Officially entering the club of “viable die-able age”

While we were working together somewhere in Africa, my boss at the time would often end many of his sentences with “I am 40.” I used to wonder if he was actually experiencing all these things so suddenly right after turning 40, or was he only just realizing them, and if 40 was indeed such a big milestone. For instance, he would say: “I can’t eat as much as I could before, I am 40 now” or “I can’t run for as long as I could before, I am 40 now.” He said all these with so much conviction and sincerity that I was totally convinced that something must change very drastically and irrevocably when one entered the 40’s club. I wasn’t even 30 at the time, so I had no clue.

I realized that someday I also wanted to say things like that, once I had ‘grown up’. Every time such a thought came, the silent disclaimer inside my head would go like this: “Let’s see if I live till 40.” And now that I finally have (on 8^th of March), I can also end so many sentences with “Ah, but I am now in my 40’s!” From now on, those occasions would be  every time someone asks me to color my hair, something I have been asked to do (at times, ordered) most days from people worldwide since I was in my 20’s, when my hair had actually started greying. And even better than that, I can finally tell every concerned person including mostly strangers (weirdly too many of them have been men) when they express concern about what I should do with my womb: “Hey, I am in my 40’s, my biological clock has ticked away.” (Note to all: if you have a womb, feel free to worry about yours. And if you don’t have a womb, it was never your business to begin with what people with wombs do with theirs). Basically I can shut people up now with more authority when they lecture me on how I have not fulfilled my duty on this planet as a woman, which is to apparently procreate, and nurture human beings from birth till I die (in addition to elderly, and whoever else needs nurturing).

When Graham Norton had asked Kate Winslet on his show (a while back) to share some big surprise, she had taken a deep breath and revealed that she was turning 40! That was the big news. I had thought, “huh, why is she so anxious about this? She would probably live till a 100!” (I then realized I was actually thinking of her character in Titanic). Apparently 40 is a big thing even for Hollywood stars.

Then, on the home front, I recall my father saying that he wanted to live till 40 when I was a kid (he assumed he would have completed most of his duties by then and could peacefully exit the world). Later on he would keep praying to Allah to revoke his previous wish, and to stretch his timeline as he wasn’t yet done and needed more time.

The famous quote by George Bernard Shaw is: “Wisdom is wasted on the old, and youth is wasted on the young.” How right he was. We couldn’t just wait to grow the hell up when we were kids, and then when we hit the much awaited adulthood, the years just swoosh by. And pounds keep piling on.

A recurring joke between me and one of my childhood friends is about ageing. When we were pre-teens, one day we were discussing about looking older as we aged and I told her that she would always look younger than she actually was when we grew older because of her youthful face (she got the youth gene from her Mom), and my friend had replied with her big eyes all widened: “Well, my face may not age, but my organs will !” (she later became a doctor, and as it turns out, she was right).

In my country (I presume, also in several other countries), it is difficult to determine what someone’s actual age is. Many parents of many children have altered their age on their birth certificates for a host of reasons: to get them enrolled at school earlier or later, or to enable them to work longer, or to enable them to hang on to youth just a bit longer. Certain people have given me different ages at different times over the period of even a quarter, when I asked how old they were (I thought, “how did s/he age backwards?”). One month they were one age, and the next month a year younger!

There are photographs of people when I was not even born (showing clearly that the person is older than I am) and now they are somehow younger than me. As it is difficult to keep track, my practice has always been to just say my age even if others never age, and I say my age even when some seem to age backwards like Benjamin Button.

When I was a kid, one of my older cousins had joked with me, telling me that I was actually two years older than I thought I was as my Mom (like many other parents) had changed my birth year on my birth certificate. Though my Mom kept insisting that her nephew was joking, I had thrown a fit, because the thought of having lost two years of my life and not knowing what it was I had done during that time, was too much of a mystery, one I needed to solve. After interrogating several people around me (who would have been there when I was born) and triangulating info with school report cards and other documents, I was finally convinced that he was joking.

While many people might dread turning 40 for all sorts of reasons, my biggest concern about turning 40, apart from wondering if I will live till 40, was where on earth would I even be when I physically turned 40: would I be at some exotic (and often far too exciting and ‘noisy’) part of the world for work or at home or stuck on an airport transit?

I have never been too big on birthdays in general. Celebrations were never grand in my family; most birthdays comprised of the same group of friends coming over, and my Mom cooking something. When I started working, and as my birthday is on International Women’s Day, some years we had some joint celebrations at work with colleagues (IWD is stuff for a whole other blog post). However, despite being a low key birthday gal, I had always wanted to mark the big milestone of my 30^th birthday with my loved ones. But life often doesn’t work out that way. In reality, I ended up spending my 30^th in Juba, South Sudan (the youngest country in the world at the time) few months after the civil war started in Dec 2013 (while I was there). On the morning of my 30^th birthday, I woke up in the room where the office documents were archived in the expat guesthouse of our organization (different location from the place I usually stayed at, which is why I was staying at the archive room as other rooms were booked) to find two of my South Sudanese colleagues trying to get some documents from the shelf (next to me) from over my body. As in, actually from over my body, with me just lying there and wondering, “Wow, I turned 30 today…here.” Some fellow expat colleagues found out it was my birthday later on Facebook, and then during one of the ‘quiet’ hours (on a day when nobody seemed to be shooting at anybody in our neighborhood), we went to a café and they sang me Happy Birthday and I cut into a piece of pastry. They wanted me to mark the big milestone, in some way, no matter how bleak everything had turned around us. It was one of the loveliest gestures ever.

