It looks like rain in the hills in front, the lake is a deep, enchanting green, the sun hasn’t broken through the clouds the whole day, the air is cool, and I’m contemplating retirement. And to think last night I was in Delhi at a lounge party where the music was wild, the party was in full swing, and someone seemed to have removed all the furniture so you could stand and drink, or you could dance, which was alright since you couldn’t talk over the music anyway.
It seems these last few months we’ve been going to a lot of similar parties, with similar looking people, in similar looking clothes, listening to similar music, having similar-looking drinks and similar bite-sized food and no dinner. It was my wife who noticed it first. “Did you see,” she asked, “we’re always the oldest people at these parties?” “It isn’t true,” I protested, “you know how our generation is, they all colour their hair, go gymming, and wear tight dresses and Ts, and with the lights so low, you only think they’re young.”
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but my wife is usually right in all such matters. My first inkling that she might be spot on again was when, in a lull during the conversation, I could hear snatches of conversation — about upcoming nuptials, pre-school admissions, the first horror of acquiring spectacles. “Too right,”
I agreed with my wife, “they’re by far younger than us.”
The frequency of such encounters seemed to show no sign of abating. Were we the only oldies who hung out with gen.nxt? Or were we oldies clinging on to visions of a lost youth? What did the youngsters think of us? Were we exotics at their parties? Or an embarrassment? “But they call us,” I explained to my wife, when she said she was concerned we were spending more time with people our children’s age than our own friends. “We can always say no,” she said sagely.
Not for the first time, I disagreed with her. “What’s wrong having a few friends a couple of years younger than us?” My wife held up a mirror to my face. “Look at that top of white hair,” she pointed out, needlessly cruelly — it’s an inherited gene that’s the cause of it, and not age — “there’s no one else with anything other than dark hair where we go.” That much, it must be said, was true, but age, I said to her, is only a number. Besides, if it didn’t matter to them, or to us, why were we talking about it?
Last night, though I went out alone since my wife was away, holidaying with our daughter. And it struck me that the people I was with had never seen any Crazy Boy movies, hadn’t ever heard Creedence Clearwater Revival records, and probably think Woodstock is the name of a school. I was glad therefore that for a few days my son and I would be away in Bhimtal, away from the city and its madness. Where the only thing that seems to matter to guests where we’re staying is defining the exact colour of the lake: Is it emerald green? Er, no. Olive green? Definitely not. Aquamarine? That would be almost blue. But we’re thinking about it, and we’ll get there in the end.
Meanwhile, I think it might be an idea to look for a place to buy somewhere by the lake’s edge, somewhere to escape to when Delhi gets too much and the pressure builds up, and my wife and I don’t want to be the oldest couple at a party any more. Not quite sanyas, no, but I must remember to check the availability of the local medical facilities…
