Mother will you drop the bomb?

Lying in the hospital bed with liquids rushing into her body through a mesh of narrow pipes, the 70-something woman mumbles to her son: There is Rs 7,300 in 50-rupee notes under my bed at home. Please use it for my treatment. I'm really sorry to put you through this, son.

Lying in the hospital bed with liquids rushing into her body through a mesh of narrow pipes, the 70-something woman mumbles to her son: "There is Rs 7,300 in 50-rupee notes under my bed at home. Please use it for my treatment. I'm really sorry to put you through this, son."

It just takes an illness of a parent or grandparent in the family to put the word "love" to a hopelessly difficult test, especially in a city like Mumbai.

Watch how after the first round of polite inquiries and maybe a visit to the hospital, the phone calls start getting scarce, often leading to deathly silences when the hospital bills need to be paid.

Pettiness, excuses enter. Siblings slink away. Even more contentious is the issue of who will take care of the old person, who'll change her diapers (the same mother, obviously, had routinely changed diapers of the same children without even a shadow of a thought), who will pay for the nurse.

And then, who will the ill parent stay with?

A document by the Bombay Community Public Trust says: "In space-starved Mumbai, many senior citizens end up being resented by their families for the space they take in the small homes. Many of them sleep in cramped places, like the balcony or kitchen ufffdincidents of the elderly sleeping on the floor of the house has increased in the past years, since more and more middle-class families have started to opt for smooth, glistening tiles for flooring."

Illustrations/ Satish Acharya

Telling. The city, in which space is shrinking like air in a dying man's lungs, is unwilling to share it with the very people who gave birth, nourished the next generations. But what is more tragic is that the calls that stopped during the parent's illness never stop coming after he or she is dead. The rich NRI son or daughter would repeatedly call up for their exact share in the sale of the one-room flat left as inheritance.

With such affection and gratitude from their children and grandchildren, it is unsurprising that Mumbai's approximately seven or eight lakh senior citizens end up in the state's 200-odd old-age homes dejected, depressed and utterly disillusioned with those who they thought were bound by the magic of blood. Many others live neglected, humiliated and reminded every day that they are Undesirable No. 1.

The problem is more pronounced in India, where there is no social security net. Ever-dipping bank rates make our economists and industrialists happier but make the grey population poorer, more helpless as their retirement money quickly shrinks into insignificance. There are very few NGOs like Dignity Foundation and Harmony which work in that space, since it is not a sexy and lucrative cause like HIV or the environment.

Winter, however, is not always biting. Daughters, especially working women, are turning out to be a much bigger support in old age. Inverting the Asian obsession for sons, a survey of 2,078 prospective parents between April and July 2009 by the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education found that 37.9 per cent of mothers-to-be said they wanted a daughter, 31.3 per cent wanted a son and the rest said they didn't have a preference.

Researchers found that the son preference is no longer valid among young parents because they feel a daughter can be more rewarding than sons emotionally and economically.

The irony could not have been clearer, crueller on a generation that put the best food on the son's plate, best schools on his CV, best fruits of toil for him on the will.

As for the children, nothing can be more grim, prophetic and real than Dylan's words:

...the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'

Abhijit Majumder is Executive Editor, Mid Day.
Reach him at abhijit.majumder@mid-day.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/abhijitmajumder