I also happened to be in Juba, again, for my 31^st birthday. Back there for work. After what was a highly stressful day at work, with nobody even knowing it was my birthday, a friend of mine (a Ukrainian pilot, a fellow hotel guest, who became a friend and remains one to this day) came and wished me happy birthday to my utter surprise. He said he remembered the date (he and I share same birthday month, he is a year younger than me). He gave me a wood carved souvenir he bought from a local market. That is the only thing I have with me to this day that was actually made in South Sudan.

My 32^nd birthday is so far the worst one of my life. I had just returned home to Dhaka after an assignment in Ethiopia, and had gone to see my grandmother (Nani) at the hospital directly from the airport, and she told me ‘You have finally come, I was waiting for you.’ And then she passed away two days later, literally the day before my 32^nd birthday. Basically the death anniversary of my favorite person in the whole wide world (and the person with whom I have lived most of my life) and my birthday got tied up together for the rest of my life. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that until a friend of mine pointed out that I should look at it in a positive way, because this way I would always remember her and her life every time I was turning a year older myself. The ‘looking at the glass half-full’ works at times, it doesn’t work on most years.

I spent my 33^rd and 34^th and 35^th birthdays in Dhaka, usually in the same fashion. Close friends come over and either my Mom cooks or we eat out. Somebody brings a nice big cake as a gift. I feel in the current age of social media, the ordinary simple heart-felt celebrations (where we often forgot to even take any photos) have taken a backseat.

I was in Semarang, Indonesia, on my 36^th birthday. On that day, we were in the middle of a simulation exercise in a semi-built ‘structure’ with limited ventilation, with several stressed-out and sweating people all crammed with me into a tiny space, and the highly humid weather breathing fire onto our bodies. Basically we were in a rendition of the Survivor challenge, except it was a simulation for humanitarian response (if I recall well, the hypothetical disaster was an earthquake followed by a tsunami), and nobody was filming us, and we weren’t getting any rewards at end of it other than to pass the eight-months long Humanitarian Leadership course. The coaches assigned to us were speaking to us in turns, as part of the exercise (also to check up on our mental health status). When my turn came, my coach asked me if I felt upset that I was having to spend my birthday in the middle of a simulation exercise. I looked at her and said, “Well, no, this is a nice change from actual warzones. At least I know this simulation is not real.” She didn’t know how to respond to that. Later that evening, all the coaches / mentors / my course buddies / volunteers of the Indonesian Red Crescent Society (we were being hosted in their premises) threw me a huge surprise with a big birthday cake. And we danced till past midnight. I was too dehydrated to cry tears of joy. Till date, it was my most international birthday ever, in the sense that I got to celebrate with people from literally all over the world (with exception of Antarctica, there were people from all other continents). It was fabulous. Especially before our lives changed forever.

While we were dancing away that night, COVID-19 was being declared as a pandemic (literally around the same time on the news), and within next 2-3 days, we were all rushing to get back home before borders in some countries got closed. Several of my friends from the course were not able to go home and got stuck at their duty stations in fragile states, some having to spend days alone at isolation units upon reaching home. I on the other hand returned to Dhaka and started my new job for Sudan remotely. Re-opening operations of an international NGO office in a country I had never been to and fundraising for it and representing it to everyone everywhere (on Zoom or TEAMs or Skype or Meet) and recruiting people remotely, all from my bedroom for 4.5 months non-stop, while so many people were dying at home and all over the world, is not an experience I would like to repeat again.

I moved to Sudan in 2020, spent my 37^th and 38^th birthdays there (I have many Sudan stories and they deserve an entire space on their own).

Africa did not let go of me just yet. I turned 39 in Abuja, Nigeria, same week as my arrival there to start my new job. I and few members of my staff (3 people from 3 different countries looking at me, their new boss, very curiously and cautiously) had gone to an exorbitantly overpriced Lebanese restaurant. It was a nice ice-breaker before all the ‘being boss’ business started.

