Growing Old With You

Two stories.

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They got married at 18. It was a marriage based on love. But he outlives her to his seventies. She was due to get her hearing aid on May 8th to ease the ringing in her ears. Since each machine is uniquely designed, it takes some time to make. In the quietest hour of the night, she could not take the ringing much longer. She slips out of bed, leaving  her husband to find her hung by the neck from the rafters in the morning. She’s cold at seventy and a little too soon.

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They lived in the middle of paddyfields, elevated by rocks. A tiny concrete path led to the tiny three bedroom bungalow. Trees bearing fruits and flowers lined the path. In the summer the mulberry trees would be stripped clean of its fruits by tiny hands, leaving dark purple stains on chins and fingers. All along the perimeter of the house lies flowering shrubs against more fruit trees – exotic and strange – which leads to the backyard.

The backyard is the best part. Orchids stacked on the far left corner followed by a small chicken coop stacked on top of one another. The pigeons coo and purr in the cages next to them, balancing on top of wooden planks which overlooks a tiny fish pond. Next to it lies shelves of cacti, bulbous and thriving in their corner. Lush tangerine shrubs nestles in between bright red chilli padi shrubs. A black plastic container filled to the brim with cold mountain water. Water plants flourish inside hiding guppies, tetras, swordtails and platies. A television has been dismanteled and its convex lens embedded in the concrete divider to make more aquariums filled with fishes. Those shelves once held prized bettas – siamese fighting fish. Hanging plants, green and flower tumbles from the back porch. Cold tiles, bare feet. We’d sit here breathing in the mountain air, fondling the leaves and dipping our hands into the cool water.A ll of this secret encased in a wall of vines and creepers.

I remember the garden best. It changes with every visit but it remains the same. With the passing of time, i thought its inhabitants would remain the same: perennially green and impervious to ravages of age. My granduncle and grandaunt lives here. Their living room never changes. The same paintings dot the living room alongside cross-stitch projects framed proudly alongside them. The same patchwork cushions in faded jewel reds and greens are strewn across the daybed where the babies come to sit indoors. The same biscuits and snacks glimmer inside their crystal homes. The same 13 inch colour television sit at the corner, unmoved, as though it had grown from the ground like a tree. There are no new photo collages, just the same ones from the 80s and the 90s.

She fell in the bathroom, breaking her hips. Slippery tiles and a stroke does not make a very good match. She could not move about the garden anymore. When I saw her, she was lying in a different bed in a different house with its walls bedecked in canvas paintings that belong to her son, the painter.

Old people shrink. You could scoop her in your arms, if you wanted, except she’d probably could still whack you with her arm. Hard. These people are resilient: you had to be to survive. He travels back and forth, across the province, pushing seventy years behind. Her temper was legendary in those last months and so is his patience. When I met her, she had resigned to her death bed. You could see it in her eyes. They looked different with all the flesh of youth sucked out of her skeletal frame.

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What would it be like to grow old? I don’t mean to grow up like the full fledged adults that we are. I mean what would it be like to grow really really old? We’ve worked this hard for pension in the hope that one day we’d be old enough to be decrepit. There’s just living left and dying next. How does she feel? How does he feel? What’s that like?

Can you imagine it?