Splitting Grey Hairs

Vials of nail enamel, lip pencils aplenty and bindis plastered on corners of a full-length mirror spill colour into sexagenarian Meghna Shah's one-room apartment. 'Don't expect grey eminence here,'quips the 63-year-old, 'After years of dullness, I've opted for a bright, free life!'Just last year, she walked out of a 42-year-old 'meaningless' marriage and a lavish bungalow in Delhi's posh Anand Niketan. And into merry singledom and a modest flat in humbler Kalkaji. 'How my husband ranted about me making a tamasha of our family at my old age. But I thought if not now, then when? I've always let others decide how I should live and whom I should live with. I refuse to be ashamed of wanting to live it up because people think I'm too old to want anything at all!'

Unlike Meghna, Calcutta-based Rachel Naronha, 64, hasn't been able to unburden herself of social pressures and perceptions. But like Meghna, Rachel too has realised that marriages which bind more than bond are best annulled, at whatever age. Having spent most of her life trapped in household chores and a failing marriage, Rachel spent her late forties building a career in social work. Till recently, in her sixties, she decided freedom, for her, meant more than a career. So, she entered into an arrangement with her husband that has them living on two different floors of their Ballygunge house; leading two entirely independent lives. 'It's pointless, at this age, to draw attention to oneself by moving out. Why should I anyway, I have contributed equally to raising the family. Therefore, we've worked out a system where we stay out of each other's hair and the children accept it.'

Too bad for those who don't accept, because a growing number of older couples at least in urban India aren't waiting for death to do them part. In fact, they are not waiting resignedly for death at all. Not any more than ill-matched younger couples are. The last years of life, in the last bit of the millennium, are increasingly being perceived as the time to liberate and live, not as a period to merely tolerate. Like Meghna says: 'There's a new emphasis now. Earlier it was about just 20 more years of life, so spend it somehow. Now it's about just 20 more years of life, better make the best of it!'

And women are the protagonists here, the changemakers. An entire generation of them, who devoted their lives to being homemakers and caretakers. Today they want to be themselves. At times even by themselves. It's not easy, neither for the heartstrings, nor for the pursestrings. Independence feeds on money for sustenance. And these women have rarely enjoyed either independence or personal money. So when they choose to opt out of a bad marriage, they willy-nilly choose to struggle for both. Hardly surprising then that these divorces largely aren't about decrees. Separation for the elderly often means different bedrooms, kitchens, floors of the house, even living with different offspring.

It may not necessarily be a happy story. What with marriages, relationships and intimacy all under threat in a changing world. But it isn't an entirely sad one either. It never is when the Self breaks free of a Collective of Expectations.

'We decided that 'nana and nani are supposed to stay together' couldn't be the only reason for us to continue with the pretence,'says 57-year-old Colonel (retired) Sukhadeep Bhattacharya. 'More so in times when it's common for mummy and daddy to be separate because they don't get along. Why should older people bear the weight of all your social stereotypes?'Having parted with his wife of over three decades last year, Bhattacharya now lives in Poona's Kirkee with his divorced daughter and grandchild and 'enjoys his evening drinks without the nagging and the fights'. His estranged wife has chosen to migrate to the US with their son. And it's the wife, he insists, who's keen that legal divorce proceedings are seen through. 'She wants a clean break, and I understand. At our age you want it simple and straight,'he says.

Ten years ago, says Delhi-based psychiatrist Achal Bhagat, he rarely came across senior citizens in need of counselling. Five years later, they started trickling in with problems about their children. Now, every month Bhagat has 10 to 12 new older couples coming in for marital counselling. And it's mostly the women who want to opt out of marriages which haven't ever worked: 'It's Automatic Feminism the inherent feeling in today's women, young or old, that they will be nothing but equal partners. After all, the media is rife with images of gender equality. Also because these same women increasingly find themselves advising their daughters against being underdogs; in the process they acquire a better understanding of their own needs.'

Besides, says Bhagat, the joint family that often bred relationships stronger than the husband-wife bond, has also decayed and with it have frittered away reasons other than spousal compatibility to continue with bad marriages. And social networks like the satsang and bhajan samitis have gradually been replaced by bridge clubs and kitty party circuits among others, more often than not reinforcing rather than tempering desire and individualism.

