Six
The Maladjustment of the Bourgeoisie

in which balance, pressure, and routine anchor the experience of the old body and its degeneration, and multinational corporations take note

Civility And Contest

Meena lived in a middle-class residential colony in Pune, a city in western India. I visited her and her Maharashtrian Brahman family in 1988, before settling down in the Varanasi neighborhoods to begin my fieldwork. After offering tea to both me and a mutual friend, she began to speak of her mother-in-law.

My sas was in her last years a subject for your study. The blood supply to one part of her brain was too little for just a minute. One cell died, and this dead cell grew and grew to cover much of the brain; she became more and more disoriented. . . .

To others? We would say she's old, not doing well. Would you say to others she's crazy? We treated her well.

Record this: an example of at least one Indian family. She went to both a physician and to a psychiatrist. And they conferred with each other. The physician took care of the medical side of things. At home, she was always respected. My children always knew she was the mother of their father. They never thought she was silly. When she began going down the stairs [to get out], they didn't watch and let her fall, but took her and said—this is not the way. She was never ridiculed, never "she is sick, she is old. . . ." We had to change her, as you would a baby's diapers.

At that time, a German woman was staying with us [as a paying guest]. She asked me: "How can you put up with her? Why don't you send her to a home?" I explained that she had given much to my husband when he was young, and now we are doing the same when she needs it. But she did not understand. I asked her to leave. . . .

You know, I think it comes down to this. We have the idea that as we treat our parents, so our children will learn to treat us. So I suppose it is selfish.

Meena offered mc a story of the good daughter-in-law. The seriousness of her mother-in-law's condition, dramatized through a medicalized language invoking the wild cell growth of cancer as much as the cell death of an infarct dementia,

underscored the depth of the intergenerational commitment of "one Indian family." The Decline of the Joint Family narrative was simultaneously brought forth and dismissed: against the presumption of the Fall, I was called to witness her family as perhaps the last outpost of Indian values. Against the hegemony of the West in the figure of the German woman, Indian families were then represented as caring for their parents. And yet, in describing her mother-in-law through the training of her children, Meena again doubted the possibility of true altruism. We care for old people as our social security. In describing the brain disease of her mother-in-law, Meena identified herself with the old woman. We are, we become the old. Brain disease did not render the sas radically "other": My children do not mock their grandmother. They do not say she is old. Old age, more than brain disease, is the final gloss on the sas, but her bahu is at pains to sustain her presence as within the continuity and connectedness of kinship: "the mother of their father."

Within the house, old age was not spoken; outside, it was used to defer the blunt reality of madness. Addressing the relational context of how to talk to the neighbors and to colleagues at work, Meena framed her sas —or rather, explicitly did not frame her—in terms of being mad. "We would say she's old, not doing well. Would you say to others she's crazy?" In representing her family, Meena played with two alternatives, old age and madness. Here the cellular model she began with lost its significance. Old age, which within the family was not spoken to preserve the unbroken continuity and identity of grandparents and grandchildren, became outside the deferral of more serious claims suggesting the Bad Family.

Madness—pagalpan in Hindi, more commonly "mad" or "crazy" in English, and most commonly a language of mental imbalance or maladjustment in Hindi or English—was a frequent figure in the Varanasi middle-class colony interviews and in interviews in similar neighborhoods in Delhi and Dehradun. In this chapter I explore the particular salience of balance in these middle-class colonies, focusing at first on Ravindrapuri and Nandanagar in Varanasi, but including interviews in Delhi, Calcutta, Mussourie, and Dehradun in addition to Pune.

I was forced to cast my net widely; "You must find it difficult to research this subject; I do not think any one will talk with you about their old people," a young man from Delhi who worked for a multinational agribusiness concern had warned me. I assured him that given my experience in asking people about religious difference and about sexuality, two rather touchy topics, old age should not prove a challenge, but he was right. As I began to make acquaintances in the colonies and to be invited to people's homes to discuss my research, I found that most families remained interested in the project by redefining it: "There are many lonely and abandoned people, who have no one; this is an important work." But whenever I met the few families with old members who—according to whichever neighbor who had pointed them out—were weak-minded, senile, not right, or mad, younger family members were rarely willing to have me meet or even see the old relative. Unlike Meena, who knew me through a mutual friend and for whom I was a naive American guest rather than a professional interloper, few in the

colonies were interested in being an "example." The connections that gave me legitimacy and eased my entry into the colonies' homes—my Banaras Hindu University connections, my several years of work with prominent local physicians—simultaneously structured me as an external and official presence, one apt not only to hear bad Seva in the familial body of the old person but through an imported medical gaze to see definitively and fix blame scientifically.

Against the challenges of most homes in the colonies, where most old people I was sent by neighbors to inquire about were asleep or too old or too sick to meet me, old friends in Varanasi, Delhi, Calcutta and elsewhere had no shortage of uncles, aunts, or grandparents for me to meet. In grouping these meetings and informal fieldwork together with my interviews from Varanasi colonies, I risk enlarging my "field" far too broadly and introducing a lot of regional and structural differences, confounding variables in the language of social science. I have tried to center my discussion on common political and rhetorical structures and processes, but I alert the reader in each case as to just where the vignette and the data are drawn from. I begin with the colonies, to locate the space between the home and the world in which the familial body signifies within a local Indian middle-class cosmology.

Ravindrapuri lay just west of the old pakka mahal , half a kilometer to a kilometer's walk from the river. It consisted of large separate homes along a wide thoroughfare and numerous sequentially numbered side streets; at the southern end of the colony, then bordering two abandoned cinema halls and a slum, were several dry goods and tea shops and the carts of vegetable sellers. Vegetable sellers and other itinerant merchants went from home to home calling out their wares. The main street, two lanes with a divider, was one of the widest in the city, but neither end connected to a major traffic artery and the road, going nowhere and shadeless and unusable as common space, was usually deserted. For over a decade of my visits to Varanasi, it has been in a state of perpetual disrepair, with the politics of its forever-deferred or incompletely done paving shifting. The layout of Ravindrapuri was as much an iconic sign of its prestige and wealth and an index of its lack of community consensus and common purpose as a geography relating it to the rest of city. Residents of the adjoining slum, in contrast, used their franchise to construct a common "vote bank" in electoral appeals for basic resources.

Nandanagar hugged the great semicircular rim of Banaras Hindu University midway along its span, five kilometers south of the city proper. Less prepossessing than Ravindrapuri, its large individual homes were connected by several rutted dirt roads. It was smaller, more suburban, and more closely knit than Ravindrapuri. During the morning of the spring festival of Holi, groups of men, of women, of young men and boys, and of young women and girls from the colony gathered together, each traveling from house to house for Holi sweets and the spraying of colored water and lampblack on each other. Nandanagar's celebration was more controlled than the raucous color play and sexually explicit processions of gangs of young, intoxicated men in the city proper.^[1] After the exchange of

sweets and color, neighborhood residents made their way to an empty lot at one end of the colony. Filled with scrub and leftover building materials, the lot was transformed once a year into the neighborhood commons, the site of a bonfire for the holiday.

One colony resident, a university professor who had spent many years teaching about traditional Indian society and culture in the United States, tried to start a civic association and turn the plot into a park and playground. Jyoti Sharma, a housewife in the colony and for a time my landlady, expressed to me her contempt for the plan, which received no community support: "A stupid idea! He expected everyone to give him money and wanted to build a park! A waste. He got all these ideas—he thinks this is America. Well, we are not Americans."

Despite the peacefulness of the colonies, they were the site of frequent conflicts and occasional murders. Several well-planned deaths in Ravindrapuri during my fieldwork were rumored throughout the city to be the fruits of one resident's heavily criminal dealings with "black money." A local reporter took me on a rickshaw ride through the neighborhood, pointing out house after house where she alleged violent crimes had occurred. Residents feared theft and the murder of vulnerable family members. Articles on the violent deaths of old people sleeping alone in residential colonies appeared from time to time in local and national papers.

PUNJABI BAGH WOMAN STRANGLED

NEW DELHI, January 10: A 70-year old Leelawati of East Punjabi Bagh was found strangled with leggings in her house this morning. Her legs were bound and cloth stuffed in her mouth.

Clothes were strewn all over the place and cupboards left open giving the impression that the house had been ransacked. The police suspect the motive to be robbery. . . . Her daughter-in-law, Mrs Sneh Gupta, wife of her only son, Mr Subhash Chand Gupta who is settled in the USA, was unable to provide much information. She . . . said that the previous night they had all retired at 11:30 p.m. The next morning her mother-in-law who normally slept in the "pooja" room was found strangled in the adjacent room. The police suspect that she was strangled in the "pooja" room and then dragged to the next room.^[2]

Colonies at night were relatively empty and vulnerable places. The death of Leelawati in the puja room, site of the household prayers and one of the archetypical spaces of the old person within the household, challenges the integrity of the dying space. Readers of this article questioned whether the police, family servants or the choukidar (the night watchman) might not be in cahoots with the thieves, whether such deaths were inevitable when children abandoned parents for places like America, and whether the daughter-in-law herself, conveniently alone with her sas without her husband present, might not have had a hand in the murder. Thieves, servants, the corrupt state, or relatives: there were few sources of security.

Alliances, given the ability of community harmony to degenerate, were made

warily and along family and regional lines. Mrs. Sharma told of the founding of Nandanagar. Her family had paid for several adjoining plots of land to plant a small field and garden next to the main house. Technically, such overbuying was against district regulations, but Mrs. Sharma dismissed such concerns with a brusque shake of her head: "Everyone does it . . . how else can a large family build a house? This is India." The colony resident in charge of land distribution, however, a professor whose plot adjoined the Sharmas, tried to force the family to sell back some of this land. This neighbor extended his own plot so as to prevent the Sharmas from having enough access to get a car onto their land.

Mr. Sharma, a government official whose posting was outside Varanasi in another city, was away. According to Jyoti Sharma's version of the tale, the neighbor threatened to bring some "student leaders," a euphemism on campus for gundas or mercenary toughs, to rough up her and her daughters.

