Fastforwarded Into Fogeyhood

My daughter once pronounced twenty as the cutoff age for someone who is old.

By this count, I've been old for most of my life. Yet I brazenly pass birthday after birthday feeling not a bit older, let alone old. Sprightly as I may feel, when I talk to my children about my childhood, I come across as being positively ancient.

I thought you became an old fogey after you face looks like scratchpaper scribbled with all the wrinkles life throws your way. You walk slowly. You know you’re not far from the end of your journey, and you’re in no hurry to get their fast, so it’s just as well your knees force you to go slow. You wear clothes that belong to a different decade. And when you describe your life, people chuckle as though what you said could hardly be true.

Well, the last of the three hallmarks of fogeyhood holds true for me, so I guess I've entered fogeydom in my forties.

Ancient is what my grandmother seemed to me when she talked about the way things were when she was little. She was probably in her 50s then, and yet everything she said sounded so faraway, practically historical.

Back when I was in primary school, about my daughter's age, 10 paise could buy a few mouthfuls of of paani puri on the sidewalk in my neighborhood, or a puri with a little piece of potato tucked in at our school tuck shop. Getting 25 paise back then made me feel positively rich. If my grandmother saw us trying to haggle up the ten paise to something more generous, she would shake her head and tell us how worthless money had become. Why, when she was young, she could buy a princely amount of practically for that 10 paise.

The denomination she mostly got by with when she was young, the pai, was a museum coin for us. Now, I feel ancient when I give spending money to my children. A rupee buys just a little piece of candy. Ten rupees seems barely adequate but will buy a bag of junk food. I usually end up shelling out much, much more. When I tell my children how getting a rupee was rare treat, their faces flicker with pity and disbelief. (And hey, where’s the reverence?)

"Back when I was little" was just three or four decades away, and does indeed seem far away. It's not just the money. It's describing how I lived.

It's hard for my children to imagine I had no television until middle school, and it was black and white. That when we watched televised cricket test matches, we would crank up the cricket commentary on the radio and mute the television because television was so amateurishly awkward.

It is hard for them to believe that one of my errands constituted knocking on a neighbor's door to ask if she could please chill in her fridge for a few hours the bowl of vanilla custard my mother had sent me with.

Or that we could get power outages that could go on for half a day, and that I would do my homework by the light of a kerosene lantern that was replaced by a car-battery powered tubelight when I was in high school.

That I preferred to use a kitchen knife to sharpen pencils because domestically made sharpeners were so useless and imported ones too expensive. That the first time I finished a whole candy bar by myself was after I went to college in the United States. I'd always shared them with family or friends in India. Or that I once fell off the back of a scooter as it sped down a main road in Jamshedpur, but still didn't get run over because there were hardly any other cars on the road back then.

My children find it quaint that my family used a rotary telephone, which my father still owns. Once, I tried to describe to them what a cross-connection was, and how hilarious these muddled conversations, with strangers shouting faintly in the background, could be. I felt like a time traveller, waving my arms, over-explaining everything, and still getting nowhere: Why my siblings and I used to find these so amusing that we would shout out and call everyone over to cup their hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and listen, how we’d grab the receiver in turns and laugh at what was cutting-edge eavesdropping in my time. How strange it is for them to imagine that we used to book long distance calls ahead, and that telegrams were considered speedy because they arrived in a day.

Then I was thinking today that when I was little, our father and uncles wore trousers most of the time, but most of my older male relatives wore dhotis. I remember my grandfather pleating his crisp, white dhoti and patting the folds down as he sang hymns. There was a whole array of clothes that generation of middle-class shopkeepers and traders wore daily that their children, my father's generation - the westernized young - discontinued wearing. Hand-made slippers. Tailored undershirts in super-thin cotton, with a secret pocket over abdomen or chest to carry cash from the shop. I remember thinking how stylish those garments were, even though they looked dated to us children. Now, they're practically historical for urban Indians.

We live in times when everything gets improved, updated, upgraded moments after it is created. Messages to loved ones reach a split second of being sent. Our children write with dancing thumbs, a digit that clearly was a silent valet to the forefinger in our days.

Amazing as all this seems to us, it’s all going to seem clunky and ancient to our children’s children.

So I suppose it is a just reward, for living in such fast times, that we get to become fogeys before we’ve even wriggled out of middle age.

I felt really grown-up, with the burden of the world on my shoulders, when I turned 20. I've had more birthdays since and have enjoyed each without feeling old. Along the way, I've collected crowns on my teeth and reading glasses, but I've never ever felt that I've become old. The only time I feel old as a stagecoach standing next to a convertible is when I see my children's faces when I tell them about my childhood.