Life After 60

Middle Distance Staring into the middle distance is a great pastime for me in my idle hours. I am idle for hours on end or even weeks. In 35 years of earning bread I had little time to stare at the middle distance. I'm making up for lost time now. First let me speak about school. Penal servitude  is a mild word for it. My school was surrounded by very high brick walls painted a toxic red. From the outside it looked like what it was; a detention centre where a fixed tenure of 11 years was the norm. During such hard times there was no pastime as such. Books and more books were heaped on my shoulders making it seem like the proverbial last straw for the long-suffering camel. My spinal cord almost dislocated from lugging a heavy bag on a daily basis. In school, it was something akin to jail inmates glumly breaking large stones into little stones, with the prospect of indefinite tomorrows requiring more large stones to be broken. The brass bell eventually clan...

He was a banker with round expressive eyes. But, what was remarkable, were his perfectly arched and manicured eyebrows. The eyebrows danced each time he made some point or the other.  All through that bankers ‘meet at which a lot of Englishmen were present I looked awestruck at the callisthenics that his eyebrows were continuing to do. It must have required years of effort and practice each morning after brushing the teeth. I could almost visualise his wife asking him at the breakfast table, “Did you do your eyebrow exercise this morning dear?” “Coo! I did, “he would reply tucking into his ham and eggs which are de rigueur for the breakfasting Englishman. That was my first lesson in bodily speak. There was the one man in office from whom others always kept as polite a distance as possible when he bored down  asking for the latest gossip. He would deliver a resounding pinch every time he made a point. He would seize a portion of his victim’s flesh between ...