Late that night, my brother-in-law and I and my eldest daughter got tools and began building a wall giving us the agreed-upon access to the lane. Several student toughs appeared and began threatening us with curses. I had my daughter light the lamp. The boys realized I was holding a revolver. I said, first one to move gets shot. Then one of them recognized me. He said: "Auntie, I'm so and so's son, from Ghazipur." I had grown up with that family; his father was my brother. Okay, I said. You come in for tea; the rest of you, if you don't leave by the count of ten, you're dead.

Despite the civility, of these new neighborhoods, there was often a violent edge to urban elite life in the colonies. Power was not primarily "local, continuous, productive, capillary, and exhaustive";^[3] nor did it seem to be becoming so. There was far more at stake in the boundary of the household and the violently embodied moral economy of the community than the spontaneous communitas of events like Holi suggests.^[4]

Ravindrapuri and Nandanagar were in some senses superficial communities, newly established and not yet "home" for their residents. Residents all had ghars elsewhere, households of parents, siblings, or cousins with which they had extensive ties. Household size and generational composition were fluid, a core set of members continually supplemented with the arrival of rural or small-town relations taking advantage of the educational and bureaucratic opportunities of the city. Old parents, if they were not involved in the establishment of the new home, tended to spend more of their time in the extended family home with those children who could not establish a new urban or suburban household or who maintained more direct and interdependent economic ties with the parental household.

Balance And Adjustment

Discussions of balance were always framed in second-person terms, those of the body of the known other. Once in Mussourie, a mountain resort in northwestern Uttar Pradesh, I met a group of middle-class women in their thirties and forties

from Kanpur. They were on a sightseeing tour, and we sat in a lookout and discussed behavior and mind in old age. Their stories and reflections centered on kamzori —on weakness as the reason for old people acting differently than they used to—and they rooted this weakness in "tension." In a Hindi conversation, they used this English word. Mental weakness was exacerbated by tension. When I substituted cinta , worry, for tension in rephrasing what one woman had told me, she corrected me: not worry, tension.

Tension points to a set of susceptible bodies. The Kanpur women noted that women have more tension then men. Men in the colonies claimed the opposite. Both groups noted that educated and respectable persons experienced more mental weakness, as they faced more tensions than the poor. The latter, noted the Kanpur women, do little more than work, eat, and sleep, and seldom have any more complex concerns. As the founder of Age-Care noted, "They can stand any stress and strain."

Middle-aged and old women and men in the colonies often spoke of their lives in terms of a polarity of tension versus shanti—peace, repose. Shanti was most often presented as an elusive goal. Sources of tension were constant, from the difficult responsibilities of marrying off one's daughters and settling one's sons and from the inadequate attention paid to one by busy sons and daughters-in-law. Shanti could come both from without and within, from a sense of the constant provision of Seva by children and from a balanced daily routine, or niyam . Within the colonies, old men spoke more of niyam than did old women; wealthier old men and women spoke more of niyam than did the less wealthy.

Adult children, in confronting my or another's query about the sixtyish or weak voice of their parents, inverted the language of tension: they themselves were tense, but their parents had a different problem, one of "balance." Again, one of several English words was frequently used: "He or she is fine; it's an 'adjustment' problem." From the perspective of balance, the anger of old people was at root an inability to adjust to changing times and shifting familial realities. Imbalance also connoted insanity, as it does in English elsewhere, but the central thrust of the term was positional: the old person was literally no longer able to balance on the increasingly thin line between high ascribed status and diminishing moral authority in the household. The avoidance of balance problems was for children rooted in a moral hygiene of adjustment.

Not surprisingly, in India the psychological literature on old age has centered on the operationalization of balance and adjustment.^[5] Adjustment has similarly been a central theme of the sociology of aging literature, although overshadowed by the elaboration of the Fall in the Aging in India series. This emphasis reflects and is partially derivative of a similar concern of American social science in the 1950s and 1960s with the adjustment of old people,^[6] but the American theme has been elaborated as the sine qua non of a social psychology of aging. In identifying adjustment as the key theme anchoring the lifeworlds of old people, this psychology

of aging has reified a set of class-specific concerns as universal processes demanding critical attention.

The invocation of tension (in discussing oneself) or balance (in discussing older persons) exists within a semantic network that links the hydraulic physiology of tensions and pressures to the heart and high blood pressure. The polysemy of hypertension and blood pressure has of course not been limited to India, but the ways in which blood pressure was discussed in the Varanasi colonies are revealing. Concern over "BP" differed across class and gender, being far more prevalent in upper-and middle-class discussions of middle and old age than in discussions in the slum or the poorer dwellings of the Bengali quarter, and with men "having BP" while women had "low BP." Vijay Kumar, a lawyer from a well-to-do Bhumihar family in Tikri village outside of Varanasi, reflected on his seventyish grandfather becoming almost pagal , mad, from time to time: it was due to his blood pressure. His neighbor felt differently, invoking mental against cardiovascular balance: "When a man gets old he can no longer do all the work; he has to retire; but he still wants to do the work—from this comes frustration, and mental problems." Others among the Bhumihars, the dominant caste in Tikri, identified these two models as versions of the same thing, different aspects of a single phenomenon.

BP is a prerogative of superordinate gender as well as class. The imbalance of old women was framed by family and neighbors more often in terms of a woman's need to be surrounded by others, her inability to adjust to solitude. Low BP, a common diagnosis for urban middle-class women, articulates a relation of body to pathology different from having BP. The more masculine BP was an outcome of possession: it is something one has.

The physiological systems of the body reflect status positions. Both as sites of pathology and as representations of the aging self, bodily systems were differentially distributed across the Varanasi neighborhoods. Cardiovascular disease signified the costs of power and wealth. The Times of India ran a feature in 1989, "Have a Heart," on the rise in cardiovascular disease among what was defined as India's emerging "yuppies." Cardiovascular diseases no longer signify old age, the article declared, but rather wealth and success: no longer are they the exclusive province of the old.

Having a weak heart may be the in thing—a status symbol almost—amongst the Indian yuppies like neurasthenia and weak nerves were the fads of the Victorian age. However, the fact remains that AMI [acute myocardial infarction—note how acronyms crop up as markers of a disease's designer status] has ceased to be a problem exclusively of the elderly.^[7]

When a new suburban housing complex outside Delhi (illegally built without adequate permits and pitched to future retirees and their families) advertised its attractions to potential buyers, prominent on the list was a projected "New Open-Heart Surgery Hospital." What was in hindsight a blatantly unrealizable claim

underscores the rhetorical invocation of the heart and high tech in the construction of elite identity.

Balance shifts the locus of weak mind from children who give too little to parents who withhold too much; like BP, it is a position of possession in excess. In Ravindrapuri, B. K. Agrawal lived in an upstairs flat with his wife, their younger son, and three grandchildren. An older son used to live with them but at the time of my interviews with the family maintained a separate household. For B. K. Agrawal's grown children, he was a poorly adjusted and therefore difficult old man. If I were to have offered a biomedical assessment of Agrawal, I would by no means have diagnosed him as demented. He was known around the neighborhood as a bit weak-minded, and his frequent complaints—"Old age is a curse"—were a sort of bakbak . What was key for his family was that he refused to adjust to his elder son breaking economic ties from the extended household, a break the sons relate to the income disparity between them. For the senior Mr. Agrawal, what was key was that he faced enormous tensions daily, still having to work in his old age (as a legal clerk) to help pull his and his wife's weight and to contribute to the high school fees of his younger son's children. "If I did not work," he said in his anxious fashion, jerking his head toward the doorway through which his daughter-in-law occasionally glanced apprehensively at us, "how would they treat us?"

BKA: In old age you are treated very poorly. Only if you have money and health are you treated well. If I did not work . . .

LC: What of your wife?

BKA: She has difficulty too. If we could hire someone to work in the kitchen. . . .

LC: When does authority pass from sas to bahu

BKA: Well, when a bahu first comes, she doesn't know the household. But after five-six years, when she has adjusted, the fighting must begin. Then things stabilize. Then, when sas is tired, she lets the bahu take over.

LC: What if your wife didn't work?

BKA: Our daughter-in-law would say "You're not working!" And she would have to. Because she is still capable.

With the continued tensions of householdership and the impossibility of renunciation given today's children, "Where," Agrawal fretted, "can one find shanti?" "Are there no sources of shanti, then, for old people?" I asked. He paused. "Almighty God is the only source. But," he cautioned, "one would have to renounce material things and one's grandchildren, which I cannot do. There is a point to which we cannot aspire," Agrawal the clerk sadly noted: "the silence and repose of the sannyasi." For Agrawal, solace came only in the bhajan, the repeated hymn to God alone or in a community of other elderly singers, through which he temporarily experienced shanti. In bhajan his voice was again authoritative, its trope of repetition not bakbak but divinely meaningful. But transcendence—the illud tempus of bhajan and the communitas of the bhajan group—was fleeting. Between the never-ending tensions of grhasthya (householdership) and the

always deferred peace of Sannyasa , Agrawal was unable to articulate the possibilities of vanaprastha , of a constructive rather than constrictive dying space. His children read this failure as imbalance and located it within the old father himself. Agrawal disagreed, locating balance in the spaces between family members and not in the old person. This relational interpretation characterized his definition of sathiyana : "This means, after sixty, the conscious declines, the intelligence declines. Due to family environment, leading to a loss of mental balance and irritation."

Next door to the Agrawal family, Amita Mukherjee and her mother lived together, both elderly widows from Calcutta discussed briefly in the last chapter. The younger woman, in her early sixties, was not only a teacher in an Anandamai Ma girls' school but was an adept of Ma, a well-known religious teacher and for her devotees a divine incarnation who spent much of her time in Varanasi. Mukherjee's mother at the time of our interviews was eighty-three. Mukherjee worked most of the day, and her mother remained at home in her own room, lying on her bed and getting up only to go to the bathroom. Other relations and a servant helped take care of the older woman.

Bhajan and a community of religiously minded old people were important in the lives of both mother and daughter. They had come to Varanasi in 1950 when the younger Mukherjee's husband was still alive, at the request of Ma herself. The younger woman has remained involved in various bhajan groups; she explained to me that the strength resulting from the deep meditation of bhajan singing has enabled her to both maintain her vigorous schedule and gain new insight on many things, including her mother's health.

