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4 Becoming an Elder-Abode Member One early afternoon I was greeted in the front lobby of an elegant old Kolkata club by Monisha Mashi (“Aunt” Monisha). She was dressed in a fine embroidered blue-and-white cotton summer sari with matching blouse that complemented her jet-black hair, cut stylishly short in a fashion popular among modern professional women. With her usual breezy energy, she led me to the club’s verandah. Although the early spring weather was already beginning to turn too hot, we chose to sit outside, and Monisha Mashi promptly ordered two beers and ma∆ala (spiced) peanuts for us both. I was surprised and delighted: this would be my first beer on this five-month fieldwork trip, and it seemed particularly fun and unanticipated to share it with an old-age-home resident who had invited me to join her at one of her favorite clubs.1 After our beer and peanuts came a very British-style lunch of fish and chips followed by custard. Monisha Mashi talked animatedly about the philosophy surrounding her choice to move into a residence for elders. “People ask me, ‘Huh?! Staying in an old age home? No! Don’t joke! You are so happy-go-lucky!’” alluding to the prevailing public sentiment that old-age-home living is for the despondent and rejected. “But I say, ‘I have everything.’ We sold our house and car: I came there [to the home] in the midst of full health. I don’t own anything any more. But I received everything: everything out of nothing. The idea of vanaprastha [“forest-dwelling,” the third life phase and the beginnings of older age]2 is to forsake everything, and then to enjoy—to enjoy your life through abandonment [tyag]. I have everything I need living there!” It had been Monisha Mashi’s inspiration to move into Milan Tirtha, one of the finest old age homes in the region, run by the prominent, wellrespected Peerless business corporation as one of their corporate social responsibility projects, and situated appealingly on the banks of a branch of the holy Ganges River in north Kolkata. She had persuaded her husband to make the move with her several years earlier while he was still alive. Their two daughters were grown and had moved abroad, he had retired, 1-LAMB_pages_i-132.indd 90 5/12/09 3:47:12 PM  Becoming an Elder-Abode Member and she no longer wanted to be burdened with house, car, driver, servants, and all the trappings of upper-middle-class domestic and society life. Such an attitude of rejecting worldly goods toward the end of life is one with long roots in India.3 When going to look at the home, she had found a studio apartment, then unused, in a separate, free-standing building on the home’s grounds, above the guest quarters set up for the residents’ visiting kin. The apartment boasted beautiful, large southwest-facing windows overlooking the river through which the afternoon and evening sunlight poured. Monisha Mashi persuaded the management to let her and her husband move in there, paying extra fees, for she found the ordinary residents ’ quarters less appealing—smaller single and double rooms without kitchen facilities, arranged in three stories along open-air corridors. I had first met Monisha Mashi in her elder-abode apartment when I was on an overnight stay at the home with my two daughters. We were just about to settle in for the evening when the night manager knocked on our door to announce that there was someone upstairs who wanted to meet me. I climbed the stairs curiously, having been unaware that anyone lived up there, and I opened the door to Monisha Mashi’s apartment, tastefully decorated with the kinds of colorful ethnic Indian embroidered fabrics and mirrored pillows popular among the educated elite, with books scattered everywhere and the computer on. And now about a week later we were enjoying lunch and conversation together. “People say, ‘Oh, you must feel so lonely,’” Monisha Mashi related. “But I never feel alone or lonely. I say, ‘I am living with myself. You are the best person to cure your own woes, through introspection. . . .’ The other Milan Tirtha residents say, ‘Oh, we are all obsolete—forsaken by our families.’ I say, ‘Alone perhaps, not lonely. If you want, you can keep yourself busy.’” At age seventy, Monisha Mashi herself was an impressively active woman, not only through introspection. She spent several...

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