Behaviour: Old Parents; Unlovingly Yours

Harassed by their son and daughter-in-law, the aged Dalals jumped to death in Mumbai. Others like them live on, enduring the humiliation.

From the picturesque sweep of Marine Drive, they seem to reach for the heavens -- three stately skyscrapers set atop the lush affluence of Mumbai's Malabar Hill. The name: Grand Paradi. For the Dalals, Vasudev and Tara, both 76, who lived on the eighth floor of B wing, it was anything but the "lofty paradise".

"My pension is peanuts, and so is my value to my wife and children."
J.C. KAPOOR, 69, Retired Army Officer, CHANDIGARH

While stepping out of his Sector 15 home, Lt-Colonel (retd) J.C. Kapoor seldom looks up to the first floor where his wife Santosh lives with their youngest daughter. If their eyes had accidentally met, there would have been daggers in them. There is no exception in the attitude of his wife, three daughters (two are married) and 27-year-old son who lives and works in Mumbai. Nobody has pardoned him since 1978 when, after an early retirement, Kapoor failed to secure a decent job like most of his peers. "My pension is peanuts, and so is my value to my wife and children." In 1986, a local women's organisation brokered an "amicable separation", following which Kapoor was left to himself on the ground floor, amidst a pile of junk and stale memories. Of late, he has been inquiring from a former colleague who runs an old-age home if there's a room available. Of course, it comes at a price, but this loneliness is unbearable.

In the early hours of last Sunday, a watchman on the night shift stumbled on their bodies and alerted the household. The couple had apparently climbed out of a window and flung themselves on the flagstones eight floors below. A suicide note found in Vasudev's pocket was terse: "We are ending our lives because of constant abuses and harassment from our son and daughter-in-law."

Their 43-year-old son Balkrishna and his wife, Sonal, 41, who live in the same flat, are now being investigated for abetment to suicide. Balkrishna, before clamming up under lawyer's advice, told the police that his parents were "old, feeble and undergoing treatment for depression". But more embarrassing facts began filtering out soon. Vasudev's sister Nalini, who lives in nearby Walkeshwar, told the police that the old couple "were not treated properly". There were telltale marks of neglect in the stinking room in which the deceased lived, with bedsheets that hadn't been changed for weeks. Worse still, a relative of Vasudev told the police that the couple were often beaten up by their son.

It is evident that the flat, jointly owned by Vasudev and Tara and valued at Rs 3 crore despite a prolonged slump in property prices, was at the root of the family discord. Office-bearers of the Grand Paradi Cooperative Housing Society have admitted that Balkrishna had approached them a week before with an application seeking transfer of membership to his name. The application carried Vasudev's signature. But the society is not sure if the signature is genuine, thus opening a new angle of investigation.

The Indian nation, beneath its facade of strong family ties, is crumbling under a rising number of elderly people who are unwanted by their children. Many of today's ageing parents hold their 40-something children more in fear than in the expected glow of filial love. If the parents are lucky enough to keep the property in their names, or to hold on to their financial savings, they bargain with these for an honourable existence. Even that bargain often doesn't work as age and illness take their toll on the human ability to stand on one's rights. When the parents have no property or cash to fall back on, they may get dumped in one of those free old-age homes, a living nightmare for those used to normal family life. Still more dreadful is the ignominy of sharing a roof with their own progeny and to get abused and battered.

"I fully trusted me daughter. Now even the monthly cheques have stopped."
SANDHYA KAR, 59, Widow, CALCUTTA

Worry is writ large on Sandhya Kar's face. The payment for her stay at Milan Teertha, the old-age home in a north Calcutta suburb, is overdue by three months. Till recently, the daughter was sending payments to the home from Sandhya's savings held with her as "either-or-survivor" partner. Sandhya is uneducated and the pass books and units are all with her daughter and son-in-law, who are now arm-twisting her. The widow sold off her jewellery to raise money for a life away from her greedy sons and their cantankerous wives. She paid Rs 60,000 for the tiny room and the home's charges came from the daughter every month. Now that it has stopped she must begin a fight with her daughter, which means running around police stations and law courts. She simply lacks the energy to do so. What will she do now? Go begging on the streets?