Didima, the elder woman, the other Ma in Amita's life, complained of difficulty in breathing and of deafness. She had no other problems, she said. The visiting relatives concurred. "She can walk to the market, and she does; she doesn't obey us!" They laughed. They worried that she might fall en route and hurt herself, but felt no compulsion to restrain her. They offered their concern not as vexation with her poor adjustment—"She's completely fine"—but as signs of their desire to provide an environment of total dependency. I asked about bhimrati and bahatture , the seventyish Bengali variants of sathiyana . The relatives and Didima laughed—"How did you come to know words like that?"—but made no link to Didima herself nor felt pressed to deny a connection. Didima herself explained bhimrati as a matter of shock. "Due to a personal crisis," her relations added, and contrasted the usual effects of shock with Didima's strength in the face of adversity. "She has had a tragic life. Yet she is so happy. She has adjusted."

When the relations had left, Amita told me that she had noticed significant changes in her mother's memory. "She forgets things. Not names. Her memory for things past has improved; it is her memory of present things which has declined. Perhaps this selective loss, I have wondered through my meditation, is a person's refusal to deal with a present in which they feel neglected, if unconsciously." Mukherjee noticed memory loss and associated it with familial neglect, but as a subjective feeling in old age and not necessarily as an objective intergenerational

deficit. This feeling of neglect by Didima seemed to suggest to Amita some maladjustment on her mother's part. Unlike the relational signs of overtly poor adjustment, however, Didima's memory loss did not provide an obvious narrative.

Months later, Didima's health began to decline. She didn't leave her bed; she refused things. A friend of Amita's, an old widower and fellow devotee, offered a "shock" model for Ma's health, drawing on the dangers of colony life and, indirectly, of the vulnerability of old people being left alone by their children: "About two or three years ago, she was alone in the house when some miscreants came by and tried to rob the house. They hit her several times on the face. She has not been the same, not in the same health."

Old people living alone may deny their pathetic construction, claiming to have adjusted. A few houses away from the Mukherjees, Arvind Rai and his wife lived in a flat by themselves. The neighbors who introduced me noted that the old man had a "nervous condition." Rai, a retired college professor, acknowledged no mental or other health problems. But he agreed that the failure to adjust was the primary impediment to achieving shanti.

AR: People until sixty are very involved in material things. Then they become more involved in religion, in spiritual things. Alter seventy, one looks for a peaceful feeling.

LC: What if they don't find peace, shanti?

AR: Here people are attuned to religious things from a young age.

LC: What about sathiyana

AR: People become irritated; they get angry. This may be due to weakness.

LC: Is there a cure for this?

AR: No.

LC: What about tonics? Like Chyawanprash?

AR: No. [This process] is not weakness. But the mind stagnates.

LC: Is sathiyana real? Or just what young people say?

AR: No it's real. For old people who may not adjust in old age they say "He's gone sathiya ." Like the old man who yells at the kids going to the film because he doesn't approve. My son went to the Netherlands. He met a girl and he married her. He did not tell us. When we found out, he was married. So we adjusted. My neighbor's son married an American, and she did not adjust. I told her: "You have to adjust."

The adjustment of old age is seldom to physical change in itself but inevitably an accommodation to the desires of children. Unlike Agrawal, Rai neither needs nor feels pressured to work. Though he and his wife are "alone," with many visiting cousins but no sons in India, he has, unlike Agrawal, been able to adjust. For him, asramadharma is a meaningful model of disengagement. Do the asramas exist these days? I ask him.

R: Certainly, they exist. Haven't you seen the many sannyasis in Varanasi?

LC: But for ordinary people?

R: They don't become sannyasis, but still they leave the material things. Some go to ashrams.

LC: And you?

R: Like a sannyasi. Not a pure sannyasi, as I am concerned about my granddaughter's admission and so forth, but I read Mahabharata, Gita , and go to the Ma Anandamai Ashram. Bhakti is Sannyasa .

The life of bhakti, of devotion and love for God and guru, transforms the necessity of adjustment into a realizable form of Sannyasa .

When Sudipta Basu, the erstwhile chief engineer from Calcutta mentioned in earlier chapters, began to forget words and appointments, his wife would get angry, contrasting his memory loss with his vast library and former position, literal memory banks. But my friend their grandson related that his grandmother's concern really mounted when Sudipta forgot his daily puja, his devotional exercises. Sudipta had turned to religion after retirement, and it had become part of his successful and adjusted postretirement aging. "He has forgotten God," lamented his wife, the supreme act of amnesia bound up to the sudden imbalance of a latterday sannyasi.

Senility And Madness

The terms of metropolitan medicine—senility, dementia, and Alzheimer's—were invoked within the colonies, but as in Zagreb they pointed as much to a deficit in relationships as to the matter of the brain. The American preoccupation with senility as a disease had made few inroads in the late 1980s despite considerable efforts by multinational pharmaceutical corporations sensing a tremendous untapped market. Unlike balance, which shifted blame off the Bad Family, explicit disease models did not offer an alternative imaging of the familial body but begged the question of the family's role. They were not, at this juncture and for these families, useful to think with.

A letter to the editor of the Times of India in 1989 collapsed the language of vascular dementia with that of Alzheimer's, framing both within a moral economy of balance and adjustment. Mahinder Singh of Delhi wrote:

In our country there is a misconception that senility sets in around the age of 70. . . . When an Indian had his 60th birthday . . . he is told by all and sundry to "rest" and "enjoy". These well-wishers little realize that rest at this age means degeneration and senility. An old person must be more active if he wants to remain happy and healthy.

It is well known that the most significant factor in the ageing process is the blood flow to the brain which carries it[s] oxygen supply. With age, the diminishing oxygen supply leads to a deterioration of the neural function.

Research done by modern psychiatrists and geriatricians in countries like the United States shows that many of most fears about ageing are merely exaggerated. Senility, the most dreaded of all disabilities, is suffered by only 15 per cent of those above 65 years. Alzheimer's disease, considered the scourge of old age, accounts for more than half that number. . . .

Research done by a psychologist of the National Institute on Ageing's Gerontology Research Centre in Baltimore, U.S.A., proves that old age does not necessarily doom people to senility. . . .

After retirement from routine work, a new life of learning and activity must be started. New skills and knowledges must be sought and acquired. New habits and new routines keep the brain and the body young. In this way the elderly won't become a burden on youth.^[8]

Senility's links to both sixty and seventy are acknowledged and then contested. Against the inevitability of mental weakness, Singh suggests a program of active adjustment through mental hygiene for the old, offered entirely in the imperative: they must shape up, initially to avoid senility and ultimately to avoid becoming "a burden on youth." Mental weakness is encompassed by Vatuk's dependency anxiety.

Internationalist science is repeatedly invoked as Singh offers the geriatric ideology of normal aging by denying the geriatric paradox. Alzheimer's and senility are deemphasized through the same numbers that highlight the ubiquity of Alzheimer's hell in the United States. Thus, senility is suffered "only by 15 per cent of those above 65 years," and to further downplay concern we are told that "Alzheimer's disease accounts for more than half that number." Alzheimer's here points to the need to shore up one's psychic defenses for the remainder of a life that will be increasingly spent adjusting to others.

In another Varanasi colony not far from Ravindrapuri, the extended family of the noted pathologist and litterateur Dr. B. S. Mehta shared a large home. Mehta continued to work part-time at the clinic he founded but which by then his son ran, and devoted much of his remaining time to his grandchildren, to voluntary public health efforts, and to the many cultural interests and commitments that came out of a life steeped in theater and literature. He joked with me about his own imminent senility; indeed, the phrase often came up in our conversations. Mehta has written humorous articles on old age, on the necessity and the difficulty of adjusting to the changes of old age without a retreat into self-pity or anger. Mehta's mother, he once noted to me, was "senile." He used the term to imply a pathological condition, senile dementia, drawing like Singh upon a combination of diminished oxygen, "brain softening" and "hardening of the arteries," language then out of favor in the United States but regnant in Indian allopathic practice.

She takes things and steals them—puts them up on high shelves. Sometimes she falls when she does this and then says, "It's nothing, it's nothing." She often sleeps in the day. At night she's up, and goes around the house. She gets angry, and accuses us,

and goes off next door to my brother's house. She fights with my wife, who occasionally gets angry. She doesn't take interest—for example, when her brother died—she was not moved. She hides things—food—under her bed.

Mehta first mentioned his mother in the midst of a discussion we were having on social aspects of old age. "I am more interested in bodily change," I told him. "Ah, softening," he noted, and then described his eighty-eight-year-old mother having a "second childhood" due to softening.

Mehta never returned to the subject and resisted my efforts, over successive months, to do so. He would shrug his shoulders and make a dismissive gesture, suggesting that we both knew what was going on with her. I eventually stopped harassing him. A few months later, when I asked him, as I would routinely, how was his mother, he looked at me and said simply, "She is not eating." Curious about why her refusal of food had framed the first moment, Dr. Mehta allowed himself to return to speaking of her, I later asked his wife if I could meet her mother-in-law. "She is not eating," she repeated as she brought me into a large and spotless room whose only contents were a mattress and an old woman lying on it. The old woman, whom I called Dadiji, said that she was feeling weak and had no appetite. She was oriented to her surroundings and seemed to have a clear memory, of the recent details of her illness. But for Dr. Mehta, his weakened mother was soft. Memory loss was irrelevant for the family of an old woman who, unlike Sudipta Basu, had never been crammed with imperial knowledge; but the litany of anger, accusation, apathy; and theft they described—all familiar to American "other victims" of Alzheimer's but peripheral to formal DSM diagnosis—presented an increasing challenge to the Mehtas' constitution of the familial. In refusing to accept food from her son and daughter-in-law; Dadiji undermined the authenticity of their care and awakened the anxiety of the Bad Family. Her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren never saw the fact of her not eating as fundamentally a relational gesture, and yet their concern seemed to exceed the issue of Dadiji's food intake, to become a metaphor for her inability' to adjust: the refusal of the gift of well-intentioned Seva .

The position of extreme imbalance is madness. When the voice and body of the old person threaten not only to stigmatize the family but cause great physical, economic, and psychological stress to its members, insanity (pagalpan ) or some other rhetoric of bad mind (dimag kharab ) is invoked and healers, including psychiatrists, may be sought out. Psychiatric care may consist of the prescription of neuroleptics, other sedating agents, or ergot alkaloids, the classic "senility drugs." Even then, madness is often but one contender within a semantic network centered on the family.

