I couldn't care less about how I look, I claim. But a strand of white hair, not premature, involves me in a cloak-and-dagger plot to camouflage it.As I reprimand my daughter for picking out the few whites in my crop, I claim I know for scientific fact that when they grow back, they will not come out jet black. But there is a panicky edge to my voice, as I cannot expose my belief in the old wives’ tale that several more white hairs will grow in place of an extricated one.Compared to my contemporaries, though, I am doing rather well, with a crest of black hair, although the inevitable reading glasses that shattered my carefree youngster’s look gave the game away long ago. Carrying on a back-slapping, bantering interaction with my students is not just a ploy to maintain a democratic relationship with them and earn cheap popularity, but also simulates a much younger I than I actually am.Address me by name, I say to colleagues who are much younger, feeling both politically correct and ever-youthful. Imagine my outrage, therefore, when an acquaintance spots me with a younger colleague, confronts me with a saccharine-sweet smile and asks if my companion is my daughter!Another time, a hawker of balloons, after convincing me to buy one, instantly lost her customer by exclaiming how my grandchild would love it! But this episode that demolished my evergreen fantasy of myself was followed by one that flattered my youthful fancy beyond measure. I was talking animatedly to a nephew, younger by twenty years, at a concert one day. Later, I was intrigued by the sight of a girl whispering to him. Suddenly, he burst out laughing and said that I had received the compliment of a lifetime, for this long-lost friend was curious to know if I was his girlfriend. I will never know whether she actually asked this or the nephew only pandered to my weakness about my age.Agonising forever about not wanting to grow old, I wonder how I created for myself an e-mail ID that gives away the year of my birth. Perhaps I want to hear people exclaim, “Were you really born in 1956? You don’t look half as old as that!”
