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| Sunday, 29 January 2006 |
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Young at hundred by Aditha Dissanayake
It's natural I suppose that when you are twenty you should see thirty as really old, and when you reach thirty you feel thirty is okay but forty is old. Then in next to no time, when you find you have reached forty, you feel fifty is really, really old, and so on... till you reach hundred! How would you feel when you are hundred? Would you feel hundred is not that old but hundred and twenty is? Who knows Who else but Thangamma Thangarajah, who turned hundred on January 9, would know? Though partly paralysed today, and hard of hearing, Thangamma is as alert as any hundred year old could be. She eats a normal diet of bread or cereal for breakfast, rice and curry for lunch, string-hoppers for dinner and is a vegetarian on Tuesdays and Fridays. She sits on a straight-backed chair in the sitting room every morning from around 9.30 to 12.30, has lunch, takes a nap and spends her evenings watching TV. "She is so alert that at around eleven in the morning she reminds us to start preparing lunch" (Haal lipe thiyanna welawa hari) says her eldest daughter, Jaya, with whom she has been living ever since her husband passed away. Her life Born on January 9, 1906, in Negombo after her marriage to K. S. Thangarajah, a station master, she had lived all over the country, moving herself and her children wherever her husband was transferred to. Today, as th e mother of two sons and two daughters with eleven grandchildren and ten great grandchildren, her youngest daughter Pushpa says "She looked after us and our children so well we are indebted to her for the rest of our lives". Secret "Mrs. Thangarajah, what is the secret behind your longevity?" I ask her kneeling beside her wheelchair, in the sitting room of Jaya's house in Nugegoda. When we realise no answer is forthcoming, Pushpa suggests "Shout into her left ear" I repeat my question in the loudest decibels my vocal chords can muster. This time she realises I am asking her a question, smiles and says "I can't hear you" (Ahenne na). I turn towards her daughters. Do they know the secret? Pushpa is prompt with the answer. "A clear conscience".Probably. Or could it be the exciting life she had led, visiting all her children and grandchildren, scattered all over the world, teaching their foreign wives how to prepare Sri Lankan dishes, or could it be the glasses of wine she enjoys occasionally, even today? As for finding out, if at hundred you feel hundred is not really old... I give up shouting into Thangamma's left ear. She doesn't hear me. Guess I will have to wait to find out. |
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