Mr. and Mrs. Kaul, their daughters, and Mr. Kaul's elderly father used to live in a government flat in Ahmedabad; Mr. Kaul was a senior cadre of the elite Indian Administrative Service. The old man had long since died, and I talked to the Kauls and their grown children at their current flat. Whenever we began to talk,

Mr. Kaul would say of his father: "Mad, just mad! Stark, raving mad!" Ignoring him, Mrs. Kaul would tell me that her father-in-law was just the way he had been in life, but in that exaggerated fashion characteristic of old age. The Kauls talked about the father's behavior as an oscillation between two voices, silence and anger. The anger also manifested itself as perverse behavior, such as his hiding excrement around the house, followed by a silence in which he would not admit to such surprises. It also emerged against his son in confused episodes when he would seem to mistake his daughter-in-law for his deceased wife and accuse his son of misbehavior, a substitution reminiscent of the Kesari Jivan triangle.

The grandfather would wander away from the house; these episodes were presented by the Kauls not as tales of the wanderer, as the moving body of American institutional narrative that resists benign confinement, but as a willful voice that resisted being stilled. "I'm going to jump in the Sabarmati River!" shouted the grandfather once as he stormed out of the house: his angry cry, more than his getting lost, defined the episode. Otherwise he would sit in his room and seldom respond to family members, least of all his son. "Mad!" interjected Mr. Kaul again.

For the Kauls, even Mr. Kaul, the old man's behavior was etiologically complex yet rooted in a resentment of his son's control of family resources. It suggested an effort by the old man to reach a position of minimal transaction with his son that occasionally collapsed when balance could not be maintained. This resentment was played out in his hiding his excrement and especially in his overtures to his daughter-in-law who, for her part, seemed to have maintained a close relationship of caring for the old man in part as an act of creating an autonomous space from her husband. Although this triangle was never explicitly articulated, the Kauls were quite open about both the old man's affection for Indira, his daughter-in-law, and about the exaggerated quality of her caring for him. The father's voice was bound up to his son's frustration and his daughter-in-law's efforts to achieve greater autonomy of a sort. Family dramas that emerged on lines of gender and generation structured perception of the relational old body. His madness reflected both the extremity of Grandfather's actions—hiding excrement, being unduly familiar with his daughter-in-law, threatening to kill himself—and the extremity of difference between father and son, the voice mad enough to fill the chasm of silence between them.

The categories of asramadharma —particularly the disjunction between the behavior expected of householders versus that expected of renunciates—on at least one occasion offered a further gloss on madness. Ashok Tambe was the older of two brothers from Maharashtra, from a Brahman family with significant agricultural property. Both brothers when young had studied at Banaras Hindu University and had come into contact with the charismatic political and religious leader Swami Karpatri, the inhabitant of the house on the river that I later shared with his old disciple Marwari Mataji. Karpatri had been a tantric teacher and practitioner and a reactionary critic of pre- and post-Independence state policies that he felt challenged the autonomy and sacredness of Hindu principles. He had

gathered around himself a coterie of Indian devotees and foreign students. Karpatri's mix of sexual and philosophical unorthodoxy and appeals to Hindu nationalism tinged with Aryan purity had a particular appeal for European intellectuals in the heady years before the Second World War when Varanasi was an international intellectual and cultural center; his particular conjunction of unorthodox erotics and a Hindu nationalist theory of history can be found, further transmuted, in the writings of his disciple, the French Indologist Alain Danielou.^[9]

Into the mix came the young Tambe brothers. When they returned to Maharashtra to run their family dairy, and other businesses, the promise of Varanasi and Karpatriji's particular vision of the Hindu nation lingered. As the brothers married, aged, raised daughters and sons and tried to get them well settled, tensions between them over the joint ownership of the dairy began to come to a head. The younger brother's sons saw Tambe senior as an unsympathetic tau , the classic powerful uncle working against one's interests, in this case trying various schemes to wrest control of the dairy for his sons alone.

The relationship between the aging brothers took a turn when the younger brother, widowed as a young man, decided to return to Kashi in his middle age to take up a life of study and eventually Sannyasa . In the scheme of asramas , the relationship between the two brothers was suddenly reversed: Tambe senior remained a householder while his brother "passed" him in going on to the final stage and taking on the legacy of their guru with greater fidelity. Tambe junior, now Swami to the group of widows in the holy city who took him as a guru and came to the talks he gave, maintained an interest in the worldly affairs of his sons, guiding their response to their tau's efforts to gerrymander the inheritance. Tambe senior, for his part, presented himself when I met him as being as disinterested in worldly affairs as his sannyasi brother.

Their struggle over property had by the time I met the brothers shifted to a struggle over the definition of authority in old age. Tambe senior, still married, had come to Varanasi two years before I met him in 1989, to study the Vedas and their ritual with his brother. Their discussions often returned to the themes of the Karpatriji years, to the need for a particular marriage of modernity and Hindu tradition that did not, like Gandhian nonviolence or Nehruvian secularism, emasculate the nation. The discussion was sometimes framed as comparison between the contemporary relevance and moral ranking of the brothers' respective paths: asceticism and householdership. Tambe senior stayed in Varanasi for a year and a half, during which time no resolution emerged vis-à-vis the contested dairy. But he returned to Maharashtra with a new plan to demonstrate the supremacy and modernity of Hindu tradition, one that incidentally would require him to liquidate the disputed assets and use the cash in the name of Hindutva.

The plan for most who heard it was simply raving mad. Tambe wanted to create a center for Hindu learning on the site of the dairy that would be organized around the strength of the joint family and the rituals of married Brahmanical life. In describing the plan in his often perseverating and manic fashion, Tambe

would allude to various persons he in particular wanted to impress, one of whom was a Christian missionary who ran his district's local mission school. Tambe spoke with well-founded concern over the continuing postcolonial expectation in India that quality primary education demanded "convent" or "mission" schools. He wanted to bring back the religious academy, or pathsala , and to train local boys in Hindu rather than Christian morality. The school would be centered not on the figures of celibate nuns or missionaries but on those of the Hindu family and its ritual. The guiding practice for students would be the Brahmanic ritual of the Agnihotra mantra, which Tambe planned to recite on a continuous twenty-four-hour basis. Admitting that he and his wife were unequal to the task of between them staying up all day and night, Tambe hoped to kill two birds with one stone: his wife had an orphaned cousin, the responsibility and considerable expense of whose marriage he had earlier taken on, as yet unsuccessfully. He proposed marrying the cousin as a second wife. His household would remain an auspicious and fertile site, and the three of them could split the task of supervising the boys in the recitation of the mantra. The intensive recitation of the mantra would bring rain. Tambe proposed using his engineering background to set up giant sprinklers around Australia to increase cloud formation; the mantra would then pour rain into the desert outback, converting it into an area as lush as the Gangetic plain. Tambe senior was crazy.

I speak less in a psychiatric than a personal voice. Given the DSM-III-R criteria of the time, Tambe senior might have been labeled with "297.10 Delusional Disorder, Grandiose Type," having a usual age of onset in "middle or late adult life."^[10] He was not demented. Yet this rather irritating man resisted easy definition: he was no fool, and he was effective in taking pains to convince others that his ideas were not delusional. In 1989, he returned at the age of seventy-five to Varanasi at the request of his brother. Swamiji wished to dissuade him from the marriage, from the selling of their family resources, and from the foolishness of the project. Tambe resisted all efforts to deny the legitimacy of his plan. The taking of multiple wives was sanctioned by numerous divine and Epic examples. The efficacy of the Agnihotra mantra as a bringer of rain was outlined in sruti and smrti texts. The desire to help Australia was a way of demonstrating the emptiness of any rhetoric of European superiority. According to Tambe: "The West tells us we are failures, that we have no science, that we are not developed. They give us fertilizers which destroy nature. If the Western science is correct, then why has it not worked there, in the West. Look at Australia. It's still a desert!"

Tambe drew on the Karpatri days, on Karpatri's belief that Brahmanic technology was the key to Indian development, and on Karpatri's great concern with the emasculation of the Hindu nation resulting from Gandhian-based mixing with untouchables: "To work the enormous areas of land [that] the mantra, with the aid of ocean sprinklers which will increase evaporation and cloud formation. will generate, we will solve India's population problem by sending all the harijans to Australia."

Swamiji for his part had no doubt as to the sanity of his brother: "I tell you, the man is crazy. I am going to have him locked up. He has these high ideas. He wrote to the minister in New Delhi about his plan. He writes letters to young women, wanting to marry them. He is crazy, and I may have him committed here for his own good. Whatever he tells you, I want you to tell me."

Tambe senior's sons and nephews differed on how they framed him, but all but the one son who seemed likely to benefit from the liquidation of the dairy agreed that he was old and weak-minded and could not adjust to turning the household over to others.

Despite his tough talk, Swamiji would not take matters to a head in attempting to commit him. The forum for determining Tambe senior's sanity, appropriately given the brothers' ideological commitment to Vedic science, was a local Varanasi sabha , or council, of Maharashtrian Brahmans. And the question they agreed to debate was not whether Tambe senior was sane or insane, but whether he should remain a grhasth —a householder with the power to control his family's resources and to marry again—or whether as an old man he should be forced to hand over control of the family property, to the next generation and take on vanaprastha , as Swamiji wished. The logic of the asramas became the structure of confinement through which Swamiji hoped to control his mad brother. asramadharma , though elsewhere in my interviews not a central frame for confronting the extreme old voice of madness, here became a tool through which the old person, his family, and their community negotiated a contest over the nature of familial authority.

The unexpected intervention of foreigners, another echo of the Karpatri years, offered both parties new sources of legitimation. Eugene Thomas, an American psychologist studying old age and spiritual development in Varanasi on a Fulbright at the time, was introduced to Swamiji by his research assistant Om Prakash Sharma. Swami asked Thomas as an American expert to evaluate his older brother for senility, hoping to submit the evaluation to the Brahman sabha . But Thomas was not a psychiatrist, and he responsibly deferred the diagnosis. Swamiji gave me a copy of the American's letter, wondering if l could advance his cause better. Thomas had concluded: "Finally, I have to say that I do not consider B. "crazy." Psychologically, to be declared incompetent a person must be shown to be disoriented. . . . B. clearly does not fall into this category. There may be some evidence of a senile brain syndrome, but that would take exhaustive clinical tests to determine." In sidestepping the psychiatric question of whether Tambe's ideas were delusional in favor of a cognitivist emphasis on disorientation and memory loss implying the necessity of "clinical tests," Thomas was able to minimize involvement with the Tambe affair.

