Dogs And Old Men

In his well-known story "Burhi Kaki " ("Old Aunt"), Premchand tells of an unnamed elderly aunt, a childless widow, whose nephew Buddhiram ceases to care for her once she makes over her property to him. Like Manga, the old aunt suffers because she has "no one," but though she is treated like a pagli she does not become one. Her two grandnephews persecute her because "children have a natural antipathy to the old": "One would pinch her and flee; the other would douse her with water. Auntie would shriek and start to cry. But it was well known that she only cried for food, so no one would have paid attention to her grief and cries of distress."

The aunt is reduced to a voice identified solely with her demands upon her family for food; she is not heard otherwise. She is treated like a pagli but her voice, within domestic space, never threatens to become inhuman. The conflict between the sas and bahu is lifelong. Though the aunt is marginalized, she remains conceived by her relations as an active combatant in the chapati wars, in the contested economy of the hearth. The domestic old woman is here less a dog than a child. In the context of the old aunt, Premchand notes that "old age is often a return to childhood." Childhood is here a return to a less abject orality than that of the dog, to the mind's identification with the mouth and its paired functions of eating and lament: "The old aunt had no effort left for anything save the pleasures of the tongue, and to attract attention to her troubles she had no means but to cry."^[18] The child suggests the inversion of power and of role, but it remains within the language of kinship, within the space of domestic logic.

Buddhiram organizes a feast to celebrate his son's engagement ceremony, or tilak. The old aunt is beside herself smelling all the food being prepared. But she is afraid she'll incur her nephew's wife's wrath if she should step near the hearth.

She cannot control herself, however, and twice comes out of her room at inappropriate times to ask for a puri , a piece of bread. Both times she is soundly scolded and sent back without anything, and in the end she is forgotten about. Her grandniece, the one family member sympathetic to her, leads her during the night to the soiled plates of the guests, where the old Brahman aunt stuffs the polluted leftovers into her mouth. She has at last become a beast. Her nephew's wife discovers her there, and at last recognizes the Bad Family in the unexpected image of the dog. The story ends not in the chaos of the voice and then death, but in the return from second childhood toward a reclaimed adulthood. The voice of the old aunt comes again to represent her reasonable needs and claims to status and is no longer art icon of an infinite desire. Once transactional flows are restored, once the nephew's wife allows the Bad Family to heal, the question of second childhood recedes.

As old kasivasi women are more frequently the dogs of the interstice than are old babas; old men are more frequently the dogs of domestic space. Mausaji was frequently described as a dog by his family in Chittupur: eating, shitting, pissing, barking. The identification of the old man with the dog recurs in classical Puranic and Ayurvedic descriptions of old age. When the old man—who had symbolically maintained his youth, "sixty years young," against the weakness of the son—finally does fall into powerless decrepitude, the move from head of household to supplicant conveys a far more abject reality than the cyclical politics of bahu and sas . Old men who give up household power are described in the Bhagavata Purana :

Being unable to maintain his family, the unfortunate fellow, whose all attempts have ended in failure, becomes destitute of wealth and miserable. Being at a loss to know what to do; the wretch goes on brooding and sighing. Just as miserly farmers neglect old (and hence useless bulls), his wife and others do not treat him with respect as before, as he has become incapable of maintaining them. . . . He is now nourished by those whom he had brought up. He stays in the house like a dog eating what is contemptuously thrown to him.^[19]

In the Bengali quarter, an old friend of mine had announced along with Bijay his interest in helping me find crazy old people. Bijay "realized" the appropriateness of the Dog Lady within several days, but my friend Bishwanath waited six months before suggesting one day that I visit his maternal grandfather, his dadu who talked funny in a way he thought I would find interesting. When the invitation came, I had already developed my little symbolic interactionist tool kit and decided without too much reflection that Dadu's sahi nahin voice had of course suggested the threat of bad Seva to his family, and my being introduced to him thus carried some risk. I was less interested in plumbing the violence and grace surrounding a friendship.

