Ageing, decline and resilience in literary imagination

Several years ago, when my grandmother sought medical help for her diminishing hearing, the young doctor dismissed her concern with a laugh. “Dear granny, haven’t you listened enough for an entire lifetime? It’s fine if you can’t hear everything at this age,” he said. For my grandmother, an eager conversationalist, the remark was far from amusing. More recently, my 90-year-old father-in-law — an avid reader troubled by weakening eyesight — was similarly shrugged off by his regular eye doctor. Not one to be easily dismissed, he went to another specialist who prescribed new glasses, restoring to him the pleasure of newspapers and evening news bulletins.

Both incidents reflect a larger reality: the tendency to trivialise the concerns of the elderly. Such attitudes shrink the already limited spaces of activity available to them. The built environment compounds this exclusion — the absence of ramps or railings, the lack of safe footpaths and technology designed without consideration for ageing users. At banks and public utility counters, the elderly often persist with face-to-face transactions not out of resistance to change, but because digital systems rarely meet their needs.

The literary imagination has long grappled with questions of ageing, decline and resilience. At a literary festival, barely three years before her death at 90, Mahasweta Devi spoke of ageing with unflinching honesty: “Was yesterday not full of a thousand possibilities? That was the life! What has changed since then? You feel weak, insipid, a dreadful, debilitating listlessness worse than malaria fever. It is far, far worse. You are alone.” Yet she tempered this starkness with resilience: “The end of strength is not quite a full stop. Nor is it the last station where you get off the train. It is simply a slowing down.”

Khushwant Singh, who delighted in the epithet “dirty old man”, captured the bluntness of ageing in his trademark candour: “Old age is not pleasant; it buggers up your life.” His novel ‘The Sunset Club’ (2010), written at 95, traces the lives of three octogenarian friends who meet daily at Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens. Raunchy yet reflective, the novel explores fading virility, friendship, and the stubborn march of time. When only one of them, Boota Singh, remains alive, he carries on their ritual alone — a quiet affirmation of endurance.

Similarly, Perumal Murugan’s debut novel ‘Eru Veyyil’ (Rising Heat) beautifully portrays urbanisation and its toll on familial ties, especially the abandonment of the elderly.

The emotional dimensions of the twilight years — loneliness, resilience, the persistence of self — have been captured in literature with varying shades of tenderness and severity. “An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick,” laments WB Yeats in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Its famous opening line, “That is no country for old men”, refers to a world that he is not at peace with.

A more positive evocation of ageing can be found in Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. Santiago, the fisherman who has not caught a fish for three months, ventures into the sea with his young apprentice. Santiago’s wisdom and patience, sharpened by experience, complement the boy’s energy. For him, catching the giant marlin is not merely a test of skill but an affirmation of dignity in old age. As Hemingway’s famous line reminds us, “A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.”

Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Coming of Age’ is one of the most influential philosophical meditations on growing old, challenging readers to confront not only society’s “crushing” of elderhood, but also the unsettling alienation from their own ageing selves. For Beauvoir, old age is a socially constructed reality shaped by exclusion and neglect. She writes: “Society inflicts so wretched a standard of living upon the vast majority of old people that it is almost tautological to say ‘old and poor’.” Yet Beauvoir also explores the existential estrangement of ageing, describing it as a confrontation with the “Other” within: “Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside — from others. We do not accept it willingly.”

Underlining a culture that is youth obsessed, actor Meryl Streep recalled how she was offered witch roles because she was considered old at 40. “But the good thing about getting older is that you find your own way... You have your own understanding of yourself, and that’s what you’re going to count on,” says Streep.

Ageing, therefore, is never a singular story. It can be indignity or dignity, loneliness or companionship, decline or renewal. What matters, finally, is whether we recognise in old age not the end of vitality but another, equally human, form of it.

— The writer is a Bengaluru-based contributor