Tambe senior, meanwhile, began to cultivate me extensively when he learned that I was living in one of Karpatri's former residences and knew of Danielou's Karpatri connection. Tambe hoped that I could be persuaded that Vedic science was firmly a matter of this world and "not just the stuff of lectures to old Nepali widows" (Swamiji had a big following among old Nepalis in the city). Tambe appealed to the ethos of the householder, making a strong case that the grhasth and

not the sannyasi was the ultimate Hindu exemplar of dharma. "Reason in madness," to cite Lear again. He came by my house on the river nightly, presenting his vision of a societal analysis based on authentically Hindu categories rooted in the family.

His appeal won over the council, who decided in favor of Tambe senior remaining a householder but placed restrictions on which of his projects were in accordance with the shastras, the authoritative texts on dharma. In the case of Australia, the council was not able to deny the efficacy of the Vedas and dismiss the project entirely, but it made the suggestion that the application of Vedic technology to a foreign land, particularly given the presence of large unproductive tracts of land within India, was inappropriate. When last I saw Tambe senior, he had taken their decision to mean that the project was on and had jettisoned the outback for the great Indian wasteland, the Rann of Kutch. The family had triumphed over the confinement of vanaprastha .

Loneliness And Menopause

In 1989 after I gave a talk at the Vasant College for Girls on Raj Ghat in Varanasi, in which I cited the experience of old people in Nagwa to argue that gerontological agendas were usually based on the needs of urban elites, several audience members and college faculty approached me: "You haven't considered the loneliness of old people." They of course had a valid point: in my bluster, any careful attention to experience was missing. But what sort of experience did they expect in the specific demand that I address loneliness? Loneliness as a primary concern had not been expressed by most of the old people of either Nagwa or the colonies nor inferred by me. Over lunch following the seminar, students and faculty began offering examples of what they had meant: "On my lane, there are two old Bengali widows who live by themselves; their children never write them." None of the examples offered addressed the old age of the speaker's own parents or relations, nor of most old people in Varanasi who lived with or near their families. Rather the kasivasi , and primarily the kasivasi widow, came to stand for old age as a time of loneliness. She was further distanced from the family of most at the luncheon by being a Bengali widow; "in Bengal," non-Bengali Banarsis said to me on several occasions, "They talk much about their mothers; but then why do all these old Bengali mothers end up being abandoned here?" In the intimacy and immediacy with which these "interstitial" old women—inhabiting the interstices between domestic spaces, a point I will develop in the eighth chapter—were brought forward into our discussion, there was an exclusion of "domestic" elders, of the parents, aunts, and uncles of the Vasant College faculty or of other old people who might indexically represent them. These were absent from this discourse of the problem of aging perhaps because construed as problems they would have threatened to signify the Bad Family of the self.

The lonely old person in the Varanasi colonies was as inevitably the Other as

the tense and overly burdened old person was associated with the self. Within the gendered terms of public iconography and reminiscent of the literary forms discussed in the third chapter, the old aunt rather than the old mother was the acceptable image of abjection. Koki (Auntie), a Bengali widow living in the stairwell of a wealthy family in Ravindrapuri, was quick to anger and was often spotted screaming at small children, dogs, or other passersby along her daily route. She was dressed in a ragged white sari and often had a wide-eyed glare, the image of the matted-lock pagli , or madwoman. But for Ravindrapuri residents, she was, in my hearing, never framed in terms of madness, imbalance, sixtyishness, or even weakness. "She has no one," I repeatedly heard. No one heard Koki as maladjusted, for there was no one to whom she had to adjust. She was not imbalanced, for there was no bahu against whom to balance. The interstice was her own.

The widowed old auntie without children seldom threatened the moral integrity of middle-class families or neighborhoods. Traditional behavioral restrictions on upper-caste Hindu widows and concerns over whether these were followed closely seldom formed an explicit part of local discussions of the morality of old widows. Younger and middle-aged widows offered a sexualized threat to the moral life of the colony; their behavior, particularly those women who were heads of households and those who worked outside the home, was inevitably if vaguely noted to be transgressive. One of the metaphoric registers through which the inappropriate behavior of such a woman might be marked was old age: by being prematurely marked as old, a widow could be seen to act in ways that were inappropriate for her age. The language of balance and adjustment could be invoked to frame what was wrong with such women in the contemporary absence of a shared public discourse on widowhood.

In Nandanagar, I was frequently told by young and middle-aged women to meet the old mad woman who rented a room from one of the colony families. This "old" woman was in her late forties, an educated Bihari woman widowed at eighteen with two children who managed to raise them without family support by obtaining a position working for the government on issues of rural health. She had married off both children; her son was posted in Rajasthan, she resented living alone but saw no alternative, and she was reluctant to discuss why she could not stay with the son and daughter-in-law. Unlike the many women in their forties in Nagwa basti who were frequently called old, in Nandanagar colony chronological age mattered and persons in their forties were simply not old. When I asked women in the colony, who had called the widow old why they had done so, they did not answer directly but noted both her behavior and her bad family: her working in offices, her always coming and going, and her being abandoned by her children. There were hints of liaisons and infidelities, and even a soupçon of incest with the son offered by one neighborhood know-it-all.

Mrs. Seth, the widow herself, told me of great pressures and tensions. She had to struggle to marry off a daughter and get both her children postings, while working full time and bearing with neighborhood approbation. Her doctor had

prescribed her minor tranquilizers, she told me soon after we began the interview; she had been told by the neighbor who had introduced us that I was becoming a dimagvale daktar , a brain doctor or psychiatrist. She repeated throughout our conversation the difficulty of "tension," the impossibility of peace of mind, and the aid of medicine. This series was offered to deflect something, perhaps the sexual rumors or the complexities of the life behind them. Her taking tranquilizers was a fact several of the neighborhood women seemed to know and repeat. Though she worked a demanding job and had few interactions with anyone other than her landlords, she was offered by several in the colony as "mad." Descriptions of her pathology linked her nervous behavior, including "strange emotional outbursts," her femininity and indirectly her widowhood, and her obviously troubled relations with her children.

The menopause, during the 1980s, was emerging in settings like the Varanasi colonies as an increasingly powerful frame legitimating the pathology of difficult women like the Nandanagar widow.^[11] Not (yet) a part of an everyday universe of discourse, the menopause was better known as a medical problem faced by middle-aged and middle-class women in particular, requiring psychotropic medication. Phenomenological descriptions of menopausal pathology in India have stressed its hysterical aspects, implying an opposition of cognitive male versus embodied female age reminiscent of earlier European climacteric literature. A 1981 study in a Varanasi colony adjoining Ravindrapuri began:

The climacteric is a universal phenomenon which has received relatively little attention from psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and social workers all over the world, but almost no research on this subject has been carried out in the Third-World countries. This study, carried out in India, has been conducted for the purpose of unraveling the difficulties that Indian women have to face during the climacteric. 405 married women between 40 and 55 years of age from the general population were contacted and interviewed. The results, obtained with the menopausal symptom checklist prepared by the authors, indicate . . . that hot flushes, night sweats and insomnia seem to be clearly associated with the menopause. . . . Despite embarrassment or discomfort experienced from these symptoms by a majority of women, only 10% had apparently sought medical treatment.^[12]

The study, which introduced considerable bias in (1) its preassessment of what could constitute relevant experience (respondents were read lists of discrete symptoms and asked which they had experienced), (2) its lack of attention to the breadth of experience that "hot flushes" and other symptoms may signify, and (3) the unrelenting programmatic goals of its investigators (who were seeking to show that India has as florid a menopause as anywhere else), found that far more Indian women reported symptomatology (for example, 59–61 percent of women across cohorts surveyed reported hot flushes) than most other populations worldwide.^[13] Searching for India's missing menopause, the authors discovered the mother lode.

Another study of menopause and South Asian women, du Toit's on Indians in South Africa, similarly downplayed the neutral or positive "menopausal" experi-

ence of many of his informants, mentioned but not enumerated unlike symptomatology more in keeping with contemporary metropolitan experience.^[14] For most women in the colonies with whom I spoke, however, menopause was not pathologized in the florid way the authors of the Varanasi study describe. My own findings were far more consistent with George's study of immigrant Sikh women in Canada: relative to other Canadians, George found that "traditional psychological and psychosomatic symptoms ascribed to menopause in the literature were notably absent in this group of women."^[15]

The menopause was not a primary focus of my field research, and I do not want to offer a thin ethnography against the hundreds of detailed interviews the authors of the Varanasi study describe. Yet the excess of symptomatology they suggest was all but absent in my interviews with older women reflecting on their own aging and on the menopause. While my own sex, age, and foreignness almost certainly limited the sorts of discussions on the cessation of menses I was likely to engender (the male authors of the Varanasi study asked their wives to do the fieldwork), I stand by my sense that stories of anticipated or experienced bodily discomfort associated with the cessation of menses were neither public nor private markers of age for most persons in the Varanasi colonies. Medicalization, less of the menopause itself than of the postmenopausal body as a tremendous market for hormone therapy, may well change middle-class women's negotiation and experience of the body in middle age, with the more far-reaching consequences Lock has outlined in the case of Japan.^[16] Far more frequent in the late 1980s than the internalized medicalization of one's own body were attributions of pathological mood swings and more general bodily instability to other women, and particularly to those who, like the Nandanagar widow, presented a vague challenge to a local moral world.

