At the middle of the night, the phone rang and woke her. After picking it up, she fumbled for her reading glasses,the glasses that had become her eyes to the world.It felt as if decades had slipped away like sand through the fingers, while the contents of the bedside table had slowly morphed into things that age had brought, but not necessarily to the mind.
In the twenties, the bedside table was adorned with fashion magazines. The phone was never by the bedside; it was the most important person in the living room, almost like an awaited guest, responded to by running footsteps every time it rang. The table lamp sat away in the corner, and the bedroom switches were only by the door. There was no need for anything else.
Then came the thirties. The alarm clock arrived, because the growing children needed to be woken up. But before them, it was a sleepwalk to the kitchen to prepare the tiffins. The clock found company in a notebook and pencil, the list of errands weighing heavily on the mind.
The forties added reading glasses, as the arms seemed to grow shorter and shorter when trying to tried to read the newspaper. Suddenly, the table space felt crowded.
The forties did something else too. They brought the philosophy of life to the bedside. The fashion magazines gave way to serious books. The forties that arrive with growing age are also punctuated by the transit of Saturn. When Saturn transits towards its radical position for the second time, it seems to turn the questions inward. He has a way of throwing us off gear. Saturn slows us down, removes the distractions, and leaves us alone with the questions we have been too busy to ask. The entire being is thrown into a state of questioning. He asks the questions we have spent years avoiding.
Are we where we wanted to be?
Is this the life we chose, or the life that simply happened to us?
Are we happy, or have we merely become good at carrying on?
Suddenly, the familiar begins to feel unfamiliar. The carefully assembled life starts to come apart at its seams. What once seemed certain is questioned. What once seemed permanent begins to feel negotiable. Some quit jobs that had long stopped giving them meaning. Some take sabbaticals, hoping that break will help them find themselves again. Some marriages begin to crack when one discovers that the co-passenger on the journey no longer wishes to travel in the same direction. Some seek escape in places and people, outside the life they have built.
The reading glasses now lie beside migraine tablets, self-help books and a water bottle. The objects are no longer reminders of what we want to become, but of what we have become.
Something is drying inside.
The space on the table and the space in the mind are both cramped.
And then came the fifties.
The fifties not only filled the table; they also cleared some space in the mind. The girl-talk no longer entertained. The fake smiles and crowded social calendars slowly began to lose their hold. There were fewer invitations, fewer late nights, fewer reasons to be everywhere. The self, finally, took over. The blacks became blacker and the whites whiter. There was less patience for the grey. And then, one day, the bedside table acquired another resident.
A photograph.
