Lost At The Fair

During the Kumbh Mela, while Devraha Baba gave his darshan, local newspapers contained several reports of lost old people.^[9] Distraught children were interviewed; their parents had wandered off and were nowhere to be found. Reporters described the plight of the children, wandering among the hundreds of thousands at the fair, looking for their mother or father. Many Banarsis were cynical about such stories of missing parents. The many kasivasi old people of the city, they suggested, did not come there solely out of a desire to die in holy Kashi, far from their land and their family. Children abandon their parents, people knew, sometimes just dumping them at the station. Whether or not it was a Forest of Bliss, no old householder would willingly renounce his or her home for Varanasi.

The lost old person was a familiar figure on television news. Local stations in the 1980s were given airtime to show photos of missing persons of all ages and describe their last known whereabouts; frequently, such missing persons were elderly. Their stories were similar: a family from a village or small town visits a big city The old person wanders and gets lost in unfamiliar surroundings. The children consult the police; a report is filed. The old person is seldom found. When pressed by reporters, families of such persons noted that the lost person was old and mentally weak. The police inspector in the old city of Delhi responsible for missing persons concurred, telling me that most of his missing elderly cases were people

with a "mental defect." Yet he also noted that many lost old persons in Delhi were eventually found at or near train stations, reinforcing the Banarsi hermeneutic of suspicion. "But I don't know for certain," he concluded. "Although we record and report these cases, our work is with the children." The sisters from Mother Teresa's Varanasi ashram, where Dulari from Nagwa eventually moved, regularly combed the train stations of the city for destitute old and sick people. They, too, agreed with local accusation: a son brings his mother on pilgrimage to Kashi and "loses" her at the train station, leaving her to die, liberated.

"You didn't speak of the loneliness of old people," the Vasant College faculty had told me. The wanderer wanders because he has been abandoned; the bakbak dog lady barks because she has no one. The Bad Family soaks up all meaning. Neither the policeman nor the nuns, whatever their institutional concerns with the traffic in children or Christians, were wrong. Wandering and being lost point in several directions. The suffering old body is simultaneously an autonomous entity in physical decline and a socially constituted entity in political decline. Both illuminate why so many lost old people get on television news. Old people may get disoriented, and confused; old people may be at greater risk for being neglected or abandoned by their younger relations. And old people are good to think with: their abjection becomes a sign that fixes the blame for the decay in the order of things, assigns it to bad children, an exploitative society, the seductions of modernity, the cruelties of Western culture. And perhaps, if demographic transitions take hold in north India and if certain kinds of medical knowledge become more useful, the decay in the order of things can be laid at the door of the brain, the cell, and the gene.

Though a century from now a different paradigm may have replaced it, I am of my time and irrevocably committed to the usefulness of Alzheimer's as an explanation for a set of behaviors contingently demarcated and grouped as dementia. But invoking Alzheimer's within the globalizing discursive milieu of Alzheimer's hell asserts that the cognitively organized clinical syndrome it represents is in every case the most real and relevant representation of what might be at stake. Invoking Alzheimer's asserts far more, asserts enough to send Janet Adkins into that final embrace with Dr. Kevorkian in the Michigan trailer park. Plaques and tangles point to embodied processes, however overdetermined their figuration of indelibility and plenitude, but they are not the font of all suffering nor of the meaning of a mindful body facing its decline. Alzheimer's ideology posits normal aging against total and unremitting pathology; in so doing, it both denies the complex experience and the personhood of the old persons it would represent and shifts attention away from the social origins of much of the weakness of the old.

