I called the Woodbridge phone number in Ruby’s letter. Within a minute, Ratna and I had arranged for the three Chatterjees to visit my home the following evening. The long period of avoiding the moment had come to an end. After more than a year of intense correspondence that had joined us fast to each other over a distance of 14,000 miles, Ruby and I would finally be in the same room.
In her last letter before leaving for the United States, Ruby had described herself.
You have not seen me yet. I will give you an idea of how I look. I am somewhat overweight and wear thick glasses, and I wear Indian dress.
The description was, of course, completely consistent with everything she had previously written about herself, and conformed exactly with the image I kept in my mind each time I wrote to her. But now, with the moment imminent when I would actually lay eyes on Ruby, I unexpectedly found myself wondering. Many years earlier when I was in my twenties, unmarried, and working at Guy’s Hospital in London, an Indian colleague asked me to come to a party at the home of one of his friends, where I would be the only person not part of a group whose members had known one another since school days. It proved to be an evening of high excitement for me, filled with unanticipated pleasures of a sort I had never encountered before. Adorned in a variety of filmy and quite revealing saris, their dark eyes flashing with an inviting warmth that was irresistible to a lonely young surgical resident an ocean away from home, the alluring girls I met made me feel the most desirable man on the planet. Even in the absence of liquor made taboo by Hindu restriction, the very spiciness of the curry and other exotic foods magnified the aphrodisiac spiciness of the erotically charged atmosphere pervading that small Shepherd’s Bush apartment. There was just enough room to dance, providing that the partners held each other closely so as to occupy the smallest space possible. I took a turn with several of the girls, choosing from among the more enticingly forward of a bevy that seemed to me on that glorious evening the most beautiful, the most sensual, group of women I had ever seen gathered in one place. Holding one or another of them snuggled in my arms, I imagined that they wore nothing under their silken saris. I felt like a priapic satyr in a field of willing maidens. It was one of the most deliciously intoxicating evenings I had ever spent in my life, made more so by the tickling frustration of the impossibility, at least at the moment, of some consummation for my runaway libido.
I had often thought of that evening, especially as the onset of late middle age made bygone youth seem even more halcyon than it perhaps was. But, as paradoxical as it may sound, nothing had ever brought it so forcefully to mind as the thought of meeting Ruby Chatterjee. I had always been puzzled by the dissimilarity between her description of her ailments and decrepitude on the one hand, and the youthful clarity of her handwriting on the other. I looked again and again at my collection of her letters, and wondered more each time I fixed my eyes on them. Another perplexity was the description of her various and sometimes complicated travels, which would have seemed to require a hardiness not to be expected in a seventy-four-year-old woman with so many physical problems, added to what I judged to be a chronic moderate depression.
All in all, now at the last minute, I began to be concerned that I might have let myself in for a scam. I had more than once heard tales of seductive and determined women inveigling their way into the presence and eventually the bed of an unsuspecting writer upon whom they had set their sights. The thought that this might be about to happen to me was worrisome, but perversely pleasing as well. As so many husbands do when wanting to purge themselves of an enticing fantasy, I told my wife of my unease. “What can I do,” I asked in a voice I believed to be sufficiently plaintive and sincere that she would think I looked on the possibility with unmitigated horror, “if she turns out to be a beautiful young woman wearing a sari and no underwear? This could be a trick, you know.” Sarah threw her head back and laughed loudly, with a sound and look that revealed not only her dismissal of such a possibility, but also that she was on to me. “You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?” she teased mercilessly. “Just forget about the whole thing. She’ll be exactly what she says she is.”
And of course, Sarah was right. Ruby stood there in the entranceway as I opened the door on the following evening, looking as though she had been blinded by the light. She was more than “somewhat” overweight, her glasses were thicker than just “thick,” and she wore Indian dress, as did Ratna. She was, in fact, just as she had portrayed herself, but more so. Ruby was a short, plump Indian woman in Coke-bottle glasses and a sari. But more important, she was my friend Ruby, with whom I had shared so much.
Despite what might be inferred from the foregoing description of her appearance, there was a distinct elegance about this elderly woman who stood with such uncertainty in my doorway, as there was about her son and daughter-in-law. Rames and Ratna were a handsome and self-assured couple, as I had somehow known they would be. My wife and I welcomed them into the house with a warmth I had not anticipated during the weeks of shilly-shallying prior to this moment. Now at this climactic instant in our relationship, I was immensely pleased that Ruby and I were finally together.
