I’m older than you. And if I’m to believe the overtly dressed salesman at the Louis Philippe store at Durbar Marg, a lot, lot older than you.[break]
For all of you who’ve only recently discovered Facebook, or more importantly, are allowed to stay out until after 12 pm on Friday nights, the world is a simple place of either-or decisions and wants and needs.
Existence is split in terms of converging on Sherpa Mall in the evenings to eye those pretty ladies in their summer wears.
Later, when your knees begin to give away and you have a few grey hairs, you’ll understand firsthand that life isn’t that simple, after all.
Take vintage cars, for instance. Now, when I was your age, it was simple.
There were men who fitted into those cars and those who didn’t, and nobody I knew did. Not owing or not wanting a vintage car was a small slice in the mosaic of belonging.
Then, we sneered at snooty men driving around in their unbuttoned shirts, with their Ray Bans and ridiculous hair, or whatever little was left of it.
Then I thought they were pathetic, beyond pity or comprehension. Except for my granddad who I thought was very cool and dignified.
Other than that, it was as if they’d paid a great deal of money to purchase a huge piece of attire that pointed at their waning potencies.
It was as if something had gone in their heads, some bit of wiring had gotten confused, and they had got exactly the opposite effect of the one they’d desired. When I was young, vintage cars weren’t just a discarded option; they were an utterly inexplicable faux pas.And now I’ve got my granddad’s Beetle, and I love it.
I’ve been trying to work out how it happened, to retrace my steps from the little sneer to the dilapidated key jangling, because a vintage car didn’t just slip in there.
Let me tell you what happens as you grow old, and by old, I mean older than anyone who saw Michael Jackson perform live on color television when he was alive.
You can’t touch your fingers vertically over your back – not in the run of things a great disability, but a sign that you’re over the summit and on the descent; that your body’s beginning to shut down and discard unnecessary adaptations.
And then comes the point in your life when you realize that if you ever take up exercises, it would be simply to stay the way you are for longer, that any sport you might want to do is more medicinal than competitive.
The other day, I met a nice young girl, a former beauty queen, with one of her friends, a beauty queen herself, and they both addressed me as “Sir.” That did it.
Now I’m not one of those people who give inanimate objects pet names.
It really is called a bug, which I feel is a perfect name for a mid-life crisis.
If I’m going to be bald in a few years, then I’m glad I’ve done it in a bug. And it’s fantastic. It was love at first sight, for it was a physical embodiment of everything I’m not: low, confident, self-assured.
And it was red. I also discovered the bug’s biggest asset when I turned on the key – the noise. It has a stentorian throttle, exactly the sound my life should make if it already didn’t sound mellow. Your SUV may make a noise like a symphony orchestra, and you may like it. The bug sounds better than two hot 18-year-olds screaming at a Yogeshwar Amatya concert. If I drive fast down narrow residential streets at night, something I love doing on Friday nights, the bug’s mere ecstatic proximity starts all the dozen car alarms wailing.
Also, the bug does all the other things vintage cars are supposed to do: it drinks petrol like a fish in a pond, the doors are lower than most of the curbs, so that you can park; but getting out of the car is an adventure in itself.
It incites motorcyclists to accelerate harder when I stop at zebra crossings with the windows down, my Ray Bans on, while tapping the wheels to the moody sounds of The Wallflowers.
It elicits peals of delight from schoolgirls, which is something I couldn’t have abided when I was in my 20s, but it makes me smile now that I’m almost over 30. And that’s the point. I’ll never be younger again.
But know this. I’ve never passed a birthday where I wished to call it a halt and say “I’ll stay here.” I realize I’ve got to a blissful age where I just don’t care, really and truly don’t care what 18-year-old girls think of me, or 18-year-old boys, for that matter. It’s none of my business.
Their lives are not my life. What’s more, I don’t care what my contemporaries, elders or betters, think of me, either. On the contrary, when I was young, I cared what everybody thought.
I cared what people across the street thought; and I assumed, in the way of youth, that all they thought of was me. I cared that my hair was the right length, and my jeans the right cut.
And it was hell. It was life as a continual audition.
Now I’m just grateful to still have a walk-on part, and the bug is my little award for finally having been relieved of the bondage of youth. It isn’t a style statement. Rather, it’s no sort of statement at all.
The bug’s not about clinging pathetically; it’s about being blissfully released. And you can believe that, or not, depending upon how old you think you are, because quite frankly, I don’t give a f**t.
Then again, personally, I don’t feel that old. In fact, I don’t feel anything till noon on Saturdays.
That’s when it’s time for my nap.Maslow’s Theory of Hierarchy be damned.
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