Like suspicions as to how one gets "lost" at the fair, debates on Kevorkian have been a way for the American media and its various experts to raise the issue of a social constitution of a dying space. Unlike the triumphalist narrative of Adkins's authorizing her death, the 1996 case of Gerard Klooster, a retired physician from the San Francisco area diagnosed with dementia whose wife had considered the services of Dr. Kevorkian, was reported with greater ambivalence. One of

Klooster's children, also a physician, spirited his father away from the rest of the family when he became convinced they were trying to kill him, and the case ended up in the courts. Unlike Janet Adkins, Gerard Klooster could not offer a voice in the moment of its own extinction, and the question of assisted suicide versus forced euthanasia could not be resolved. The irony of the tears of the other victim, usually restricted to tabloid reality, could here break through into the mainstream press.^[10]

As sorts of places to be abandoned, gerontopoli like Varanasi or Allahabad are different from the embrace of Dr. Kevorkian, if only in the ideology of renunciation they seem to embody, the radical frame by which families can divest themselves of the expectations of Seva . But Kevorkian's relationship to the disenchantment of the dying space is anything but obvious. In the summer of 1996, he responded to his critics in an address to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Against concerns that he and his various instruments of assisted suicide—the "Thanatron" and later the "Mercitron"—promised a less dignified death than his advocates claimed, the Michigan doctor responded:

Well let's just take what people think is a dignified death. Christ. Was that a dignified death? Do you think it's dignified to hang from wood with nails through your hands and feet bleeding , hang for three or four days slowly dying , with people jabbing spears into your side, and people jeering you? Do you think that's dignified? Not by a long shot. Had Christ died in my van, with people around Him who loved Him, the way it was, it would be far more dignified. In my rusty van .^[11]

The space of Kevorkian-death is not that of a household, but neither is it the modern institution of the hospital or the institutions—the legislature, the judiciary, the media, the church—which Kevorkian sees as ranged against him, sustaining the hospital's algorithms^[12] of alienated machine death. Neither home nor hospital work as dying spaces here, but a middling space in between, characterized by an accessible pioneer ethos of the trailer-park wild, the rusty-van West, and the trash technology of tubes and gas masks and crazy pathologists who get off designing ever simpler and less alienating death machines. Jesus is reclaimed for this new world, but not the Crucifixion, not the resistance of suffering and death to their rational management. Kevorkian's rusty van offers a bloodless Pietà , a seamless move from life to the arms of the Mercitron, Mother of Death. Old age vanishes.

Perhaps the exemplary figure of this new bloodless comfort at the American end of the millennium is not Doctor Death but the man I see as his counterpart, a Doctor Life fashioning not middling death but middling life, and not out of tubes and the pioneer West, but out of exotic Indian wisdom, the language of hormones and genes, and the imagined Arthurian and pagan past of whiteness. Deepak Chopra, the great purveyor of neo-Rasayana to the world, in book after best-selling book and in repeatedly broadcast television shows and videos and motivational seminars, offers Unconditional Life and an Ageless Body, Timeless Mind .^[13] His 1990s writing has turned ever-more toward Arthurian and other European imag-

ined pasts of enchantment, integrating these with the ancient truths of Ayurveda.^[14] Life and death, within Chopra's world of the ambient, are a nondualist blur, and middle-aged adults make their quietus by both ignoring and embracing decay yet seemingly never having to suffer it. Kevorkian-death and Chopra-life refashion the ends of time and the body; emptying sickness and frailty and confusion of any presence.

That a migrant from India can brilliantly recommodify his heritage into such a gift of no aging seems telling, at the close of the century amid the World Bank and Government of India's efforts to achieve a far greater articulation of India into the global market. Rishis travel well, though in the process they seem, like sage Chyavana, to grow younger. Chopra began his New Age career by trying to help his guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to bring Ayurveda to America. But at some point he seems to have outgrown Maharishi, and the figure most Americans associate with Ayurveda is not a white-bearded old rishi but his former disciple, the middle-aged Chopra, in business suit or leisure wear. Chopra offers an India without guilt, and for those who would embrace the other India, there is always Mother Teresa, ready like the Mercitron to make Third World death a good death. The Indian anthropologist at Zagreb could offer the good family against the cold biologism of the available West, though back at home the Bad Family awaited, and the absence to which it tried to speak. To that absence and to several of its own, such a West could in turn offer Reason, and Mercy.