The gaps in our ages

Feeling closer, feeling distant

A few months ago, I met my favourite uncle and aunty. I grew up being so close to them that I often forget which one of them I am related to by blood.

It was a lazy Madras afternoon, and we had many “What happened to” and “Remember when” conversations to fill up our time. I had come to Madras for an event at a school friend’s home. On certain subjects, older people have better memories. (My own mind is a sieve, so no comparison anyway!) My uncle remembered this friend of mine and others—children they would have first met around 1987. When I told them that my friends and I would turn 50 next year, my uncle and aunt were visibly startled. Really? they said, You will be 50? 50, Suchi? We can’t believe it.

I was amused because they would always tell me anecdotes about when I was born. Surely, they knew the year of my birth? And just a few years ago, they’d noticed my greying hair, the dark circles around my eyes. But still, 50 seemed a large number to absorb for them. For a long time, I was the youngest grandchild in the family. Maybe that was it?

I was thinking later about my aunt’s age. She is around 75. That was just 25 years more than me. My young niece is about 25 years younger than me. I kept thinking about a river, and how I feel caught between fast currents and slow ones. Maybe I am currently anchored to a rock, steadying myself, and that is what middle age is. To me, as my niece grows older, she will move into more adulting concerns, and she will be carried by a fast current towards me. But I see myself as being closer to my aunt, who lives upstream. I will soon be swept by a current towards her, and this current, for some reason, seems slower. As though it does not need speed to reach across the same distance.

I currently have the privilege of having friends of all ages. The ones I spend the most time with are about 6 to 8 years younger than me. I feel their youth keenly at times, and, sometimes, not at all. Occasionally, when we are discussing something that’s tied to a specific date, the age-difference seems stark. We all rewatched DDLJ together last year. The last time I saw it in a theatre, I was halfway through college. The last time they saw it, they were barely in high school. They were children. I would never have been friends with them at that time.

In school especially, the differences between each year seemed enormous. Having a crush on a boy two classes or grades older than me seemed like the limit of my daring. Older kids and younger kids were sisters and brothers and cousins, or those they knew. They were not yet—at least for me—friends.

Adulthood is good for such things. Once you pass the phases together, regardless of whether you ticking or untick them, the differences in years seem smaller. Our concerns and interests are similar, I guess. You make friends at work, at hobby classes, on trips and at conferences. I’d guess that mine was the first generation in India to make friends online. I caught up with an online friend just recently. We’d fallen out of touch after the pandemic. She told me she was going to be 70. I had not known her age until then, it was just a vague hazarding that she was at least 5 to 10 years older than me.

Age is just a number, isn’t it? But then I’ve always had trouble with numbers; they don’t sit in my head properly. I have some mild synaesthesia which makes me ascribe strong personalities to numbers. 9 has always been evil to me, 5 a bit too clever, 7 is simply a handsome person. It doesn’t go past 9 though, so I am unable to imagine what a number like 50 would mean. I know it is significant to the outside world, so I keep repeating it, as though repetition would make it feel significant to me. I am trying not be afraid of growing older. I speak honestly when I say that, for me, it’s not about being young at heart. Even when I was younger, I didn’t feel particularly young at heart.

In some ways, I feel like the numbers are simply catching up to me. Maybe they are fish in a river, swirling around me, biting at my feet when I am not looking, and letting go when I catch the current.