of growing old in a Western country like England, and becoming burdensome for the next generation — is very real say sociologists and literary critics alike. And they feel that the author has devised an very convincing, if hilarious, case for a possible solution — outsource the whole lot to India.

“Life is miserable for the elderly in England,” Moggach says sincerely, yet not, without a tinge of that, famous, dry, English humour, when you contact her at her residence in London. “First of all, it’s bloody cold here for their old bones,” she says, rattling off a list of complaints: “No one respects them, no one has time for them and though life-span is increasing, pension money is dwindling.” She points out that their children, themselves, are nearing old age and can’t cope.

British writer, Helen Falconer, agrees. “The doctor is not alone in his suffering,” she says. “A generation of 40-somethings is saddled with decrepit parents, each one a shuffling guilt-trip. Costly, clinging, embarrassingly old-fashioned — the old cannot die soon enough these days.”

So, Moggach points out, the elderly are often sent off to live in old peoples’ homes in the countryside or by the sea. “There, they sit on the edges of their sofas watching telly, and spend grey, drizzly days, waiting to die.”

Contrast that with sunny India, where things are cheap, people are helpful, family ties strong and the elderly respected. So it makes perfect sense for the elderly — Moggach puts it at anything above 50, which includes herself, as she is 56 — to want to spend the rest of their lives in India. So, in her novel, she has Ravi’s enterprising cousin turn a hotel in Bangalore into a guesthouse for the old, and an entire generation of English oldies go off to live there.

Moggach, who has visited India a number of times, decided to write on this subject because, she says, “I’d been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going to happen to us all. The population is ageing —– for the first time the over-50s outnumber the rest.”

But are India’s elderly really happy? Just last year an 80-year-old man in Calcutta killed himself — driven to suicide by loneliness. You ask 91-year-old, J.K. Saraswati, ex-employee of Metal Box of India Limited, whether India is a good place for the old and whether Britain’s aged population should make it their home. “What, the British are coming again?” he jokes, smiling a toothless grin. No, he doesn’t think the elderly are very well taken care of here and dismisses his son and daughter with a few disparaging remarks and a wave of his hands. Says his son, a 51-year-old employee of Godrej Tea, “We face the same problems here with our aged as in the West. I have my own family and my own problems. I can’t always give my parents the attention they demand. So they feel neglected. I understand that. But they too have to understand us. My father and I don’t see eye to eye at all.”

In the book too, the aged are not always poor little victims. Moggach shows them to be as cranky, moody and demanding as they are affectionate, loveable and vulnerable. If Kapoor’s father-in-law is selfish and bad-mannered, with poor hygiene, the old woman in the hospital dies because she refuses to let a ‘darkie’ treat her.

And the author is aware of “the way India is romanticised”. In fact, she brings it out in her novel, as she does the disillusionment. The Indian doctor tells his wife, for instance, “You British go there… mouthing a lot of mystic tosh” and “you all come back… (saying) ‘oh the poverty!’”.

But by and large, “Indian society is still friendlier,” says Moggach, “and it is more tolerant of the elderly and their follies. For instance, they are addressed, by everyone, in terms of endearment, such as, ‘grandma’ or ‘grandpa’. This is attractive to the old, who hanker after affection. But English society is too polite and distant, even with family members. I myself live across the street from my mum, but haven’t met her in years.”

Not so with Saraswati and his son, who in spite of all differences, continue to live under the same roof. And all said and done, ask Saraswati senior if he would live anywhere other than India in his old age, and he shakes his head. “No, I won’t go anywhere,” he says, “let the British come here”. And then with another toothless grin, “They are not so bad.”