The irresistible charm of old women

What is it like to be an old female? When I try to answer that, quite naturally, I think of my two grandmothers. My maternal grandmother was a small female, barely five feet tall, with rolls of fat that made her almost as wide as she was tall. 

She tied her thin golden brown hair in a braided crown on the back of her head. She wore a thin layer of white powder on an already waxen skin. Her strict face was further marked by her thin lips that she kept tightly closed.

She used her tiny eyes to much purpose which glinted like little stars when she was pleased. She was fond of fried food and fancy necklines. She made excellent gulab jamuns and dal moth. She spent the empty afternoons of her long busy days in creating something new from coins, reeds, old bedsheets, or anything she could think of.

My paternal grandmother couldn't be more different. She was a tall woman who never wore stitched clothes, shunning them as unnecessary foreign invasion on the Indian feminine. Consequently, as she talked we could see her long sagging breasts - that almost touched her midriff - moving in tandem with her booming open voice.

Her big ears too had sagged after years of wearing heavy earrings. The wide gaping holes in the places where the earrings had been served as a reminder that not too long ago jewellery was as integral to her body as seeds are to a fruit.

The figure of a grandmother is perhaps the most evoked in literature. For example, the grandmother figures prominently in Proust's magnus opus, In Search For The Lost Time. Marcel's grandmother acts as a marker for memory, as inspiration for writing, as symbol of human frailty and fickleness.

Through depiction of Marcel's grandmother Proust comes close to describing humanity's prejudices and expectations from old women. In fact, no autobiography is complete without descriptions of our grandmothers and their influence on how we live our lives.

They are part of our first impressions in this world and it is those memories of first taste, touch and sounds that reclaim their significance as we grow older. No wonder then that even Vladimir Nabokov couldn't resist devoting a whole chapter to his old Swiss governess, Mademoiselle O, in his autobiography Speak, Memory.

I am not about to engage in yet another predictable article in praise of our grandmothers. The unfortunate result of such articles and stories is that our understanding about old women comes from men or young women who tend to see them only in relation to themselves, in largely domestic roles.

History and literature has rarely accorded an old woman a leading role. Even in Bollywood, rarely do we get to see older women as protagonists. Besides, none of these descriptions tell us how it feels to be an old woman: about the changes a human female perceives in mind and body as she ages.

In reality, there is a marked separation between how an old woman is perceived and how she feels physically and mentally. In a rare description, AS Byatt in her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession describes a feeling of the older grandmotherly body from inside.

She describes in detail how an old woman feels about her body and how sensitively she understands how the outer world perceives her. She writes: "In fact her thoughts about her own sexuality were dominated entirely by her sense of the massive, unacceptable bulk of her breasts... Beatrice Nest (the protagonist of the novel) bundled them into a drooping, grandmotherly bust-bodice and stretched over them hand-knitted jumpers decorated with lines of little teardrop shaped holes, which gaped a little, pouted a little, over her contours. In bed at night she felt them fall heavily sideways over the broad case of her ribs... She imagined herself grotesquely swollen, looked modestly down and met no one's eye. It was to these heavy rounds that she owed her reputation for motherliness, a rapid stereotypic reading which also read her round face and pink cheeks as benign."

It is only recently that older women have started to write as themselves. They have come out as people, embracing their state of mind and physicality with honesty. But it is not easy to find constructs and descriptions that accurately capture their feelings and perceptions. This is especially difficult to negotiate given the heavy expectations that come with ageing and as a female: both are beset with stereotypes and abnegations. As Susan Sontag says,

"Nothing more clearly demonstrates the vulnerability of women than the special pain, confusion, and bad faith with which they experience getting older."

No wonder then that the female attitude to ageing varies considerably. In an expanding oeuvre of writings, some view it with dread while others embrace it as a time for contemplation. A great many women are still busy in digitising their youth, buying elixirs and denying themselves the pleasures of ageing.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her exhaustive study, The Coming of Age (published in 1970, when she was 62), wrote, "Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species."

Susan Sontag in her essay "The double standard of ageing" "says, "Aging is a movable doom. It is a crisis that never exhausts itself, because the anxiety is never really used up. Being a crisis of the imagination rather than of 'real life', it has the habit of repeating itself again and again."

Now when lives are getting longer, women around the world are asking themselves just what old age signifies for a woman. In this vein, Jane Fonda talked of old age as a third act in her Tedx talk. As a third act, old age is a time to devote oneself in the matter of the mind - towards attaining that mythical spiritual salvation.

Hers is a tempting depiction. We may like to think that life, like fiction, follows the three-act structure of the Freytag pyramid: setting, conflict, resolution. In the third act, age is seen as a place for rest and recuperation, a respite from the hustle and bustle of everyday negotiations. It is a time for climactic resolutions: closing loose ends and bestowing theme on earlier episodes.

Fonda's idea is not new. Old age is riddled with anxiety for death and salvation. The first lines of Nabokov's Speak, Memory reads, "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."