The articulation of the senility of an old women may draw on other gendered life events. When I first met Mrs. Mishra in the Uttar Pradesh hill station of Mussourie, she was in her seventies and lived alone with her husband. Their eldest son was in government service in Orissa and the second had married and was living with his family nearby; their eldest daughter also lived nearby, a second was in Delhi, and the third abroad. Several cousins also lived nearby. I knew Mrs. Mishra's husband, and when he learned of my interest he invited me to visit him and his wife to help me with my book. As we walked down the steep hill to their home, which Mr. Mishra, in his seventies, negotiated several times a day, he told me that a visiting foreign doctor had diagnosed his wife with Alzheimer's disease and had told him that there was no cure. Mussourie was after all, as N. L. Kumar had noted to me in discussing its role in the founding of Age-Care India, the "headquarters" for many foreigners. Two of the Mishra children had married foreigners, in one case leading to an estrangement between father and son that prevented Mr. Mishra from accepting his son's Seva and left him with sole responsibility for his household and wife. As soon as we arrived at the house, he left to do his shopping.

I greeted Mrs. Mishra, who motioned to me to sit down. She stepped outside and began gathering twigs for a fire, placing them on top of the gas stove (which her husband kept disconnected when he was out) and looking around for matches to start a fire and make me some tea. When she went into the kitchen, I threw the twigs away, and she came out and began to process all over again. As I came to know Mrs. Mishra and the rest of her family, my clinical impression was that she was diagnosable with senile dementia, probably Alzheimer's disease. She had had steadily progressive loss of both short- and long-term memory and was seldom oriented to person (confusing her husband with her long-deceased father-in-law), place (wandering from the home each day and getting lost while her husband was at school), or time (she would frequently talk as if she were a young woman with small children). To frame what was wrong another way, Mrs. Mishra had grown mentally weak, with frequent bursts of anger and an often bakbak voice.

Mishra coped with the risks of his wife's affect, wandering, and disorientation through the help of many in the neighborhood. Neighbors and shopkeepers knew to keep an eye on her if she left the house, and to steer her in the right direction as she wandered about the market lanes. The nearby daughter came whenever her full-time job and household responsibilities allowed her time, and other relations helped with her care. For neighbors and for some of the relations, the cause of the old woman's bakbak and angry voice was more immediate than a foreign diagnosis and lay in what they saw as the improper Seva of the younger son who had married a foreigner. She had failed to adjust to his decision, they said; rather, it had caused a shock that weakened her mind and precipitated her current voice. In retelling the events of this marriage and her mother's decline, one of the daughters shifted the chronology of events to maintain the clear causality of her brother as the source of pathology.

Yet even within the world of these accusing sisters and cousins, bad Seva was an inadequate explanation. Mr. Mishra clearly had adjusted, though at the cost of a relationship with a loving son. He was neither sixtyish nor angry nor a bakbak type. In framing the difference between the two old people, relatives drew on a notion that I had heard a few times in the Varanasi colonies: women adjust more poorly than men. Men in Ravindrapuri framed this difference more in terms of innate differences; women in terms of the gendered events of the life course. The daughters of Mrs. Mishra recalled that their mother had become delirious during the birth of her last child years earlier: they defined this temporary period as sannipat , or derangement, a folk and classical Ayurvedic term denoting a literal derangement of all three bodily humors. Childbirth, they noted, carries its dangers: it weakens one and renders one vulnerable to shock. Women are less able to adjust because they have had to quite literally bear far more. In turning to the relational effects of childbirth to supplement the moral narrative of the bad son, the daughters echoed the typological difference discussed earlier, between fathers who negotiate all-or-nothing intergenerational relations of substitution and mothers who constitute and are constituted by their children's voices and effects.

Balance And Cartesian Possibility

Balance and the power to adjust were differentially located across gender as well—as the following chapter will detail—as class. Briefly, in Nagwa slum, balance and adjustment were far less salient ways of making sense of an aging voice or forestalling the accusation of improper Seva . The possibility of balance is located within a particular embodiment of socially located experience.^[17]

Dr. B. S. Mehta, in addition to his work as a pathologist and a student of theater, was a well-known raconteur. In 1989, he gave a talk on All India Radio Varanasi about growing old. In his talk, Mehta addressed a conflict in the aged construction of selfhood reminiscent of Sharon Kaufman's informants: feeling the same as one's youthful self but being socially and bodily marked as an old person. He explored several variations on the disjunction between what he framed as the ageless feeling of mind and age-bound experience of body. Ultimately for Mehta, unlike Kaufman's interviewees, both mind and body constitute authentic sources of selfhood. Rather than an alienation of identity from body, he describes a splitting of self.

In translating his address, I have included the original Hindi and Urdu terms for old age Mehta used, in part to show the subtleties of Banarsi Hindi's rich lexicon in the hands of a master and the ways Mehta can thus use local idiom to construct a thick phenomenology of old age.

Why get nervous at the coming of old age /piri/?

People tell you, you've gotten old [burhe ]. It's for people who talk like that that it is said: They neither listen to God's praise, nor sing His songs, yet claim they can bring the heavens down. Only crookedness filters through: since they're washed up, so others must be destroyed. Well, let them be damned. What do you think? Perhaps you're humming: The heart remains young in love, and that, in the opinion of those who know, age [umr ] is not measured in years but feeling. One sees them strong at sixty and aged [burha ] at twenty.

The paradox of sixtyishness is cited by Mehta to demonstrate the essential youthfulness of the self as heart and feeling. Yet sixtyishness is laden with irony, and Mehta goes on to suggest that the consciousness of oneself as youthful is sham, a denial of identity bound up with the prerogatives of mast , libertine pleasure. The first gray hair, a sign in Sanskrit literature of sexual decline, is an appropriately located index pointing to inward and essential change. And the hair is that of Dasharath, doomed to die of grief at the separation between generations for the sin of killing the perfect Seva of Shravan Kumar.

Now on the other hand, after a time the mirror of King Dasharath seemed to say to him: Near the ear, white hair. The lesson: the mind is aging [jarathpan ]. And those who offer unsolicited advice say that when your hair is gray it is time to abandon wife and property and follow the path of Ramanath. All well and good—but might one not say: Old age [burhapa ] is mine, but being called old [burhe ] has no support in my heart.

The split is not of mind and body. Heart—that is, desire—is young, and the body is old. Mind shuttles between, as mind is wont to do in Indian thought, reflecting Mehta's implicit insight that desire implies an absence, that the youthful heart of old age is predicated on an identity cognizant of its transformation. This transformed but authentic self is expressed in kinship terms, as a shift in one's relational identity from the lover to the "baba," the old man or uncle.

To hell with white hairs and black mouths—neither are particularly affectionate. Of gray hair it is said that: White things all are fair, are fair save for hair, women won't bend nor enemies press, save in respect. Kesav Das used to moan: Kesav. . . . No enemy could do worse than these moon-bodied, doe-eyed ones. They call me baba and go. Now times have changed. Now a stretch-fabric beauty queen calls me "uncle" then disappears, leaving uncle scratching his head with his finger of wisdom.

A play upon embodiment: the mind as a contemplative "finger of wisdom," an impotent and useless appendage and a conflation of the weakness of dimag with that of bodily hath pair and of sexual potency. The very organ of reflection generating a sense of an ageless self is revealed as the phallus in decline, and the denial of the body as a source of selfhood becomes a pathetic effort to regain the seamless phallic hegemony of the body that does not signify its difference.^[18] The multiple claims of heart, body, and mind are consolidated in a confrontation with one's mirror image: "And it is truly said, one wants to stand in front of this matter and to declare soundly: The world has come to witness a strange phase, continually changing in many ways, with surprise I look into the mirror, to-see the oldness [burha sa ] of another one. The problem is that the perception of the mind [man ] and body [tan ] differ."^[19]

Unlike Kaufman's informants, who in Mehta's terms take the interior claims of the mind and not the exterior ones of the body seriously in the constitution of the self, Mehta suggests that the self is simultaneously experienced as young and old and as hot and cold. Failure to manage this set of apparent paradoxes tips the equilibrium, and one becomes irritated and hot. Missing in Mehta's lexicon are terms for old age that stress experience and wisdom, as opposed to decline and abjection: the Sanskritic vrddha against jara , wise against decrepit old age,^[20] or in this context the more neutral Urdu buzurg . Wisdom in this unmatching world is not a phenomenological given of old age, but a precarious state of balance between conflicting sources of the self.

Many people in the colonies framed the mental health of old people in terms of their niyam , their rule of conduct, and felt that through a balanced lifestyle they could maintain a state of shanti. For many in Nagwa and the poor of the Bengali quarter, the contrast Mehta evoked between a youthful heart or ageless mind and a weak body in old age neither paralleled experience nor was available as a rhetoric mapping intergenerational politics. Particularly in the lives of the Nagwa Chamar, dependency anxiety was rooted in a chronic sense of marginality, and old age was experienced less as a new Eriksonian challenge than as plus ça change .

Shanti was less a state of equilibrium than of asymptotic possibility, less the everyday coping with a dualism of self than the transcendence of extremity.

The last line of Mehta's radio address cited above, on the split between man and tan , mind and body, offers a play upon a verbal pair ubiquitous in Hindi poetics. Several variants of a couplet on man and tan in old age were told to me in Nagwa slum, ascribed to the late medieval poet-saint Kabir. I heard the first two versions over snacks at Secchan's tea stall, the initial one declaimed by the local neta (political leader) Seva Lal:

Na tan mare na man mare marmar jat sarir
Asa trsna na mare Kaha gaye das Kabir.

Neither body [tan ] nor mind dies as the body [sarir ] keeps dying
Hope and thirst will not die, it's been said by Kabir Das.

When Seva Lal spoke the couplet, someone responded that there was no opening "na " in the first line. But the tea stall audience was unanimous in hearing man and tan as a conjoint pair in both versions, linked to hope and thirst as things that lingered despite the decay of sarir (or sarir ), the corporeal body not split into tan and man .

The two contradictory appearances of "body" in the couplet did not make sense to me, and I asked about them. A serious discussion of these terms followed, in which several people pointed out that man and tan were lasting ideational and material aspects, respectively, of human experience, whereas sarir was the body tout court . One man called tan and man the soul (jiva), suggesting by the term that tan was the "subtle body" of Indian cosmology, that which transmigrated after death. Throughout, man and tan were not the ultimate and opposed alternatives they were in much of Mehta's text; rather, two different conceptualizations of body, one total (sarir ) and one discriminate (man/tan ), constituted this framework of informal analysis. Against the transformations of age, mind and body were not opposed but set together as a pair; the operant dualism was between a notion of body that decays and body that survives. Man and tan do not in themselves generate a sense of irony; as the next chapter will suggest, the irony of aging in Nagwa lies in its meaninglessness, for all culturally elaborated frames for making sense of its transformations—weakness, renunciation, and the split self of Mehta's piece—have been exhausted in the comprehension of the marginality of low-caste youth.

Ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder. Viewed by younger others across the class spectrum, old people are split: experienced yet debilitated, peripheral yet icons of the family, hot-minded yet cold-bodied. In making sense of themselves, however, individuals experience the relationship of mind, body, and self relative to their own bodily histories, histories rooted in an individual's social position. The frequent but ethnographically crude invocation of Cartesian/non-Cartesian distinctions in medical anthropology—viewing cultures as more or less dualistic in

their construction of body and mind—must be sensitive to the dialogic constitution of the split self, to the dangers of equating mind (rather than body, or both) with identity, and, in particular, to the variable possibility of balance and dualistic thought across class.

The Dementia Clinic

In 1989 I spent several weeks in an empty office adjoining the psychiatric outpatient clinic of the Banaras Hindu University Hospital. I had been advised by several hospital physicians that the psychiatry clinic, as opposed to the general medical or neurological clinics, would be the place to meet persons referred with diagnoses of senile dementia. Across the hall from where I would sit, several persons waiting for a consultation along with their family members crowded around the desk of the attending psychiatrist while he examined the patient whose turn it was and then prescribed something. More than a hundred patients were seen each day. Patients diagnosed with dementia by the attending psychiatrist were told about my' study and asked if they would agree to a second clinical interview. At least, this was the plan, proposed by the attending psychiatrist and gratefully agreed to by me. During the month in which I scheduled these weekly sessions at the clinic, the attending psychiatrist with whom I was working diagnosed only six patients as potentially demented. They were all middle-aged adults, forty-five to sixty-five, each with a chief complaint of memory loss. None could be diagnosed as demented by DSM-III-R criteria.

1. KKB was a sixty-five-year-old male retired police superintendent with the chief complaint of memory loss. His past history was significant for a series of "nervous breakdowns": in 1962 when he was posted to Nepal and at the same time was involved in arranging for the marriages of his six sisters, in 1982 from the shock of having to cancel his daughter's wedding on the wedding day itself when he found out she was having an affair, and attacks of "nervousness" over the past year not associated by him with specific events. His father died several months ago and KKB became the head of the household; since then he had noticed a progressive memory loss.

2. TNR was a forty-five-year-old male stenographer living with his wife and two sons, with the chief complaint of memory loss. He reported that he had suffered from an "inferiority complex" and forgetfulness since childhood. He began "bad habits"—by which he meant masturbation though he hinted at occasional sex with female prostitutes or other men—in childhood, and accelerated them in the army. He was impotent with his wife, got little sleep, and felt fearful and hopeless.

3. UD was a forty-eight-year-old housewife brought to the clinic by her husband for refusing to eat; she was sent to me because of the attending physician's sense of her continually worsening disorientation and memory loss. Five months earlier, she began refusing food and became increasingly agitated. At that time she would refuse to look at anyone else and would close her eyes, lie immobile in bed, and refuse to move even to relieve herself elsewhere, would make vibrating noises but

no clear speech, and "forgot everyone and everything." She had had intermittent swelling of her face and extremities, intermittent abdominal pain and vomiting, and episodes of incontinence. A medical workup was negative; she was referred to the neurology' clinic. One medical doctor suggested the symptoms were due to the menopause and would in time resolve. The first neurologist diagnosed her with "? schizophrenia"; the consulting neurologist noted on his report "?, adzheimer's Disease, Progressive deterioration of intellectual function. No objective neurological signs." She was retorted to the psychiatric clink: and placed on Valium.

Simultaneously, her husband consulted with a pandit in the Sanskrit department of the university, an expert on astrology, and mantra-tantra, spells and esoteric practices. He was concerned that his wife's behavior might be due to possession by a bhut , a type of spirit that frequently attacked vulnerable and particularly female bodies. The pandit examined both the patient and her horoscope; he then prescribed an Ayurvedic medication and the reading of the Durga calisa , a hymn to the goddess Durga, after which the patient's symptoms improved but did not resolve.

4.UsD was a forty-six-year-old female school principal with the chief complaint of memory loss and the continuation of headaches that she had had since a fatal scooter accident two years previously that killed her husband and during which she lost consciousness. She described finding out about his death, a week after regaining consciousness, as a great "shock." She developed headaches whenever she tried to do her work, could get little accomplished, and was afraid of losing her position. Her "memory ki kamzori" (weakness), like her headaches, was associated with her job and her feeling of failure and inability, to work. She received a provisional psychiatric diagnosis of "post-traumatic fear, psychosis" and was placed on Ativan, another anxiolytic medication.

5.SR was a fifty-year-old male file clerk with the chief complaint of memory loss. He had been seen at the clinic for a year with the primary diagnosis of depression and had been treated with antidepressant and anxiolytic medication. He felt the memory, loss was a new problem and that his "mental depression" was cured. His past history, was unremarkable, but he noted that he used to do too much "deep thinking" about his worries, particularly about getting all his daughters married.

6.H was a forty-seven-year-old male shopkeeper from a village in the district, whose chief complaints were memory loss and a hot brain (dimag ). He had a history of several decades of ghabrahat (nervousness, panic) to the point over the last few years of pagalpan (madness). He had seen a series of medical doctors without relief until he had met the attending physician at the psychiatric clinic the previous year. Since then, he was receiving shanti from his medication, Halcion. He noted the medication helped to cool his dimag but has not relieved his forgetfulness, a problem in keeping his accounts straight for his business.

In addition to developing a dementia workup including a mental status exam, I listened to whatever the patient and his or her family thought was most relevant to their situation. Only UD, the woman who wouldn't eat and who had been referred to psychiatry by the neurologists, had a score on the mental status examination that could be correlated with dementia; she had been the one patient

whose file included the possibility of Alzheimer's. But her score, like that of many in Nagwa, seemed in itself little indication of much save her disinclination to be examined. The memory loss of the other five was not the demonstrable short or intermediate term memory loss in theory demonstrable on such an exam. Nor were UD's rapid course of decline, her sudden anorexia and aphasia, her history of swelling, and her family's sense that she got better with mantra-tantra treatment indicative of a clinical picture particularly suggestive of chronic dementia.

The clinical data of A. K. Venkoba Rao, the first psychiatrist in India to carry out extensive clinical and community-based surveys of mental health in the elderly, suggests that at least in the south Indian city of Madurai old persons less ambiguously diagnosable as demented form a majority of those over fifty-five referred and brought to the psychiatric clinic by their families.^[21] In Varanasi, my own physician interviews, clinical interviews, and examinations of medical records with psychiatrists, neurologists, and internists suggested that although most old patients with cognitive deficits and behavioral or other "adjustment" problems were diagnosed as being demented or having Alzheimer's, few old people ever came to the clinic as patients for such things. More to the point, few old people were ever brought to the Varanasi clinic for anything. As I noted earlier, one answer to explain the difference between Madurai and Varanasi would be quantitative, the effect of the demographic and health transitions of south India: there are proportionally more old people and these live longer. Thus, there will be more senile pathology and more dementia, leading to more clinic visits.

But the Varanasi clinic as of 1989 was not characterized so much by fewer visits by persons over sixty-five as by their virtual absence. The behavioral difference of older people was seldom medicalized, independent of the proportion of persons over sixty-five within the population. If the difference between Varanasi and Madurai is related to the health transition of the south, it may be related more to the antecedents of the transition than to its effects. North-south differences within India in terms of family structure and their effects on life expectancy and mortality are a complex topic—as is evident in the data collected by scholars like Pauline Kolenda and Bina Agarwal^[22] —and I do not think a satisfactory resolution of why Venkoba Rao's data so differs from clinical experience in Varanasi can easily emerge. What is missing from such a discussion is a sense of how the ideology of the Bad Family relates to the everyday negotiation of intergenerational relations and knowledge of the old body in different regions of India.

In Varanasi, dementia—as a medical site linked powerfully to memory—drew to it a host of life experiences that, unlike those of weak or hot brain, were embodied primarily through the idiom of amnesia. The memory loss of the patients I have described and of persons in the colonies with similar complaints was attributed to sorrow, shock, masturbation, attacks of nervousness and panic, depression and deep thinking, and a range of somatic experiences. Many of these persons' illness narratives were reminiscent of other idioms and 'frames of suffering—of dhat , or semen loss,^[23] of bhut-pret , or spirit possession—sometimes

with explicit diagnostic and therapeutic links. The associations of masturbation and semen loss in particular evoked a semantic network of semen, capital, and memory, the space of the neo-Rasayana tonic. The psychiatric clinic, with the frames it tentatively offered, was but one of several sources of healing considered by sufferers and their families, most relevant for the families of middle-class and primarily male adults for whom memory loss as opposed to possession or depletion could be a primary idiom of experience.

The likelihood of physicians—and in particular psychiatrists and neurologists—to consider pushing a diagnosis of dementia was, in the two years of my primary fieldwork, most closely correlated with their interactions with pharmaceutical company representatives, or detail men. I followed the efforts of one multinational corporation to market an antidementia product to Indian physicians. In 1988, the Italian firm Farmitalia, under a dynamic new American manager of their Indian operations, began to promote nicergoline, a product sold in Europe as the antidementia drug Sermion, under the Indian brand name Dasovas. Company and product names differed in India, in part given then-current restrictions on multinational corporations prior to the economic liberalization of the 1990s. Farmitalia did business under a different name, as a company set up through the liquor baron and horse-racing enthusiast Vijay Mallaya.

The challenge for the firm was to sell a relatively expensive dementia drug in a market where, as Farmitalia's Indian medical director noted to me, senility was seldom medicalized. In the beginning of the campaign, he was unsure of strategy ("It's a mystery to us"). Six months later, in 1989, the company had formulated a strategy and was set to launch the new drug; I returned to Bombay to visit the medical director. He asked me what sorts of symptoms I was seeing in Varanasi. Somewhat Warily, I answered that what I was seeing was that symptoms did not correlate with mental status exams in the ways I had been taught to expect in medical school. He responded "Frankly, we don't want doctors to do these tests. We're trying to push these drugs. How can we pressure—no, that's the wrong word—how can we convince doctors, GPs, that they should find out about memory?"

