The LIves of the Elderly & Friends

Our Landlord and Landlady

Our landlord and landlady lived on the ground floor in our first apartment – very old and practically tied to the house. They used to get “Meals on Wheels' daily, perhaps except for once a week, when they must have eaten leftovers or sandwiches. While living at this apartment, we often helped them with her shopping needs – she otherwise went with a friend. Her husband who was a bit older than her early 80s, was almost senile and could do nothing. We generally took their list too when we went grocery shopping and occasionally checked upon them to see if they were ok.

This was the first time we had seen for ourselves the lonely limited life of the elderly in the USA, and it was really barren. Another view that we got was when we went on our foreign students' Thanksgiving holiday trip when a group of us were taken to visit an old lady in a nearby town. She was eagerly waiting for her only son, who had recently remarried, with her new daughter-in-law too perhaps, and finally he did turn up alone and to her disappointment, announced he could only stay for a few hours as he had some work! It did not look much of a Thanksgiving for her. Nor did we savour much of its togetherness that visit, as she handed out only a cup of soup that we two, as vegetarians, could not taste anyway.

We went on many such trips the first year or so. One included a number of interesting places in the South, Georgia, South Carolina etc. Happening to meet an octogenarian woman rejoining the university for her basic degree on one occasion really thrilled me! On the same trip, we gawked at the Smoky Mountain caves, with their stalagmites and stalactites [am sure you are aware that when the mites go up, the tites [tights] come down!]. Some of these were quite huge and the caves were meandering and fascinating. So many shapes and colours the mites and tites seemed to have!

Despite our avidly soaking in all these new and rich experiences, these trips also brought home to us the problems of being veggies in the USA at that time. Mostly, the group was taken to a college or university canteen, and the only edible dishes for us were bread, salads, cottage cheese and jello [not vegetarian, for sure, but we were used to eating it]. Not one dash of honest to goodness spicy ingredient in any of these! We felt almost nauseated by the thought of yet another go at this food. Hunting in local shops was not productive either. No pickles or hot sauces, not even Tabasco! You can be sure we did not forget our own stock of pickles and podis [spiced powders to mix with rice etc.] on our trips after the first one.

Our Host Family

The host family institution in US universities is a most welcome tradition. Occasionally, the host family and the foreign student may not hit off together, but I have not heard of any major disasters. Our family, the Steinbecks, became good friends. Alan was in the University Publishing dept., while Cecile too worked –I think in the foreign student section. We quite often spent an evening with them and their young children, or had a meal at their place of a weekend. One such meal, Cecile produced triumphantly a veg casserole, explaining she had it in the deep freezer waiting for us for the past several months! I was amused – no Indian would admit this even if they did thaw out any food frozen even for a day, to serve guests . Anyway it tasted fine, and since then, I too have often frozen leftovers and served them up both for family and company.

One another occasion, I was chatting with Cecile in the kitchen while she busy there, and she asked me about Vatsayana's Kamasutra – was it very old? I mused aloud, 'No,I do not think so; maybe about 600-700 years old, that is, around the 12th-13th century perhaps'. She burst out laughing, ' Now that shows the difference in our time perspectives. Our country itself is only two hundred odd years old and anything near a hundred years is old, really old, and here you said so casually, even 6 centuries back was not!'