Today I took a new route on my walk and came upon an old-age care home. It was a neat block of lovely fresh flats tastefully built in the middle of a green carpet of grass. The view was captivating and the lovely gardens surrounding it forced me to stop and take a second look. The curtains were flung open and the colours radiating out was not only picturesque but had a strange attractiveness with a welcoming fragrance. As I began to resume my walk, it almost felt that I was being invited in to participate in the life that was happening behind those double glazed windows. I watched some of the elderly crossing rooms on walkers, while others seated, watching the telly. Some windows led into private quarters while others into community areas with settees and long dining areas. As I continued to peep in (probably I shouldn’t have), the place looked merry with vibrant colours, Sky entertainment, great food on the table, fun, laughter and friendships. As the home passed out of my peripheral vision, I glanced back one last time. This time I was looking right into the very last window of the very last room and suddenly life went into slow-motion. An attendant was helping an elderly lady get to her bed. She had one of the most beautiful angelic smiles I have ever seen and it seemed she was looking right at me. As the attendant was gently nudging her and as her body was being lifted towards the bed, her face was fixed looking through the window, looking right at me. As I turned my head away, I caught a slight wave of her hand and I walked on with a waving hand. Thoughts of birth, life and death came in unannounced and struck a conversation that I was to witness.
We come alone and leave alone – at both ends we are with strangers. That was the very first thought. If we try to remember, we have no memory either of ourselves or of those around us not just at the time of our birth but even the first few months or years. We are born among a bunch of strangers whom over time we start to call family. As the years grow by, we understand what relationships are and what father, mother, brother or sister means. Those very strangers become family. Then an uncanny thought crossed my mind – as one grows older, with the fading of memory, the family once again becomes a bunch of strangers. The memory that held those relationships together is slowly lost and along with it the relationships that it cherished. Those who held you while you were a baby are no more and those you held are not always near. Of course they do love you, and they do come in regularly to visit. They peel an apple for you and even as you bite into it, you try hard to remember, to reach out, and to connect but everything is blurred however hard you try. You seem to know them but just can’t seem to place them, to remember anything properly any longer. As they close the door behind them, you breathe out a sigh of relief. The pressure to try to remember is gone, along with them. It is better to be alone. But then you are not really alone, you are in a home full of people with whom you play games, watch telly and have your meals. But there is no pressure with this bunch of strangers, there is no strain to remember – actually, there is nothing to remember about strangers.
The similarity between childhood and old age is definitely uncanny. Another example is that at both ends, you don’t seem to have control over your own body. The body does things that even surprise you. At both stages of one’s life one is dependant and needs to be cared for and looked after. People are always around you, watching over, looking out and taking care of you. They are around you but cannot be with you. They care and do everything you want, even before you ask and they really want to get into your world, but are unable. You are bounded off and they cannot break in to your horizon. They can read your body language and sometimes it seems even your mind, but at both ends, you always remain an object of care – of loving care, but an impenetrable care.
These thoughts of birth and death made me wonder about the life lived in between. I thought about the different faces that I had seen through those fantastically colourful windows. Each one had lived a whole life with a multitude of relationships. It made me wonder about people, the ones with whom we live, and move and have our being. I wondered about those faces behind the fences– who would have shared the best days of their lives? Who did they live it with? What did they do? They all would have stories that span the time they have distanced. Stories that narrate their time, stories in which they were uniquely the lead actor – the central character. In all their actions, all their emotions, and in all their relationships, every role they played, each one lived in a uniquely personal way. But an actor does not play just one character; he plays different roles, different parts. The myth of the unified self! Maybe there are unique stylistic characteristics in an actor that identifies them irrespective of the roles they play, like Al Pacino’s coarse voice. But a good actor is able to disrobe and empty himself, undergo kénōsis before every new role, so that he becomes nothing but the role – a different person in every new role, completely immersed in the role, he does not play the role, he is the role.
But she is still the same, is she not? But how is she the same and to whom is she the same? In the different stories of her lived life, she has played different roles and different groups of people have seen a different her, so how is she the same. But then at least to herself, and in her memory, even as she draws all these different stories together into one magnanimous whole, a book with each story a chapter – but one book, however, a book that can’t be found in a library, unavailable to any other person, not even available to herself objectively. Only available to her in her memory where she is always the actor, the editor, the producer. But is that it! What happens when her memory fades! What is the use of producing stories only for oneself and for them to be burnt to ashes with the passing away of memory? There must be another way out. Would there be another way to keep these stories alive, to ensure that they have a longer shelf life than the fading memory? But then there are those fragments she leaves behind, traces of herself in co-actors, crew and the entire production team of every story. Maybe even in the lives of the bystanders who watched her perform in front of life’s camera. They all take away traces of her. I suppose we leave ourselves behind as fragments in those who share the stories with us. A story brings different characters together and each character completes the other. My part and role is necessary for the completion of the story and for the other characters to perform their roles. So in performing my role, my character, playing my part, I am giving myself to the other, to complete their role. Just as my part would be incomplete, without any sense without those myriads upon myriads of actors whose parts have completed me, and given sense to my stories, similarly my part completes each one of them. But I would not know what I leave behind, it is left behind, even as it leaves me, it becomes a part of the other, in the unique way they have appropriated and received it. It no longer is mine; it has become a stranger to me, it is partaken by the other.
All I have are my memories, my special seat in the balcony, in my own theatre, where my stories are screened, for the audience of one. Surely, a day will come when all this will not matter, these memories will fade away and all these others will come to become a bunch of strangers again. Yes, that day will probably come soon, for me and for my memory, when I am no more even to myself, and the stories become incoherent. But these stories live on. They have taken a life of their own. They transcend me even as I leave them behind, in every other person who has walked, talked and woven stories with me, together. Not just the chosen few who played roles opposite me, but the hundreds with whom she shared conversations, meetings, coffees. The thousands of bystanders who watched her and maybe never uttered a word, but they have got a bit of her, a tiny part of her that completes them. You leave behind a fragment, a special part of yourself in each of them.
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