Old is not gold

Age is but a number that plays hide and seek with the viewer who tries to guess the age of a person. Discussion on one’s age is generally avoided and frowned upon. I heard a person with a dog on a leash declare, “Roxy is two years old but very mature” but when asked his own age, he whispered, “Ahem, around forty plus”, when he may have been well over fifty.

It is a well-known piece of advice not to ask a woman her age. A woman is always as young as she looks but a man is as young as he feels, no matter how old he may look. Why this discrimination? But irrespective of gender, the bias towards growing old and the fear of being treated as old is common to all. The present generation of quinquagenarians and sexagenarians are especially smitten by this phobia.

As such, beauty and skin care product companies are a happy lot. If women worry about grey strands on the crown, the men need to worry about the crop over the lip too. Many a time, this crop gets the chop to make the face look younger. I fail to recognise well-known faces when meeting after a hiatus. The reason is the missing bush over the lip which transforms a male countenance like nothing else can hope to do. Adolescents in the family can hardly control their mirth when they encounter such sights, as the moustache would have been a sine qua non of that person’s face.

The person with the new look does not seem less embarrassed either as he certainly behaves as if he is missing something, with his hand caressing the space over the upper lip every now and then. So the next best idea is to give it a shade of artificial black in stark contrast with the aging lines on the face. The effect is there for all to see and wonder.

So hats off to the few quadragenarians of today who sport grey with abandon and treat it as a matter of pride and self-respect. I remember, as a schoolgirl I had donned the role of a middle-aged mother for a skit and it was with pride that I had sprinkled chalk dust on my crown. But when middle age did embrace me, a strong prod by a senior cousin to paint my few grey streaks black to match my as-yet-unwrinkled face startled me.

I remember my maid Lakshmi who had not a single strand of grey at 60 plus and borrowed chalk powder while posing for a photo to set forth her claim to old age pension. A family friend, 75 looking like 65, recently said he refused to divulge his true age to his future daughter-in-law, lest she panic about taking care of him soon after marriage. Age is best silently recorded on documents.