The medical director and his marketing team had sensed that marketing Dasovas as a memory tonic would reach a far wider market than marketing it as a specifically medicalized dementia drug. Gurious, I asked him if he too had noted that adjustment problems and affective change were more salient criteria of old age weakness. He immediately noted: "Yes, but we want to stress memory. We want, when a fifty-year-old man comes in with other problems, the doctor to be alert to memory—how is his memory—and to be able to say 'You need this drug' and to treat the problem before dementia sets in."

Nicergoline was thus from the outset offered as preventive medicine, through a radical pathologization of middle age. To legitimate the move, Farmitalia decided to begin with brain specialists but to advance the campaign quickly to

include other practitioners: "We'll begin with the neurologists. Otherwise, no one else would prescribe the drug. But we want to move beyond them. We recognize that most, 80 percent, of people will only see a GP, so we have to target them. But how?"

The strategy was reasonable, and the question germane. Its answer came from a surprising quarter: "We want you to work with us. Perhaps you could publish an article—anonymously, if you wish—with us? Though I declined, Dasovas's medical, marketing, and management support team developed several successful strategies; the product's appeal did not suffer. When some months later I was in Madurai visiting the psychiatrist Venkoba Rao, several physicians connected with Madurai Medical College mentioned to me they had been visited by Dasovas representatives, and asked me what I thought of the drug.

By early 1990, when I again was in Bombay, Farmitalia had moved to new and far plusher offices, up from the basement to the fourteenth floor. Dasovas was doing well, though the pattern of its success surprised some in sales and marketing. Expecting the largest impact in urbanized areas of north India, particularly Delhi, they found their best sales to be in south and central India. Given feedback from detail men informing them that in central India Dasovas sold well to the middle-aged concerned about memory, they began to consider marketing the drug more explicitly as a brain tonic as a way to success in the north.

What did I think of the drug? I found the answer tough. Nicergoline is an ergot mesylate, a descendent of a class of drugs clinically labeled vasodilators and marketed extensively in the United States until the 198Os as treatments for senile and vascular dementia. In the days before Alzheimer's was a household word, when diminished cerebral blood supply secondary to arteriosclerosis explained senile behavior, vasodilators offered the prospects of increased blood flow. By the late 1970s, evidence had emerged to challenge the efficacy of these compounds against placebo;^[24] simultaneously the concept of Alzheimer's had shifted and was leading to a rapidly changing research climate in which vascular models were being eclipsed. By the mid-1980s, American vasodilator use was declining and behavioral interventions targeting the lingering "inappropriate prescribing" of the substances were being undertaken^[25]

Despite the American shift, European companies like Farmitalia continued to market and develop newer generations of ergot mesylates and to promote extensive clinical and experimental research. Cross-nationally, it is possible that the degree of decline in vasodilator use was correlated with the centrality of Alzheimer's in professional and popular conceptualizations of senility. The new generation of ergot drugs was rechristened, their function fortuitously rediscovered: no longer vasodilators, the drugs were now metabolic enhancers. A new rationale was advanced for their efficacy. Research findings favorable to the efficacy of nicergoline were extensively promoted by Farmitalia. Articles distributed by the firm were sel—

dom paragons of impartial research design and reporting: sources of funding were seldom revealed,^[26] placebo controls were not always included in study' designs,^[27] and the effects of the drug on long-term prognosis and on severe dementia were downplayed or ignored.

To explain the significance of metabolic enhancement, Dasovas literature relied on a somewhat tautological category of "chronic cerebral insufficiency," presented through the use of an acronym (CCI) as an accepted and experimentally confirmed biomedical fait accompli. CCI—which was a grab bag of lumpedtogether symptoms with complex differentials, including dizziness, depression, anxiety, memory loss, and "decreased performance"—was posited to occupy the gray' space between the poles of the normal and the pathological of geriatric ideology It was described as "a complex age-related degenerative process that can be considered an exaggeration of normal ageing," and "its symptomatology could be considered (as a working formulation) as lying midway between that of normal ageing and the one of senile dementia."^[28]

CCI, like its liminal DSM cousin "benign senescent forgetfulness," allowed for the maintenance of the sharp division between the normal and the pathological through the containment of the geriatric paradox within itself. Presented as normal—thus universal—aging meriting consideration by physicians for all their patients, and as a pathological syndrome with its own "symptoms" and "management," CCI could become a synonym for the ambiguities of old age. In Dasovas literature, its invocation was followed by a description of the various dementias, further establishing a metonymic link between CCI and dementia and implicitly suggesting that to treat one was to treat the other. CCI played on the weak but certainly plausible evidence that nicergoline may in fact increase alertness and concentration in old adults with mild dementias.

In its construction as a sophisticated medical object, Dasovas was offered as a gatekeeper, a cure for the climacteric period between aging and the fall into severe dementia. The assumption throughout its literature was that if one could, through nicergoline, make an impact at the limen of pathology, one could forestall dementia forever. Thus the medical director's attempt to get to all fifty-year-olds "before dementia sets in." Thus the picture, in an article reporting one of the European clinical trials, of Lucas Cranach's Fountain of Youth^[29]

What moral are we to draw from the ongoing saga of Dasovas? That the senile body is being rampantly medicalized by' the false promises of the encroaching world system in the incarnation of Italian companies, German researchers, American managers, and Indian medical directors? To assume that the usual excesses of the medical marketplace are so powerful as to recreate the cultural construction of the senile body in India is to assign the Indian consumer—physician, patient, bureaucrat, or relative—the thoroughly passive role of unwitting dupe in the play of markets, practices, and representations. But Farmitalia has its echoes elsewhere. Recall King Vinayashila, and the lesson of the Kathaaritsagara: it is the nature of

physicians to promote their wares and to respond to the desires of some patients to forestall old age indefinitely Recall Siranji's family, and the gift of the tonic: a drug was bought not as an agent of transformation but as a sign of Seva and the love of children. In contesting her children's gift, Siranji argued that it was a worthless tonic, that they needed to try again and not just to point to the abandoned big bottle on the shelf every time she complained of weakness.

Dasovas was offered as the cure for the senile climacteric: the drug that if given early enough will prevent further decline. It used a neuronal language synchronous with Alzheimer's to legitimate its vague model of efficacy. But its success may draw on other needs and other languages: the desire for the powerful gift, the quest for the neo-Rasayana tonic. Few physicians or families with whom I spoke were particularly convinced of Dasovas's promise. "We can," noted a Calcutta psychiatrist, "only keep trying." The children, he said, need to give something.

Dasovas was not cheap; if metabolic enhancement was but old wine in a new bottle, its being prescribed to those with marginal incomes would suggest pharmaceutical industry exploitation. But like the equally upmarket ginseng preparation Thirty Plus, Dasovas's price is a marker of its transactional value within the economy of the familial body. Whatever the ethics of Dasovas's availability or the sources of its popularity, Farmitalia is not suffering; on my last visit to Bombay before leaving India in 1990, the concern had just added a fifth car to its fleet of luxury vehicles. But to focus on the sale of upmarket tonics as sources of inequality in the construction of the senile body is to miss the point. Treating the senile body is itself a conceptual possibility only within a narrow window of the class spectrum. Medicalizing senility presumes a senescent geometry of balance, not weakness.

The Way to the Indies, to the Fountain of Youth

There were several roads into that part of Nagwa. One way to get in was to cross the new bridge over the Assi River, against whose banks the slum was poised, then to turn right at the lane between the Catholic Fathers' ashram and the house where the red-haired American evangelist rented a room. The ashram Fathers, unlike the evangelist and unlike the activist priest Paul, who lived farther in, didn't interact with Nagwa residents too often but gave gifts on occasion, which angered Paul as he felt it made people dependent and less likely to resist the ways in which they perpetuated their own marginality. John the evangelist had little success in spreading the Good News, in part a result of his lack of an ear for foreign language. The missionary girls up in Mussourie—the American headquarters with its mission language school where Mr. Mishra and his children had taught—would titter and call him Ji Han for the one Hindi word he had then been able to master and which he would in consequence interject incessantly, ji han, ji han , Yes. Repeated excitedly it sounded like braying. John's modest room overlooked the bridge, which had been built when the government moved the course of the Assi as a flood prevention measure. The river, little more than a trickle most of the year, had changed its course at least twice in the chronicles of the slum, the most recent being the result of the government effort and the first, according to a story I was once told in Nagwa, being the work of an angry rishi who cursed the once broad Assi after it had refused to speed up at his behest, the power of his voice reducing it to the diminutive stream that it remains.

A second approach was from the wealthier sections of Nagwa, off a road that brought one from the university. A colony of European expatriates, many of whom were students of Indian classical music, was nearby, prompting the Cardinal of Milan along with other curia officials to visit Nagwa and to conduct an inquiry into what attracted so many Catholic youth to the wellsprings of Ganga and

Kashi. His Eminence, accompanied by some of the ashram Fathers, passed through the slum en route, pausing briefly at the water pump across from the Ravi Das temple. Other luminaries have taken this way in, including erstwhile California governor and American presidential candidate Jerry Brown.

The approach into the slum most used by its residents led one through a series of lanes that began by the police station, or thana, at Lanka crossing. The police were also frequent visitors to the slum, but whereas the cardinal had limited his inquiries to the young the police had an interest in the old as well. A lot of young women in Nagwa worked in domestic service and were the prime suspects in local robberies of jewelry and gold, a few of which they may have abetted but most of which they clearly had not. Still, one often made oneself scarce after a robbery in an establishment where one worked, to avoid the trial-by-ordeal beatings of police custody. Thus the police interest in the parents of the absconders as sources of information about their children's whereabouts, and consequently the not-too-infrequent beatings of Nagwa elderly.

The "elderly": many in their late forties through early sixties, yet very much burh , old, in the terms of local knowledge. There were not too many persons in their seventies or older in Nagwa. Some people went back to relatives in their villages when they were too old to work; more died, failing to survive bouts of illness in the absence of sustained nutrition and health care by their children or others. It was a neighborhood of the young, a Shangri-La of the plains. A funny place to study old age, standing in queue behind the missionaries and politicians and police, each with their questions and each their good news: Yes.