Advancing age often does something, indeed a number of things, to the sensibilities. It makes you go easy on yourself. It induces in you a certain sort of languor, the point of which is that it tells you to stay home and shut out the rest of the world. Solitude, if you must know, is at the core of creeping age. And home is where you can safely and quietly indulge in reflections of the past, of the present you keep trying to shape to your specifications. When you reach your sixties and then go beyond them, all too often the glamour and the glitter you might have desired at a younger age are suddenly not part of your sensibilities any more. You have now arrived at a time in your life when you remember the friends who have predeceased you, who have lain in their graves for long years. The friend who died of leukaemia more than three decades ago, the colleague of whose death in unnatural circumstances you read in the newspapers long ago, the college mate who died quietly on a Ramadan night while you were away abroad are the sad stories you recall as you stay, and brood, in your room at home. That room is your world, when you are in it. It is home within that larger home, for here within its spaces is the history of the world as you have experienced it in your sixty-plus years. The books, straddling such diverse themes as literature and politics and culture and much more, constitute the idea of home for you. The world outside then becomes irrelevant. There are the books which speak to you of the various facets of German history. You pick up a work on Indira Gandhi's Emergency era, wondering why she was unable or unwilling to rein in her arrogant younger son. And then something else takes hold of you, an urge to go into a bit of literature. That again is a sign of restless ageing, for you wish to move from one idea to another. Not that ideas matter anymore, especially when your future now belongs in your past. You pick up a biographical work on Mohammd Rafi, the artiste who in his lifetime and beyond it has enchanted millions with his songs. It is a work you got hold of in Kolkata. But as you begin to read, it is thoughts of the beloved in your life, the lover-wife, which rush with wind force into the cavernous spaces of your soul. Should I buy this work? You recall your question to her at the bookshop and the cheerful response from her, in the affirmative. On this day at home, you imagine her at work thousands of miles away. You would, if you could, make your way to her again. The impediment is geography. There are the wishes, a plenitude of them, which take possession of your soul. Something of religiosity, you realize with somewhat of happiness, has come to define the heart in you. The mind travels back to the sufferings of your father, to the pains endured by your mother, to the deprivation through which your siblings grew into adulthood. Since those hard times, it has been a miracle of a life for the family. Dreams have sprouted and blossomed into reality. Somewhere up there, you reason with yourself, is a caring, loving God. Because He cares, you care about your devotion to Him. You do not forget to pray to Him. As the afternoon descends into evening, in the silence of home, you marvel at God's grace, all of which is symbolized by the young nieces and nephew who energise the home. You held them in your hands the day they were born, years ago. They are, for you, yet babies whose voices, whose laughter you need to hear every day. That is when music begins to pierce your being in all the entirety of its beauty.
Staying home does wonders to the soul. It makes you focus on all the issues confronting the world, for you are part of the world. The plight of innocent men and women thrown into limbo by the illiterate leader of the world's strongest nation appalls you. The creeping communalization of education in your country causes a roaring fire of rage to burn inside you, enough to make you question the future, to ask if there is indeed a future. But then you reassure yourself --- with so many liberal minds asserting themselves around, the future cannot go missing. As you sip the steaming tea in that familiar mug, you fall into thinking. The mind dwells on the future of the universe, on the great probability of intelligent life somewhere out there in ever-expanding time and space. As you recline against the three pillows that allow you a comfortable enough position to be able to read and think and indeed do both at the same time, your eyes fall on literary works you rushed through four decades ago. The appeal of Tolstoy's 'Resurrection' has remained. So has Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' A young colleague from your former office calls, asking you if she could see you at your workplace in the evening. It breaks your heart to disappoint her. No, she cannot see you because you do not mean to step out of home today. But she can next week. She is happy with that promise. And you go back to your thoughts. Should you take an early shower? Should you go for a nap? Indecision holds you up; and the one way you can come out of it is switch the television on, to see how much more damage has been done to people's lives on the planet. Stephen Sackur talks to Jens Stoltenberg of Nato. On Al-Jazeera, the young governor of Jakarta, the background interspersed with images of Ahmed Sukarno, speaks eloquently of his dreams, of why it is not up to him to be president someday. It is the people who will choose. Somehow you begin to admire the energy in this young man. He might, you whisper to yourself, go far in the intense landscape of politics. Home is where the heart is. And the heart is at home, in that room where you are, wishing you could remain there in the form of a recluse, ensconced in its warmth. Home is the slight chill in the breeze at the twilight cemetery holding the remains of your parents. In your sixties, home is that song you heard long winters ago and now hear it again, as it rises from the depths of your soul. Home is the soft, insistent lyricism stitched into the swansong that will be yours soon.r Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor, The Daily Observer
