What it means to be 50

Arriving in Manhattan at age 20, I found myself connected to a world with which I had no shared history. I started breathing and dancing freely and to an entirely new tune. The visage I saw in Manhattan mirrors didn’t have the grit and grime I had gotten used to seeing in Delhi and Bombay. I was older, yet younger, and brimming with innocence. My reflection in the mirror came with messages from my daring parents, and I had their assurances in my head encouraging me to be bold and different.

Setting up home in America brought me closer to relatives from my maternal side. They helped settle me in this new nation and provided me with comfort and nurturing. I became close to my Nana and Nani, my maternal grandparents, Chaman Lal and Shanti Bhardwaj. When I briefly set up home in Montclair, New Jersey, managing a retail outlet of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was lucky to have them visit and stay with me for a long duration. Although they were up in age and seniors with health issues, in their actions and thinking, in how they behaved with one another and how they opened themselves to my friends and co-workers, I saw two people bursting with peerlessly youthful energy. Beans and drive, gusto and vigor, vitality and zing, bounce and dynamism, zip and verve that even I couldn’t
match.

Getting closer to Nana and Nani is the most cherished blessing my move to the US bestowed upon me. But my friendships with senior citizens didn’t end with them. Soon after my arrival in New York City, I started meeting people of all ages, and most of my friends were at least one decade older than I, if not several. Mary Ann Joulwan, my Lebanese American friend, just celebrated her 90th birthday recently, and her youthfulness cannot be matched by a teenager. Maria Anna, as I lovingly call her, is also the first friend I made after my move to America. We would spend several nights a week together at one of our homes, cooking for and with one another and bringing along loved ones to add to the mix. Mary Ann remains the younger one in our relationship, and I cannot see that changing ever. She lives with peerless hunger for discovery and the utmost respect for independence.

My health and circumstances brought me back to India, and it is here that I celebrated my 50 th birthday. Manhattan is my heart-city, and India the country of my birth, where my karmic soul shall feed itself and be a support for others. As I resettle my life, mind, body and soul in a new geography, around people who I once knew but who I was a stranger to for 30 years, I am finding pep in my step and thinking fearlessly and with a carefree mind and spirit, mirroring Nana and Nani, fashioning myself after Mary Ann, and never forgetting my parents’ ability to face every challenge presented to them with a youthful resolve and stamina, young innocence, and childlike hopefulness.

When my classmates remark that I am a very young 50 or I’m not behaving my age or looking it, I think back to delicious meals around our table in New York with Arianne and Michael Batterberry and Gael Green and Steven Richter. These celebrated Manhattanites, each over a decade older than my parents, considered me their friend and equal. Michael, the founder of Food Arts and Food & Wine Magazine, brought me on board at age 20 as a contributing authority on the masthead. On my 30 th birthday, he brought a “Happy 40 th ” birthday cake to the party, and when told that I was only 30, he said, “Only old-man Suvir could have fooled us into believing he was in his 30s when he was all of 20!” Michael was my godfather, for a lack of a better word, he wrote the foreword to Indian Home Cooking, my first cookbook, and he blessed my life with opportunities that come my way even today and shall tomorrow. His was a staggering presence of life-giving youth and young energy. When asked about his age, he would say, “Age is for wine, not for people”. We lost Michael too soon, as we did my Nana, who passed away at 92. I had hoped both these men would live to be a hundred and more. They surely would have been the youngest people in any group. They defied the parameters that define age. They personified youth and carried their age with pride.

I am what I am, I am who I am, I am the age I am, but what I hope never to be is a man too young to be smartly wise and too old to be living and loving. As a proud 50-year-old, I am mindful of the choices I make. I am keenly aware of what I have done and achieved and the potential that still lies ahead.

My voice is as much of me as I can make it today, and my choices reflect those freedoms I was denied, that I have in my hand today, and which I must ensure for others, young and old, who aren’t afforded the equity I am given. I hope to rise to every challenge sent my way, to be in command of my faculties as a person who brings wisdom and know-how to every situation, and to control my reactions and make them mature outpourings that justify my having navigated 50 rich years on this planet. I am a man who has lived and loved, lost and found, succeeded and failed – and, most of all, I am, at 50, hungrier to learn daily and grow moment by moment into an older and wiser version of myself, bursting with infectiously youthful energy and unmatched zest for loving and living.