Old age can be both a blessing and a curse. You can be an old man dreaming dreams. You can be an old man like an empty dustbin waiting to be filled with whatever is thrown into it. You can be old and yet courageous like Socrates openly challenging the garbled truths. Ahmad Khan Kharral was advanced in years when he organised a resistance movement against the British colonialists in 1857 in Punjab.

The physical aspect of getting old may be painfully sad with the lurking fear of what will make one an irretrievable part of nothingness wherefrom one came. More agonising is the fact that doing the things one wants to do is prevented by enfeebled body causing unbearable angst.

Baba Farid, the pioneer of the Punjabi literary tradition who had a long life, expressed the human feelings in such an unmanageable situation in a couplet full of pathos. “Farid, with these small legs of mine I traversed deserts and mountains/but today my water-pot over there seems to be hundreds of miles away.”

Forced to be away from the scene of ever-flowing waters of life while one is alive is an existential predicament most of humans are condemned to be in at some point of time. Seeing the continuous disappearances of the things which are taken for granted is an unstoppable process that makes one a cipher in a fast appearing dark void. “You have grown old with your teeth spaced apart/you rise in the morning and gapingly look for those who departed last evening,” says Shah Hussain, the poet-saint of 16th century.

An eerie sense of aloofness is another feature of growing old. You are not there while physically being there in the midst of things. You cannot relate to the things you are otherwise related to. Here and now lose meanings. Remembrances of the things past swarm in and out of your mental space in such a manner that the past becomes the present and the future gets obliquely linked with the past ruptured by muted rumbling of what is present.

Remember T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock? Ageing Prufrock in the company of a lady sees and hears what happens around: “In the room women come and go talking of Michelangelo”. Still he remains immersed in his subjective space because of his opaque relationship with time, struggling “To prepare the face to meet the faces that you meet.” Time and age are what makes his vision communicably incommunicable. “Time for you and time for me/and yet time for a hundred indecisions/and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea.”

When hair turn grey one’s relationship with time undergoes complex changes that redefine interpersonal relations and social interaction. Awareness of the fact of having lived long gives one a sneaking sense of a triumphal march that rightly or wrongly demands respect bordering on veneration. With the end in sight being loved is what one loves most. Of all the passions love mediated through tangible and intangible connections is an emotional and psychic force locked in a biological mystery that makes you not only a desirable being but also connects you with the world; social and natural.

The elderly are accorded respect in almost all societies and cultures. But the need of being loved elicits different responses in different societies driven by culture-specific values born of dissimilar historical conditions. Loving the ones weighed down by time is a demanding task as most of us are rarely tempted to love a being or thing that seems to have no future.

Urgency of being loved can make the old vulnerable to emotional manipulation. King Salwan, an ancient ruler of Punjab who sired two celebrated heroes of ancient times, Puran Bhagat and Raja Rasalu, marries a young woman Luna in his old age. Luna tries to seduce young prince Puran, her step-son and fails. In a desperate bid to cover up and take revenge she accuses Puran of sexually assaulting her. The aged king taking the accusation as a mark of her young wife’s love for him orders the execution of his son in a fit of fury. The executioners overwhelmed by compassion for the young prince dump him in a dried up well. After being rescued by a Guru of Nath Order he learns the ways of mystic life. Having learnt enough and gifted with healing power he returns home not to claim the throne but to heal his ailing parents.

Raja Salwan was fooled by his young wife’s false expression of love and King Lear was fooled by two of his three young daughters with their flattery masked as love. After having disposed of his estate among the two of his daughters, the guileless king discovers the reality of the situation and goes mad. The need of being loved in old age makes both the kings lose their power of judgment. Lear, raving and ranting, does what an old man, deceived and disgraced, can do: throwing questions to the wind. “Is man no more than this?” Of course man can be more than this provided he allows his experience to be his guide rather than the walking-stick of his vacuous emotions.

Experience is fallout of ageing. And experience, existential and social, is an authentic source of wisdom usually associated with old age. The irony is that the wisdom of the old though glorified is usually sought as a token of respect for a cultural nuance. Paying little heed to the words of the old is not a new phenomenon as it is usually made out to be. It is natural for the young to think of the old as flotsam and jetsam of the past while they in their opinion embody what lies in the present and the future; revealed and unrevealed. They, bubbling with raw energy, tend to forget that without the past there could be no present and future. Life is continuity in which indistinguishably intermingled surges of what was and what is, move toward what would be.

Ageing has a contradictory nature. It can make you as much sagacious as senile due to the interplay of physical and psychological forces working in a biological process. Sagacity and senility are a dialectical outcome of ageing, reflecting the unity of the opposites that sustains life. But aging does not make the world lose its magical pull with a lure of serendipitous gifts that lie ahead whether you are a sage or a senile. “Almost everyone has loved the world when on him two clods of earth are hurled,” says a modern bard. — soofi01@hotmail.com