The group of us stood on the threshold—literally and figuratively on the threshold—for only a few moments, until an initial awkwardness faded. I felt as though I were a guide to a maharani’s retinue as I ushered the Chatterjees through the central hall of my house and out onto the screened sunporch overlooking Sarah’s backyard garden. Ruby took a place beside me on the couch, turned her body in my direction, and began to stare wordlessly at me through lenses so thick that I could barely see her eyes. She hardly spoke for the two hours we were together. As the rest of us sipped our tea, munched on our little cakes, and kept up a lively chatter about matters great and small—mostly small—she sat transfixed as though in a spell, in awe less of me, I think, than of the moment. She appeared to be so overwhelmed by the actuality of having finally reached this time and place that the beautifully articulate gift of expression capable of composing the challenging thoughts in her letters had simply been shut down by the torrent of overpowering emotions arising from some deep place within her.
Or perhaps Ruby had so much to say and so many thoughts to bring forth that the very profusion of words was clogging the channel through which they were to flow; or perhaps the closeness and the moment were strangling an ability to communicate that could make itself known only from the safety of distance and an effortless spontaneity of thinking unimpeded by the actual presence of its intended recipient.
Ruby, still in Woodbridge, would later write to say that she had wanted to speak of so many things that evening, but “I preferred listening to what you were saying,” which was the only sentence she has ever written, before or since, that I cannot bring myself to believe. Quite obviously, she had been mesmerized by the aura built up in her mind, and no amount of her rationalizing could hide it. Her first letter came only a few days after the visit, and expressed a truth I had not perceived until I read it on the small sheet of notepaper. Indeed, it was the essence of any relationship that has meaning to both who enter into it. “You have given me so much yet you have never thought that you were doing me a favor. And I have taken from you, but did not feel that I was indebted to you. It is as if the way of Nature.”
Ruby and I had been talking to each other through the mails for more than a year. On the face of it, an outsider might think that my role was the dominant one, but that would be erroneous. True, I was in a kind of mentoring, or—to use the word with which she had begun our correspondence—a guiding, role. But every mentor and every counselor must surely know that such bonds form a two-way street, as meaningful at one end as at the other. Articulated in Ruby’s letter was a truth I had intuited from the beginning, but needed to see written there in words so that I could fully appreciate its value: The relationships that sustain us are relationships of mutual giving; though the giving may at first glance seem to flow mostly in one direction, such an impression, i
f subjected to thought and scrutiny, is seen to be mistaken. When Leo Cooney talks about the critical importance of relationships with other people, implicit in his viewpoint is the notion of contributing as much as one receives, in whatever form it manifests.
If there is a single bestowal we need from others in order to maintain a sense of self-worth, it is surely the gift of understanding. We all want, we all need, to be understood. It is when others seem not to understand what we are that we question our worth to them, and in consequence our worth to ourselves. No one can live a solitary or a lonely old age when feeling understood by those who matter in his or her life.
The reason Ruby heard so well what I had to say in those initial letters was that she could already tell not only that I was taking her seriously but that she was being understood. One does not care to understand another person if one does not care for that other. That this is on some level clear to both parties was the subtext of Ruby’s words in this most recent letter. The notion of doing favors, or being indebted, has no place in such a bond. Had I ever needed evidence that it was not my words per se but rather the relationship we were developing that was the instrumental factor in changing her mind about the value of her life, the proof was there in the three sentences of this letter.
And what had Ruby given me in return? “In return” is not the issue. There is no quid pro quo when considerations arise from a mutuality of regard. From her first letter, I had sensed in Ruby a kindredness, a concern with issues with which I had dealt in How We Die, specifically the concept of the value of life. She had become in our letters a partner in my ruminations, a medium of responsiveness to my thought. In these letters, I had found a friend who understood why I felt as I did. Here, there were no favors, and no indebtedness.
I am going on at length about this matter because it seems to me that much of the unhappiness associated with the older years is the unhappiness of not feeling understood. So much of the reward and vibrancy of the older years, on the other hand, is associated with being understood by other men and women about whose opinions we care. That was—and continues to be more than a decade later—the essence of what Ruby and I did for each other.
My two hours with Ruby Chatterjee on that sultry August evening in 1995 was the only meeting we ever had. But our correspondence continues.
And so does Ruby.
In the eleven years since we met in 1995, Ruby and I have exchanged many letters, and many thoughts as well. Rames and Ratna now live in Colorado, and Ruby has visited them in one or another of their American homes a total of eight times. During the course of several of these visits, she has traveled with them from Connecticut or Colorado to California, Utah, Chicago, North Carolina, Niagara Falls, and perhaps some other places she has not mentioned to me. In 2000, when she was seventy-nine, she traveled alone to visit her younger granddaughter in the United Kingdom, where she is studying medicine at Leicester. A year earlier, Ruby spent two weeks in Dubai (“It is a pity that the women are still behind the curtains”), again traveling alone. On six separate occasions she has made the thousand-mile journey to Delhi to visit her niece, most recently at the age of eighty-three.
During this time, Ruby’s health has deteriorated somewhat with increasing age, but only slowly. Her eyesight and hearing are worsening, as is her arthritis. In the late 1960s, chronic arterial obstruction to her lower extremities began to cause calf pain when she walked, but this eventually cleared without needing an operation; she underwent gallbladder and bile duct surgery in 2003; and was treated for a rhythm disorder of the heart in 2004.