Much of the parental suffering is borne in silence. Nobody, least of all a father or a mother, would shout from the housetop about a humiliation which is deeply personal. There is also the fear of reprisal, compounded by the insecurity of old age. But persecution finds its own idiom. Demographer Ashish Bose, who conducted a pioneering pilot survey of 60-plus people in Delhi last year, found 93.1 per cent of the respondents agreeing to the suggestion that "respect for the elderly is dying out", and 93 per cent supporting the view that elderly persons "must learn to be self-reliant". These indirect admissions of weakness are the chinks in the mask through which the furrows of anxiety are visible. There are also signs of stress due to household labour put on the old parents' shoulders, and the fear of alienation. A disturbingly high percentage (34.5 per cent) did the family's daily shopping, 62.9 per cent said the role of grandchildren would decrease in the life of elderly people, and 37.9 per cent said they supported the right to die.

According to Kuttan Mahadevan, head of the department of population studies at Sri Venkateswara University in Tirupati, the neglect of the older generation is a direct outcome of the demographic and socio-economic changes. "The life expectancy at age 60 was only 11 years in 1951; it is 15 years now." The share of 60-plus people in the total population is steadily rising -- from 5.82 per cent in 1961 to a projected 6.97 per cent in 2001 and 8.94 per cent in 2016. So, 20 years down the line, there is a good chance that every tenth Indian will become a "senior citizen". And as she (or he) demands recognition in a society that is fast altering its value system, the battle trenches within families will be dug deeper and wider. The shovels and spades are already at work.

Avdesh Sharma, psychologist and director of Parivartan, a centre for mental health in Delhi, says that the seeds of the present generational hostility were sown in the late '60s when opportunities beckoned at the young generation with the spread of industry, proliferation of public administration and availability of entrepreneurial capital. "Youngsters moved away from homes, never to come back." This generation, says Sharma, heralded the "nuclear families" in the '70s and put individualism ahead of the "sharing and accommodating" spirit of traditional family values. It worked in the short run as the individualists were rewarded for venturing out from the joint-family milieu. But the new perception of the individual spread to the children. "The son of the '60s wanted to live better but the son of the '90s wants to live alone."

Bose cites his field-study interviews to say that economic factors have also gone a long way in shaping the combative attitude of today's middle-aged children. In the top two metros of Mumbai and Delhi, the phenomenal rise in property value in the past two decades has created an unprecedented "incentive" for the succeeding generation to inherit parents' property. In the 1980-98 period, says Bose, "by the time your bank deposit doubled, the property value had quadrupled". This, in turn, has planted in the minds of the children, particularly among those who are none-too-successful, a craving to raise capital for business by either mortgage or sale of property. A member of Bose's study team says that in "six out of 10 cases", the father-son battle can be traced to a request from the son to sell off the property and move to a smaller house.

Clinical psychologist Aruna Broota of Delhi University's psychology department says the Indian value system began altering under the influence of urbanisation, with the old parents of today having shown in the past an obsessive attachment to power. "If the father had said 'it's my money and before I die I'll put it in a charity', the son will grow up with a death wish for the father."

It is difficult to ascertain the role of a warped childhood in the growing instances of 30-plus Indians' cruelty to their 60-plus parents. On the contrary, there are many instances of parent-child disputes in enlightened homes where parental display of power play is quite unlikely. Supreme Court senior counsel Indira Jaisingh talks of one such "enlightened" family in which the son, who works in the US, returned on hearing of his father's death, challenged the mother's right to live in the house, filed a criminal complaint against her, and got her dislodged, until she reclaimed her right through a Supreme Court order.

"Jesus loves me, this I know, but nobody else does."
ROSY LIBERA, 70, Housewife, MUMBAI

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so ..." Slow, sonorous, the hymn wafts softly in the fortnightly "entertainment hour" at the Shepherd Widows' Home, south Mumbai, where Rosy Libera fingers her rosary with arthritic hands. Yes, Jesus loves her. "But nobody else does." Nobody, except her daughter Addy, perhaps.

And her sons? A brief shrug of despair. "Stan and Willy don't bother." They've got the involuntary gift of life, and the voluntary gift of her tenancy which, in the city of pugree, can be transferred for a huge consideration. "There's no place for all of us, you know," Stanley had said 12 years ago. It was true, but where could she go? Manuel, her husband, who was a foreman at Tata Mills, had just died.

