The year was 1993, and at least for the next 4-5 years during which I actively played the game, I was hard at work trying to replicate it every time I bowled. Such was the magic of The Ball of the Century. I don’t even watch cricket now, and yet, I could sense my own excitement when I showed the clip to D.
No wonder it came up in an evening with friends soon after. 40-something year olds who are still at war with the phrase ‘middle age’. We talked about Warne and how everyone was shocked – after all he was only 52. In the context of cardiovascular diseases, I think 40s are the new 60s, mostly courtesy a drastic shift in lifestyles. And that’s when it also struck me that all our celebrity crushes and role models are entering the second half, if not already well into it. In them, we see our own epochs. They are a part of us, and their age or agelessness have started defining us by holding up a now uncomfortable mirror for us. When health events happen to them, or when they pass on, or they retire (like Shahid Afridi at 18), we feel the spectre of old age. And along with that, the grip of our own mortality tightening. We’re watching the clock and conscious of time.* Or maybe it’s just me.
But let’s not get morbid. While Simone de Beauvoir called ‘elderhood’ the ‘crusher’ of humankind – with our own biology and expectations of ourselves, and society’s different manifestations of ageism, she also believed that it is an opportunity to turn to ourselves, to be more responsive to our own needs, and less obliged to other people.** And hey, we still have mid-life crises, and the thrashing around for relevance and meaning. Also, apparently, in a happiness vs age graph, the 50s are when the curve begins its upward journey towards making a smile.
But yes, the series of undulating hills that I wrote about in a post a while ago are certainly coming up. And while The Lincoln Highway is not my favourite Amor Towles book, two pages in it, when Abacus Abernathy weighs his life, were magic to me. I see no way to top that, so I’ll just leave you with it.
What an extraordinary passage were those first years in Manhattan! When Abacus experienced firsthand the omnivalent, omnipresent, omnifarious widening that is life.
Or rather, that is the first half of life.
When did the change come? When did the outer limits of his world turn their corner and begin moving inexorably toward their terminal convergence?
Abacus had no idea.
Not long after his children had grown and moved on, perhaps. Certainly, before Polly died. Yes, it was likely at some point during those years when, without their knowing it, her time had begun to run out while he, in the so-called prime of life, went blithely on about his business.
The manner in which the convergence takes you by surprise, that is the cruelest part. And yet it’s almost unavoidable. For at the moment when the turning begins, the two opposing rays of your life are so far from each other you could never discern the change in their trajectory. And in those first years, as the rays begin to angle inward, the world still seems so open, you have no reason to suspect its diminishment.
But one day, one day years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains before you begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.
In those golden years of his late twenties, shortly after arriving in New York, Abacus had made three great friends. Two men and a woman, they were the hardiest of companions, fellow adventurers of the mind and spirit. Side by side, they had navigated the waters of life with a reasonable diligence and their fair share of aplomb. But in just these last five years, the first had been stricken with blindness, the second with emphysema, and the third with dementia. How varied their lot, you might be tempted to observe: the loss of sight, of lung capacity, of cognition.
When in reality, the three infirmities amount to the same sentence: the narrowing of life at the far tip of the diamond. Step by step, the stomping grounds of these friends had shrunk from the world itself, to their country, to their county, to their home, and finally to a single room where, blinded, breathless, forgetful, they are destined to end their days.Though Abacus had no infirmities to speak of yet, his world too was shrinking. He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb.
*Trivia: It has been a decade since Gangnam Style became a phenomenon, two decades since Sourav briefly became Salman at Lord’s, 25 years since Diana died, Arundhati Roy got a Booker, the release of Hanson’s mmBop, Aqua’s Barbie Girl, and Titanic, and 30 years since Basic Instinct released, and Babri Masjid was demolished.
** Simone de Beauvoir recommends we fight for ourselves as we age
