Soonamai Desai

I have been reading the (unpublished) memoirs of Soonamai Desai, a Gujarati lady who lived to be 100. She died in 1983 and the memoirs speak of both her public and her private life. She was the first woman corporator in Navsari and travelled widely. I have been intrigued by her life and also by her description of social life in general, the difference between the India she grew up in and the one she died in, and the way in which her story ties up with 'standard' history.

For example, she speaks of meeting Madam Cama in Paris and of how the lady had made arrangements for what should be done if she died there as she expected to since at the time she doubted that the British would give her permission to return either to England or to India because of her Nationalist activities. As it turned out, the British did allow Madam Cama to return to her homeland and she died on Indian soil but I hadn't known anything at all about the French funeral arrangements. In fact, I didn't know that they had existed at all.

What I found particularly touching though weren't her memories but her description of growing old. She said that in old age, the respect and admiration of one's acquaintances give way to their mockery and to a 'don't care attitude'. After all what can the old actually do? They become dependent on others and are therefore helpless. To understand the lot of the old, one has to be old -- to understand how desolate they can be as all their contemporaries pass away and they have no one to turn to. She ended by saying, "So now my life is not only in its evening -- it is decidedly night and as I look back, with a few blinding spots which have hit me hard enough to make my head reel; life, fate, destiny -- call it what you will -- has been good to me and it is in this mood that I await the coming of a stage of life called death but which could be but another phase of life with some impatience and great curiosity."