Little Willy took the cue from his brother. "Move out of your room," he advised, "and give me the money to buy us a larger place in the suburbs." In a city where tenancy is as good as ownership and can be transferred in downtown Sankli Street for no less than Rs 3,000 a sq ft, Rosy lost the life-belt with that room. She was hesitant at first but finally relented, and moved in with her younger son, daughter-in-law and their two children. Then, one fine day, Wilfred simply upped and emigrated to the United States and Addy placed her in the home. Poor Addy, who lives with her husband and children in a tiny suburban flat. So where's the space for her mother?

Now life is a numbing, interminable routine of needlework, prayers and sleep. And the slow ticking of the clock down the hall through the long night. Yes, Jesus loves her. The Bible tells her so.

Broota says there was a basic inconsistency in the nuclear families of the '60s in defining "we", meaning that members of even the smallest family of three often confused "we" with "I". "We are witnessing the harvest of that folly," she says. But the theory of the child's revenge does not explain the excessive greed that marks the incidents of intra-family cruelty. A social worker in Delhi (she prefers not to be identified) talks of a widow suffering from stomach cancer with whom her son has struck a bargain: she is allowed access to the painkiller only after signing away, in parts, the fixed deposits and other financial assets that she had inherited from her husband. The ailing widow still has the horse sense not to part with everything. Terminal ailments are often a gilt-edged opportunity for the enterprising son to stake his claim before other successors, particularly his sisters who, under the Hindu Successsion Act, are equal claimants to the property of a father or a mother dying without writing a will. Bose says that in the course of his survey, he encountered instances where the sick and old parent "began losing his proprietorial instinct by the day", and often ended up signing on the dotted line.

A fraction of these tormented parents are sheltered in the old-age homes, free and paid, and they are growing. There were 354 listed homes in 1995, the year when they were last counted by HelpAge India, an organisation for the welfare of the old. Major-General (retd) R.S. Pannu, who headed the organisation then and is now vice-president of the International Federation of Ageing, a UN-accredited body monitoring old-age care programmes, says the number of old-age homes is growing exponentially. The inmates of the homes are expectedly a traumatised lot, mostly living on the threshold of manic depression. The ailment does not disappear by living in the homes. It aggravates instead, with bleeding memories gnawing like fog at the windowpanes of loneliness.

In urban India, the "small family" of the post-Independence era is coming under unsuspected pressure, with the generations battling it out for living space, individuality and control of finances. Ageing fathers are often unable to put up with the loss of self-esteem after retirement, when income diminishes and demands are made on them to go to the market, pay electricity bills, stop objecting to the viewing of the more raucous television channels, and to transfer assets they had built up. In the West, where most nations are ageing, the maladjustment problem was solved decades ago by making the grown-up child's separation a norm. In India it will take time because income here grows with the years and so children take years to be able to live independently. Nor can the old live safely alone in the absence of an elaborate network of public health, nursing and public-funded old-age care. The Indian society has just begun taking the halting first steps in the painful transition from a family model to the "I" model.

--with Farah Baria, Sayantan Chakravarty, Udayan Namboodiri, Ramesh Vinayak, Uday Mahurkar and K.M. Thomas

"My son didn't speak to me for 20 years. He even whacked me."
INDERJIT S. THAPA, 73 Retired PSU Executive, DELHI

In the 10x8 room, there is no television set, no radio, not even a picture album. Except a pack of cards, with which Inderjit Seth Thapar plays patience, arranging the numbers and colours for hours on end. This is what Thapar has been doing since 1993 when he moved into Sandhya, an old-age home in Delhi, with a small suitcase in hand.

The suitcase contained, apart from a change of dress, a sheaf of papers that documented the retired National Fertiliser Ltd general manager's ownership of substantial assets, including a house. It took Thapar only 10 minutes to hop across to Sandhya, but it was an emotional odyssey. He left behind his wife Raj, whom he had married in 1952, son, daughter-in-law and grandson Archit, now eight and curious to know why dadaji had left them. "I wanted to spend the remaining years of my life with dignity. My son hasn't spoken to me for the past 20 years. He even whacked me, and my wife conveniently sided with him." He tries to grip the air with a tremulous fist as he speaks. Why doesn't his son speak to him? Why was he violent with his father? Thapar wouldn't answer, except to say that his wife and son did not respect him "for a day".

The family members say Thapar was a "Hitler" at home and left without any reason. Thapar doesn't utter a word in self-defence. Fumbling with the cards for the aces, he points to the suitcase lying in a corner of the room, saying, "I didn't sign these away, which is why I've been able to keep my head up."