Grey matters

Children have been going their different ways for some years, and taking their own decision not just about marriage but about relationships in general, writes Bhaskar Ghose.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The trouble is that these much-quoted lines from the poem The Second Coming by WB Yeats have begun to preface many dull sermons on The Dreadful Fate That Awaits Us — economically, socially, morally, politically and in all the other ways in which we’re seen to be sliding into the abyss. I’m afraid I’ve used them because what Yeats says is the perfect epitaph of our times — at least, of the times as seen from the position taken in this essay.

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This is really about the family or what used to be the family. A young woman from a well-known college in Delhi says, in a film: “I’ll marry someone I choose. I wouldn’t trust my mother or father with that choice. I’ll make it myself.” A not very surprising comment from a young woman of this generation, or for that matter, of the earlier generation as well. Not just the middle class of this and the previous generation; among a very large number of people from conventional families in what we conveniently pigeonhole as lower middle class.

I may be wrong, but it’s more an attitudinal shift in urban areas; in the more tightly knit communities in villages, it is probably not quite as widespread, if indeed it exists at all. I would like this to be true, if for nothing else, because it fits with the perception of urban societies as units that fragment easily. Families are not held together by shared experiences and activities; parents disappear during the day to anonymous workplaces — children either to anonymous schools or their own workplaces or to gatherings of peers whose collective existence is quite separate from that of their parents or even their siblings. Add to this received ideas in schools and colleges and from peer groups and the result is the unsurprising comment of the young woman in the film.

Children have been going their different ways for some years, and taking their own decision not just about marriage but about relationships in general, about their professions — about their lives. There is mutual acceptance of this and beyond these choices such bonding that exists continues — warm, affectionate or perfunctory — even suffered.

Where I live there are many, perhaps three out of every five, who live by themselves, that is, just the husband and wife. Their children are for the most part abroad, or elsewhere in the country — usually doing reasonably well in their chosen profession. For the rest of the lives of these elderly couples, they will see relatively little of their sons and daughters; the occasional visit on a holiday, perhaps once a year, would be about it. The children aren’t the issue; the parents are. Inexorably, age takes them towards frailty and ill health. Inexorably, the frightening spectre of dependence first comes into vision, then begins to advance.

What happens then? It’s bad enough for these relatively affluent couples. For the not-so-affluent and for the poor in cities, it’s a nightmare that the old head into, a world that would make many horror stories read like Alice In Wonderland. NGOs working with the old have, I understand, innumerable stories of the manner in which the old are treated when they are dependent on their children or relations, at times even when they are not financially dependent but need care because of infirmities. Physical violence is common; verbal abuse is a daily ordeal the old dependents have to endure. Above all the humiliation — their reduction to creatures who are best not seen, and who cannot, in some cases, even ask for any kind of help.

The situation is rapidly becoming even worse as the general age of the population increases; longevity brings with it mostly suffering and pain, physical and mental. In cities, the size of apartments is, if one were to take a broad average, very small, perhaps two rooms, in which adult children and their families live with the old parents. As long as they can walk, the old can at least stay out for lengths of time, but again, age inevitably reduces that time, and they need more rest, and that means space. I’m not even going to mention any differences of opinion; that’s another world altogether.

What do we do with these old people? In a celebrated science-fiction film of the Seventies, Soylent Green, they had the option of going to beautifully appointed clinics where they were given a luxurious death, with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony playing as they gently drifted into oblivion. They were then converted into food — recycled, more effectively than the manner in which we’re asked to recycled our refuse today. By entering the food chain they actually solved two problems at once. But if this is not seen as a viable method of dealing with the old, (beating and starving them being preferred as more humane) then some other way has to be found, as the numbers of the old continue to increase.

In all fairness, it is not very easy for the sons and daughters who have to care for old parents. Leaving aside the affluent, it is a terrible effort to keep a job, or whatever employment they have, and then return to a small tenement and cope with growing children and parents who, like as not, are ailing. Nothing, naturally, can excuse ill treatment of the old, but there are instances where the old become querulous and demanding and that leads to ugly situations. Situations in which, inevitably, the old suffer.

But it is a problem and it will not do to paint the adult children as totally villainous. Small incomes, tiny apartments, growing children, growing responsibilities are all factors that compound the problem and make it difficult to get out of — in any easily perceived manner. Nor will it do to look at the villages, where the old have a place in the community, and receive a degree of care that is considered as natural as care of the young.

The reason why villages cannot serve as examples for the urban families is simply because in villages there is space. Space binds, and the lack of space tears apart. Poverty is a secondary factor reflecting more on the quality of care. It is space that gives rise to ceremonies of innocence; to rituals and social observances. There is, of course, much that is cruel as well; one isn’t trying to romanticise village society. But, taken across the board, the old have a place there that they are increasingly being denied in cities and towns.

Perhaps it’s time for us to think of an institution that, in earlier years, we considered one of the most distasteful features of western societies — old age homes. We need to accept the fact that the way the old have to live in many families is beginning to break family ties, and if the old were taken to places where they retained their dignity and were cared for, the ties of affection may well remain intact. Our planners need to factor this into our plans for the social sector — and it would be wise to start doing it now. What may, on the face of it, appear to be a cold, even cruel provision may, in time, actually restore the ceremony of innocence we are now in danger of losing.