Back to the present (March 2024), once the clocked ticked past midnight in the safety of my room at my parents’ home in Dhaka (where I was again back to ‘remote management’ mode due to visa delays at my new duty station) and I was officially 40 on 8^th March, I felt silent gratitude for having lived that long, and also for being with my family for this big milestone. And then I officially started thinking as a 40 year old. The switch was rather sudden. I even almost immediately started feeling my back ache. I suddenly felt that I wanted to do something to mark this turning point, and rather abruptly my big epiphany came to me. I thought that I could I gift myself something on 40^th: the gift being a bit of my own time. I proceeded to then do something that I had been wanting to for a long time, I started a blog. Several people around me had been telling me to resume writing for a while (maybe they thought I can vent on paper instead of them). And also I missed writing. So I googled what ‘wordpress’ was, and then opened a page there. It took me an hour to figure out what my site name should be, and then additional two hours to figure out how to do even the most basic things on it after watching You Tube videos. I realized that WordPress was not MS Word, and that it was a whole different world and that I was a complete novice (what are plug ins? what on earth are widgets? why are they asking me to type some code as if I was a software engineer!). My brain had to learn something new and it was figuring out if it was even possible. And then we just soldiered on. We will figure it out as we go along.

As some of you may have noticed, I borrowed the title of my first ever blog post (the article that you are reading now) from Arundhati Roy’s book, The God of Small Things, a book I had bought as soon as it came out in all my excitement because she was the first South Asian woman to ever win the Booker prize, and realized that I was way too young to read it back then. However, I have read it once every decade since and it reveals more nuances each time). In the book, one of the protagonists, Rahel, thinks of 31, her current age, and the age at which her ‘Ammu’ had passed away, as the ‘viable die-able age’. This phrase is repeated throughout the book, and it had stuck with me for decades, except that for me it was not 31, but rather entering the 40’s club in general.

After all, one grandmother of mine (Dadi) passed away before she even turned 50 (I realized years later why her son, my Dad, had actually thought that his time on earth too might be up in his 40’s) and my other grandmother (Nani) became a widow also before she became 50. It is only after I was in my 20’s that I realized how prematurely the losses had come for both of my grandmothers. In addition, I have seen way too many amazing women in my vicinity perish before they even reached 50 (we lost so many people during COVID-19 that I would just ask my Mom “Who died, Ammu?” every time she called me sounding a bit sad while I was away from home for work).

Don’t get me wrong. I know plenty of men who died way before they should have had, maybe even outnumbering the women, but somehow the women’s permanent physical departure from our lives and this world, felt a bit personal to me. Probably because for many of them, they were only just about to finally start living a little bit for themselves after a lifetime of dedication to family and children and household and homemaking and putting own dreams on hold. For some of them, it came as a relief for their own families when they passed away because of the suffering that preceded their deaths. Either way, it didn’t seem fair. They all deserved long healthy lives. They didn’t. And we just moved on without answers, with each loss changing us in some permanent ways.

I am happy that I grew up in an era where I not just knew but I have had to actually use analog phones and floppy discs, and I got to watch shows with my family on the only channel on our only TV. I am glad I got to study under the warm glow of candlelight and kerosene lamps when there were power cuts. All this prepared me well for the several locations in the several countries I would end up working / living in since I was 24 (basically, a significant portion of my life so far has been spent in power cuts).

I am glad I grew up speaking to people looking them in the eye rather than with my eyes glued to my phone / tablet / computer screen, and thinking that our sense of worth and self-esteem and validation were not tied to the number of ‘likes’ and ‘hearts’ our posts got and the number of ‘followers’ we have on our social media accounts.

I am glad that I grew up feeling guilty about having privilege in a country where most of the people had none to begin with, because it directly led me to my chosen profession (humanitarian sector), one where I am reminded on a daily basis what a privilege it is just to be able to live, to get to grow older. Given that I have to write the words “mortality and morbidity” on an average once a week on project documents, you realize that your limited time on earth is something you learn to come to terms with, and it is not something to worry too much about, but rather to focus on the present.

One time, I was watching an interview of Michelle Obama by Oprah (something to do with Weight Watchers) where Michelle kept talking about how much harder it was for her to work out as she was “not 36 anymore’. She said this multiple times. I was 36 at the time, and half lying on my bed in Khartoum (Sudan) watching this on my laptop eating popcorn and hot chocolate after an incredibly stressful day at work and wondered to myself, “Damn, is this supposed to be my peak?” At the time, I promised myself that I will get abs like Michelle by the time I was 40. The feeling did not last very long. I am 40. I am still not ripped. I am not likely to be anytime soon either.

I will refrain from making any more resolutions or promises that I end up discarding or forgetting about the next day. Instead I will choose to show up for myself and do what it takes to live well, to not look at weighing scales but rather listen to my own breath.

Because I feel that I need to live more. To see the world being good again. To see us being good again, or to at least try. To watch oppressed communities to no longer be, to be free and shine and thrive in all their Black and Brown glory, as we had before, and to remind ourselves that we could once again be. To watch oppressors fade out and not be reborn generation and generation.

I would like to live longer to see the world free of hunger, a world where humans are indeed all equals, irrespective of our gender or race or zip code. Even if only for a day.

I would play my miniscule part. I would watch so many others play such big parts.

That would indeed be a life well lived. And perhaps our homage to those we lost.

Happy 40^th to me!