Old age, called euphemistically ‘the golden time of life’, brings in its trail a host of challenges, foremost being forgetfulness.
The golden period begins when you are so close to the horizon of your life’s setting sun that every thing looks golden, like in the dream of king Midas.
Out of sheer politeness you would be called ‘senior citizen’, instead of ‘old coot’ or ‘old goat’
With old age comes the wealth of experience, sobriety, intellectual subtlety, and what not. Of course in your own mind! But, in the American society, in particular, you may be segregated and treated like contraband. Whatever the case, you find that you had undoubtedly started losing the erstwhile command on your memory, short-term memory particularly.
If you start hunting for your glasses, or your car keys, one can make an allowance for that. But, when you cannot remember where you had parked your car at the shopping mall, and keep walking for an hour or so between rows and rows of cars without sighting your own, you admit to yourself that you are indeed one forgetful old coot.
Psychiatrists assure us that increased forgetting of people’s names, driving directions or where you have kept your keys, is a part of normal aging.
There is another kind of forgetfulness that afflicts people who are still young. Just as excessive distractibility -a tendency of the mind to wander while reading a book, talking to someone, or even playing a game- produces scatter-brains, excessive faculty to concentrate on just one subject to the exclusion of every thing else produces the absent-minded professors.
This uncanny trait of hyperfocus in a former office colleague, a famous poet and scholar, landed him in situations highly embarrassing and even hurtful for him but quite funny for others. Out of sheer respect for his outstanding talent and attainments, I would not like to mention his name but would refer to him as Mr. X.
Once he created a terrific traffic jam in Saddar, Karachi. That was in the late fifties when he was not even forty. He had stopped his car at the red light and soon went into the poetic trance of composing a ‘ghazal’. The light turned green, red again and green once more. Cars, buses, motor rikshaws were all tooting their horns: X Sahib was concentrating on his couplet, impervious to all the noise and rumpus. The Klashnikov culture was still a feature of the remote future, or he would have then and there become history. A policeman finally awoke him from his reverie.
He liked to take his tea with lemon juice. So, he used to carry a lemon or two in his pocket. Once, when tea was served to him, he put his hand in his pocket to fetch the lemon: what actually came out in his hand was a tomato.
“When I opened the refrigerator this morning to take a couple of lemons, I had a sudden poetic inspiration; I got the right Qafia for the couplet, but the wrong lemon for my tea. I will have to ask my wife to keep the tomatoes and lemons in quite separate compartments”, he said.
Once after a visit to a colleague’s flat on Bunder Rd, he discovered that his car was not parked down stairs. He started tracing his movements after leaving the office that afternoon. He recalled that he had been to the Royal Book Publishers, then to his tailor and to a fruit merchant before reaching the flat. He was driven to these places in the reverse order. The car was sitting near the publisher’s office. Then he discovers that he had no keys. Evidently, he had walked all the way playing with the key chain in rhythm to the verses he was composing. When the train of his musing was disturbed by some mundane interference, he no longer needed the rhythmic noise of the key chain. The keys were, after much search, found at the counter of the fruit shop where he said he had kept them carefully to make payment but had as carefully forgotten to pick them up.
My office moved to Rawalpindi in 1960. His office was still in Karachi. He called me to say that he had an important matter to discuss with me the next day when he was reaching Pindi. He came and I made the mistake of asking him how far he had gone with his research work. He spoke for about an hour on the subject he was then concentrating on. The depth of his knowledge astonished me. He then looked at his watch and remembered, fortunately, that he had a plane to catch for his return journey in about an hour. He left in a hurry without a word about the ‘important’ matter he had come all the way from Karachi to discuss with me.
He had a severe car accident in Karachi not long after retirement and was admitted to Liaquat National Hospital for treatment. My brother, who was at that time the director of the hospital, informed me later that the basic cause of the accident was his forgetfulness.
This abnormal faculty of concentration has produced many an absented-minded professors -real or fictitious. Here are some funny pieces attributed to the fictitious professor in just one book.
Reporter: What is the Professor’s research work?
Housekeeper: It consists principally of hunting for his spectacles.
So you use three pairs of glasses, Prof.?
Yes, one pair for long sight, one pair for short sight, and the third to look for the other two.
Friend: Ah, Prof. I hear your wife has had twins. Boys or girls?
Prof.: Well, I believe one is a girl, and one a boy, but it may be the other way around.
Prof.: Give me some prepared monacetic-acidester of salicylic acid.
Pharmacist: Do you mean aspirin?
Prof.: That is right! I can never think of that name.
Waiter: Haven’t you forgotten something, Sir?
Prof.: Why, I thought I gave you the customary tip.
Waiter: You did, Sir, but you forgot to eat.
Prof.: I forgot to take my umbrella this morning.
Wife: When did you miss it?
Prof.: When I reached up to close it after the rain had stopped.
Bewildered Prof. on looking into hairbrush - Guess I need a shave.
Prof.: (Going around in a revolving door). Bless me! I can’t remember whether I am going in or coming out
When they pulled the half-drowned professor from the water, he sputtered: ‘How exasperating! I’ve just recalled that I can swim.’
I should stop here about the absent-minded professors and revert to my own tale of forgetfulness. I went recently on a vacation to the East Coast to forget things -and as soon as I opened the luggage I realized I had succeeded. There was no underwear, no tie for the suits, and no spare sock!
I have to tell you something important and amusing. But, let me first attend to the phone that is crying like a hypersensitive baby which has just wetted its diaper. That was a wrong number call. The old lady had forgotten the right number. When I mentioned to her that she had dialed the wrong number, she protested: “If I had dialed the wrong number why did you pick it up?”
…Now, what I wanted to talk to you about is ...it is... Oh! I forgot! So long. Arifhussaini@hotmail.com