'As old friends from school who've grown up together we'd agreed that the day we stopped talking sex would be the day we'd turn old!'says 56-year-old Rupali Sawhney. 'Considering my husband and I had enjoyed no physical intimacy for years, I realised my marriage was ageing me prematurely. So, a year-and-a-half ago I quit.'Not an easy decision for this Delhi-based school-teacher with teenage children. Mostly, because she has to 'cook up socially justifiable reasons'for moving out of a 'perfectly happy marriage'into a friend's home. Also, because the change of address has brought about a drastic change in lifestyle. Always having taken money for granted, Sawhney is now trying to unlearn luxuries. 'To not have your housecoats ironed to save money...for me it's new. But then, I extend the logic and think how ridiculous it would be to continue living in a loveless marriage just so that my housecoats can be ironed!'

Still aghast, Sawhney's 62-year-old former husband, who is a businessman, fulminates: 'I don't want to be a part of the muck she's raking. She had money, career and children, what is she complaining about? At her age, my mother was immersed in bhajan-kirtan.'

But problems are not any less real because they weren't voiced earlier. Lalita Padmanabhan, in her 50s, suffers severe depressions and bouts of aggressive behaviour because of irreconcilable differences with her husband; differences she never aired before. 'Like most women of my generation, I was never allowed to work. I just moved with my husband's job transfers, caught up in household drudgery and routine raising of children. Today when I have the time to reflect, I feel my life's been a complete waste. But I have no income to live independently,'she laments. So vociferous is she with her resentment now that her husband has taken a job in distant Jalpaiguri and left her alone in their Koramangala apartment in Bangalore. 'It's only divorce I can afford. I can't bear to live with him and won't.'

Divorces indeed are adapting themselves to suit older couples. Psychiatrist Bhagat says he recently helped draw out a separation agreement between an old couple whose fights were getting unbearably bitter with age. He was getting more violent and she suicidal, till their children brought them in for counselling. 'Too much had happened by then. The only way things could be sorted out was for them to live individual lives,'says Bhagat. But being from a lower-middle class background, their children couldn't afford the cost of running two establishments. So, they delineated parts of their small flat into two parts, with separate kitchens and utensils for both. And they are more at peace for it.

Says Raj Dagur of Sanjeevini, a Delhi-based walk-in crisis intervention centre for emotional problems: 'Hailing from times immemorial that divorce, or even socially acknowledged separations, bordered on the scandalous, today's elderly are coming to terms with it. Not just as an option for their children, but also for themselves. The change agent really is social freedom. The social space to live as an individual, no matter what your age.'

In a growing number of cases, adds Dr Shilu Srinivasan, president of the Mumbai-based Dignity Foundation that works for senior citizens' welfare, a parent teams up with the children to throw the other one out. 'While counselling it becomes apparent that loneliness, estrangement, cheating always existed in the marriage and getting older hasn't helped. The differences are surfacing now camps are being formed within the family, bottled anger being expressed and it's ugly because resentment has festered so long,'she says. The conflict issue being suppressed which was so much a part of marriages a generation earlier is what renders break-ups in most relationships, says Dr Neeru Kanwar, clinical psychologist and member of the Indian Association of Family Therapy. 'Also, there's an eventual assertion of gender. Her children have grown up, they often empathise with the woman and she's come into her own and finally found her voice. All of which could only mean that she wants things changed. And considering most husbands won't change, she's even opting out on occasion.'

Jasmeet Kaur, psychotherapist and trainer who specialises in family issues, relationships and intimacy, perceives the break-ups in older marriages as a fallout of psycho-social change at both the inner and collective levels. 'Social messages say we aren't subservient to traditional husband-wife roles any more. People have more choices to be what they want to be in their marital relationships. Therefore, the balance of independence and interdependence that every marriage tries to attain is going through a real transition where people are leaning more towards their own autonomy. Since older couples have focused too much in their earlier lives on doing things jointly, now there seems to be a need to create space for the individual self.'

But director-general of Helpage India, Major General S.S. Sandhu argues that a country where old widows and lonely parents languish, very few senior citizens can afford the courage to walk out of the security of a marriage. This, not without qualifying: 'But must say, while many of the younger people who walk out of marriages don't know what they are doing, the older do.'

So long as they know what they are doing, what they want, who are we to grudge their urge to live independently ever after?

(Some names have been changed to protect identities.)