And through it all, Ruby’s spirit has remained indomitable. I have never again gotten a letter in which she ruminates about death. On the contrary, some of her writings are nothing less than inspiring. When I wished her peace and contentment on the New Year of 1996, she replied, “Well, I do feel quite content and at peace.” Soon after, she wrote, “The days pass as usual with happenings, some of which make me happy and some of which I have to ignore. I look forward to being with those whose company gives me infinite pleasure.”
In the winter of 1997, Ruby was trying to decide which of two fascinating destinations she should choose, whether Dubai or Santiniketan, the site of a school founded by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. But leaving Calcutta proved to be impossible at that time, because she needed to oversee the extensive work required to refurbish a new apartment into which she was moving. When she told me of this, I wrote, “It does my heart good to read of your trying to decide whether to visit Dubai, Santiniketan, or some other nifty place. Coming from a woman who was planning to leap off the end of the earth only a few years ago, all of this is very happy-making for me. As you can see, there is a great deal to live for, and plenty of pleasure for yourself and others.”
Some of our letters are newsy, some more thoughtful, and some are both. During these past eleven years we have exchanged details of travels, holidays, the births of grandchildren, world affairs, and cabbages and kings. Just before Ruby’s eighty-first birthday in 2002, she wrote to me,
In my younger days, when I was thirty or thirty-five years old, I always thought that I would never live to cross sixty. But I have crossed sixty, seventy, even eighty. Death has perhaps forgotten me. However, in spite of minor problems, life still has its charms.
Twelve years ago, Ruby Chatterjee came face-to-face with the existential crisis whose various forms have afflicted so many, as the later years become the present years. Despite her expressed certainty that death was the correct path for her, the fact that she reached out to another human being is evidence that, somewhere deep in her heart, she was nevertheless seeking to be dissuaded, seeking some reassurance that life was still worth living. She was able to find that reassurance in the realization that she was someone of value to others, as almost all of us are. Except under rare circumstances, the sense of aloneness is mistaken. And even in those unique situations in which it is a reality, a reorientation of perspective can create new relationships and new bonds, and strengthen old ones. A fresh look may even bring fresh realizations related to Ruby’s meaning when she, in understatement, writes, “Life still has its charms.” These charms are to be found everywhere. Like the wildflowers we have never before noticed as we walk through a familiar field, they are ours if we are but willing to look at them. And they are ours for the picking, at any age.
Early in the writing of this book, I had a letter from Ruby, at that time eighty-four years old, telling me that she would not be traveling to the United States in 2005, because she was not feeling well, and her physician suspected that she was developing early Parkinson’s disease. This setback was particularly disappointing to her because she had planned to visit Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, with Rames and Ratna.
Rames says it is a beautiful place. But too much traveling does not suit me anymore. I had been to Delhi in June for a month. I cannot do more than that. Here I keep myself busy with household work and go out for short walks.
These lines represented the first time that Ruby had ever given any indication that she might be slowing down. Reading them, I found myself reflecting on our long friendship, and then turning back to thoughts of its beginnings and its evolution, as the evolution was traceable not only in my memory but in her letters. As I read through them one by one, it seemed that the story they told was a kind of cautionary tale in reverse—a tale whose lesson is hope. Ruby overcame the despondency of pessimism and morbid introspection. In time, death forgot her because she forgot death. Thoughts of death were dispersed when she considered the richness that is life. In one of her letters, I found her translation of a quote from Tagore.
“When I gaze at the infinity that is you, and lose myself in its beauty and vastness, Death and pain have no meaning, they are insignificant.
“But when I turn away from you and centre on myself, Death looms large and pain overwhelms me.”
Only once in all of our correspondence has Ruby ever written of faith or belief in God, which
so motivated the philosophy of Tagore. In a letter of April 2006, she described the love and kindness that she has found in human relationships, and added, “That is why I have never needed to turn to religion. I find plenty of these humane qualities in people around me. This is known as godliness. I am happy.” In the context of the letter in which the poet is quoted, it is clear that “you” refers not to a deity but to the divine power manifest in nature and in life: its vastness, its beauty, and its ongoing essence for all humankind. The meaning she has found in Tagore’s verse is unmistakable, and it is her own.
After reading all of our letters in sequence, I wrote to Ruby, because that cautionary tale in reverse is a tale for everyone who has felt the sort of despair that made her lose sight of the significance of her life. I told her of this book, on whose writing I had embarked, and asked for her help.
I want to address a chapter of my book to people who find themselves overcome by despair as they reach their later years; people who are beset with such physical problems as you were, and perhaps with sadness and depression as well; people who believe that they can no longer be of usefulness to others; people who feel that the effort to go on is not worth making; in short, people who, like yourself, have reached a point where they would prefer not being alive.
The Art of Aging Page 15