And Then There Were None

Celebrate the colourful festive season of Navaratri, Dussehra and Deepavali with full fervour and gaiety. For life itself is nothing short of a celebration, writes Nagesh Alai.

A couple recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in splendid solitude or isolation, if one may. A feel-good factor impelled them to go to an uncrowded club for a quiet dinner and soak in the celebratory spirit. Impromptu, they had called one of their long-standing friends whom they had not met for a long time, for dinner with an intent to reconnect and revive their old bond. He was one of the few who always made it a point to wish them on their wedding anniversary and birthdays. But the retirement and different life trajectories post parting from the company that they had worked in challenged their ability to stay in touch except via the ubiquitous cell that entraps all of us. Their friend was not free and that put paid to the couple’s desire for company on a milestone day.

The invariable familiarity with each other and their respective life events limited their conversations largely to inanities and the food on the plate while peppered with reminiscences about their two sons and their respective families, both of whom had migrated to another city/country. While the regular family video calls helped maintain some connect, the intimacy of familial relations is limited to the odd visits once or twice a year in their case.

The couple fondly recalled the regular family get-togethers, over the years, on every festive or social occasions and the vibrant houseful presence of siblings, parents, nephews and nieces and friends having a whale of raucous times. These were occasions that they looked forward to and lived for, besides the mundane purpose driven lives that we all meander through. Over the years, with the passage of time, the numbers at these family events kept depleting caused by a plethora of natural and practical developments of education, jobs, migrations, failing health and passage of some to eternity. The inevitabilities of life and inexorability of time force everyone to reconcile to the situation, the couple in question being no exception.

A few of the couple’s friends are in similar situations. Their respective children went abroad for higher studies and settled in the gilded cages, never to return. One of the couples has shifted to an elder care assisted living down south, in an effort towards preparedness, while in the case of another, one is busy with marketing consulting while his spouse is busy with investment management while interspersing their lives with annual visits to their son in the big apple.  A relative of the couple lost her husband to a sudden collapse eight years ago, but has been resolutely braving on with her interior design practice; she is busier than ever. She lives alone  but makes it a point to be in touch with her friends and family regularly and regularly hosts them on every festive occasion.  

An elderly person, from the marginalised section and a household help, well into her sixties and all shrivelled and hunched and alone, still works for a couple of households to sustain herself monetarily and bodily somehow. To the credit of her employers, they are empathetic and continue to engage her.

Instances of ageing farmers, migrating to cities like Mumbai and Kolkata  from states like UP and Bihar, for a living and vending fruits and vegetables to lead a respectable life are legion. Forget the surrounding squalor for them, they must be seeing lives in Mumbai or other big cities as an opportunity against the dark clouds and vicissitudes of agrarian rural lives. Many of these migrants have seen their own sons and daughters migrating to cities for employment and regular income compared to the pittance that they earn via cultivation and poor prices for their produce. Dip-stick research of slum dwellers, packed in as they are like sardines in a can, and squeezed in by teeming co-dwellers, will validate the fact that many of them are in no different situation and are home alone. The writer’s household help, living in an old chawl in the vicinity is going through the same throes of being home alone and she sees her everyday work routine as an enabler in giving some meaning to her existence. 

There will be a billion other similar instances across the globe, only the protagonists will vary. Regardless of the individual’s origin or background or financial situation or surroundings, the encircle of comity and community for every one of them will keep shrinking every year without exception and escape. What is critical is a coping mechanism that one is comfortable with, whatever it may be. A precise coping model belies definition and will be a matter of individual discovery and comfort. 

The couple celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary quite literally take every day as it comes with no planned activities. In fact, quite often the wife will ask her husband if there is any plan for the day and more often than not the husband has none, which gives her an excuse to just set out and explore the  different parts of the megapolis by riding the popular red bus that transports millions every day. Lest you wonder, the husband is a hard worker by circumstances and a lazy bone by nature; he has no qualms in just putting up his feet and reading books, which he feels is well deserved after having worked hard for half a century. 

So, cope we all must in the interregnum, called life, between germination and finality. In life, there always will be ‘and then there were none’ till such time as we become a part of the ‘none’. Agatha Christie, the master story teller, may have penned the eponymous novel, And Then There Were None, as a murder mystery much adapted to films in various languages over the years. But the title itself is a metaphor for life. Enjoy that idiom of life in the meanwhile and celebrate the colourful festive season of Navaratri, Dussehra and Deepavali with full fervour and gaiety. For life itself is nothing short of a celebration.