He was reminiscing about his boyhood days in his village. They were three brothers and they worked together in collecting the harvest from the fields. Their mother would wake them up early in the morning and hustled them out to collect the grain into silos and stack them on the attic. The grain (kundulu?) was soaked in a pit full of water and watch it bloat into a dome. Then they would collect it into bags and shift them to the roof f the house. There it was spread to dry under the sun. The brothers arranged themselves in a line much like the workers at a building construction unit. Each would pass the other a bag until the last deposited it on the roof. This way they shifted the entire grain from the floor to the roof, one on the floor, the other somewhere halfway up on a ledge above a window and the last one on the roof.
He spoke of how he and his brothers helped their mother, how thick were the family ties, how good were the values then. He grew bitter as he reminisced more and began to attack the modern times which were bereft of those values, that respect for elders was utterly lacking, how the people became more selfish, self-centered and neglected the parents. He was perhaps betraying his own situation, but none of us mentioned it. He looked at me as he spoke, for he was sitting right across me.
I said that tradition, which was our inheritance, was much like the Roman god Janus, with one side of his face good and the other bad. You keep the good and throw the bad out. This remark somehow angered the brother and he fumed some more about declining morals and concern only with the self. There is no thought of God at all, he complained, his voice rising and his tone was bitter and angry. He got up from the chair, as if my very presence infuriated him. He found a chair a little away from me, far to my right and continued his ravings about how the society is changing for the worse. I was a little puzzled at his reaction, not sure ifi was the cause of it.
He said that people are now trying to step on the sun - at this my uncle and I suppressed laughter - and what arrogance, he says, that man should even think of it. I wanted to ask if man is not already walking on the earth and what is wrong in trying to do the same on another planet. I was not sure if he thought sun also was like another planet, or did he confuse with the moon? No. Sun and moon were the celestial beings and stepping on one I suppose gave us the arrogance to think of stepping on the other, which according to him was a sacrilege.
I did not pursue the topic. I saw clearly that the man was beyond himself with rage (at what precisely I could not gather). Another old man kept nodding at him as if he concurred, but it seemed to me more to pacify the irate brother. I kept my thoughts to myself and presently some activity of the funeral started and the man fell silent.
I wondered later why at that age - he was about seventy two or three, I was told - why such a person would grow bitter after having seen so much of life. My uncle, much older, nudging eighty, never showed any bitterness, although he suffered from the usual old age ailments, although he had lost his two sons to some disease, although he retired as a clerk and a pensioner. Why, why was that brother so bitter? What makes a man so bitter at the end of it all?
Is not the present handed down by those who lived in the past? Is it not the world that the young now live in, the very same world left by the self-righteous old men? The world that they shaped by their traditions, by their intelligence, by their beliefs and dogmas, by their successes and mistakes? Why does every generation decry the degeneracy that is present in their succeeding one? Is not the seed of degeneracy sown by the very same people who blithely disown it and point a finger of accusation at the present generation?
I think that the old are afraid that the beliefs they had held so dearly for decades are now exposed as sham, as hollow, as ineffectual in the tumultuous growth of the present, in its racy lifestyle, in its audacious inventions and discoveries? What exactly is the grouse of the old? Why are they always harping on values that they had lived by? Does it never occur to them that something was definitely wrong with those values that they didn't stand the test of time?
Man has become more selfish, the old man had said. Nothing could be further from the truth. But if the values that they had lived by were so great, then how did this situation come to pass? Evil influence, of course, the rise of the western culture, its incursions into the highly civilized societies of the east, and then the values crumbled, science grew and with it the many benefits and more opportunities to become rich, to come out of the rustic life of high morals...look at the young, he cried, look at them, they only think of themselves, they have no respect for the elders, for their parents. And so on and so on...the arguments go on and nothing comes from it. At the end there is only bitterness. An indigestion in the mind.
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