There was another issue. That I was introduced to Dadu at all may have had to do in part with the different connotations within domestic space of the weak old voice across gender. I was introduced by friends to far more "not right"—voiced old men than old women. A family was more often on the defensive about the nature

of an old woman's voice. Much might explain such an "observation," but within the sorts of differently gendered semantic networks I was exploring I found the more naturalized state of domestic old men being-the-dog at least a partial way into thinking about their slightly diminished threat of bad Seva . To frame the difference another way: old men were less ambivalently placed within a dying space than were old women.

At a friend's anniversary party in New Delhi, a rather drunk businessman in his fifties from Chandigarh told me a story about aging and becoming a dog. He approached me and asked me what I studied, and I answered "senility." He said: "You know what we call this here. . . ."

"Sathiyana " I finished his sentence for him, eager to demonstrate some cultural legitimacy. "Yes," he said, although he was about to offer a different answer and tried the question again. "But in Punjab, do you know that we say . . ." "Sattar-bahattar ," I jumped the gun again. "Yes." He paused. "And why do you think there is a twelve-year difference between the U.P.-walas and Biharis and the Punjabis . . .?" A group had gathered by then, and we laughed at the joke, although we never did articulate just what that difference might be. The man went on to bring up the Bengali term "bahatture " as well, and the group played with the ethnic distinctions the terms allowed. A Bengali man joined the group and began to explain the distinction between the Bengali and Hindi terms through elaborate references to astrology and the life cycle. His explanation went on for some time, and people began to drift away until the first man jumped in with a joke:

When God was handing out life spans to all the creatures of the world, they all stood in line. Each animal was handed a packet of forty years. For this animal, for that one. All received the same amount. Last in line was man, and God handed him a packet with forty years in it, too. I'm sorry, said God, but that's all I have left. You're last in line. I'm all out of years to give.

But the ox said to man, "I really don't want forty years of hard labor. I'll be glad to give you twenty of mine.

And then the dog said, "And my life isn't worth forty years. I'll give you twenty, too."

Finally, the monkey too decided that forty years of hopping about trees was more than enough and gave twenty of his years to man.

So now man had a life span of one hundred years.

For the first forty years of our life, therefore, we are truly men—the years God gave to us.

Then, from forty to sixty, we are living the years of the ox, working for the wife, for our sons, supporting everyone else in the family, nothing for oneself.

Then, from sixty to eighy, we are a dog! [He laughed.] The son asks us to mind the house, mind the children—"We're going out." And so we stay at home, guarding the house. And barking: Always asking for this or that, again and again and again. Like the dog.

And then, from eighty to one hundred, we're living the monkey's years, without teeth, without speech, just making the motions of being human.

A man's aging is illustrated through a bestiary. Against the cosmic theories of asiramadharma the other man was offering, the first man offers a refiguring of the life course in terms of three distinct but each unpleasant forms of dehumanization. Adulthood here peaks at forty, envisioned as the burden of carrying along one's wife and weak sons. Sixty. remains the time of political inversion, when the meaning of debility shifts from the burden of the powerful (the father as ox) to the subordinate duties of the grandfather (the father as dog). After sixty, the voice becomes central, the abject request of the man forced to beg from his own son. At eighty, a different meaning of senility is offered, not the political abjection of the dog, but the far more embodied decay of the voiceless old man, for whom the request has degenerated thoroughly into meaninglessness: the monkey.

Dogs, within the bestiary of human abjection, draw upon particular genealogies of the gift. In a lengthy enumeration of the duties of the mature householder, the Bhagavata Purana places the food-giver at the center of the cosmos. All creatures are his children: "One should look upon beasts, camels, donkeys, monkeys, rats, serpents, birds and flies like one's own sons." One should allow, the text suggests, these animals access to one's house and fields. Rats and snakes and monkeys, like sons, take. Beyond taking, the text goes to define a specific category of those who must be given to: "He should duly share his objects of enjoyment with all down to dogs, sinners and people belonging to the lowest strata of the society."^[20] Dogs are the embodiments of those too degraded even to take, within a gendered mode of exchange between fathers and sons in which the gift does not rehumanize, as it does for Premchand's Old Aunt, but marks the end of manhood and thus one's humanity.