Naturally, it is expected that in order to address this anxiety, "spirituality" must follow in old age. While we age, we are expected to withdraw from the physical aspects of existence and focus more and more to finding philosophical or divine answers on human condition. In Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, an ageing narrator recites, "Where is the friend I seek wherever I am going? At break of dawn, my need for him is growing."

While some women like Simone De Beauvoir may have a complex and uncomfortable relationship with ageing, indeed there are others who embraced the deepening labyrinth of epithelial tissue with much élan. Doris Lessing wrote in her autobiography, "If I had written an account of myself aged 20 it would have been a belligerent and combative document. At 30 - confident and optimistic. At 40 - full of guilt and self-justification. At 50 - confused, self-doubting. But at 60 and after something else has appeared: you begin to see your early self from a great distance. While you can put yourself back inside the 10-year-old, the 20-year-old, any time you want, you are seeing that child, that young woman, as - almost - someone else. You float away from the personal. You have received that great gift of getting older - detachment, impersonality."

Thus, according to Doris Lessing, an older self can see the follies of the impetuous reactive self of the 20s when we devote much of our time to mate search and rebelliousness. Alice Munro's fiction describes with much maturity and acceptance even difficult issues of old age such a dementia and loneliness.

There seems to be a way in which getting older in women translates to higher acceptance of being human.

It appears that the way to increased acceptance of one's state is largely dependent on the narratives of the self at various stages of life. How we grow and how our older selves perceive our own younger selves is a complex function of exposure, education, and inclination. It requires self-awareness. In Beckett's play "Krapps last tape", Krapp self reflects: "The grain, now what I wonder do I mean by that, I mean...(hesitates)... I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has - when all my dust has settled."

The relationship of age and the self is also the focus of Lynne Segal, an Australian-born British feminist, who writes in Out of Time, a book on the psychology and politics of ageing, that although the body changes and the culture evolves, the self never ages. Ageing is "not simply linear, nor... any simple discrete process when, in our minds we race around, moving seamlessly between childhood, old age, and back again." In her book, she argues that the most important thing about ageing is neither its sociology nor its biology, but the narrative of the self.

The narrative of self does not necessarily mean that older age must be concomitant with an "elevated" self. It means only that we must be allowed to look at ourselves with complete honesty. The movie Nebraska (2013) directed by Alexander Payne documents the life of an old father who is driven by one simple wish.

His child like demeanour challenges our expectations of old age. It points to the irrationality of expecting an old person to act like a mature adult when it just might be an extension of the best or the worst of us.

Through this lens, old age is best viewed as a celebration of human eccentricities in spirit and in form. The body stops trying to work against gravity, the spirit against inner faith. The person gives in to natural inclinations. Ritualism begins to mark daily life. It is kind of a homecoming for the human mind. In old age, life is not an unruly stream but a sentence laden with pregnant punctuations.

Age is thus a chronicler, not necessarily linear. Age does not appear to follow any rigid dramatic structure with rising and falling passions that answer some fundamental dramatic question. Age is also not an elevator. People just grow from one state to another, looking back at their past in a piecemeal fashion.

Being oldies is mostly an external concept; a shared cultural experience. Age, like all durations of time, offers opportunity to acquire wider experiences and deeper knowledge. When practised thus, age can be an enabler. Likewise, ageing women do not come in any preset moulds. They are wonderfully diverse like all things in nature. Artistically, they are a complex entity, not just the supporting cast.

As I write this article I think longingly of the literature of the old: of Bheeshm in Mahabharata and Tagore's elderly who are miserly or miserable for various reasons. I am inspired by Rembrandt's last self-portrait, where the aged artist looks back critically and excusably at his human life, by Raj Kapoor's bittersweet Mera Naam Joker or Guru Dutt's brooding treatise Kaagaz ke Phool.

I am immersed in the slow quaint mode of life in the essays of Mahadevi Verma. I think of my own grandfathers and grandmothers. I am reminded of a certain old lady who just stays close to her small black phone that connects her to her various children and grandchildren. Uncomfortably, I think of various old people who are being seen as burden and nuisance.

In contemporary India, the real conversation on old age is yet to begin. How easily and desperately do we wish to see our old women as grandmothers? With more and more women going to work, how much longer can we force this idea on the ageing population?

What are the avenues for older women in India for self-discovery or love or remarriage? Are we ready to let them live their own lives in their own way? Our practice of imposing domestic roles on professional women will surely suffocate women who have taken up new roles in the society. More than ever, Indian society needs to start opening itself up to new ideas of ageing and the aged.

In a utilitarian society such as ours, older women are particularly vulnerable. I wonder if in our ignorance we might be losing out on a great opportunity of learning and liberation. In today's world, where women have so many different influences, there is a need for understanding women as they age.

Our failure to acknowledge and study age is making us miss numerous stories of grit, creativity, and survival. A greater awareness will supplement the need for empathy and acceptance of old women as individuals, not just for us but also for themselves. On behalf of the older women, it is important to discover new ways of seeing as well as being seen. In this discovery also lies the key to our future: how the essentially young India will see itself when it grows old.