A coming of age, too early or too late

Males have no reverse gear on their emotions. It comes from thousands of years of charging into battles and playing rugby.

THE MEDICAL Wallah is a chemist, who discovered vegetables and feminism in an ashram near Bangalore in 1983.

He was trapped there for six months because there was no telephone, and he now wears his grey hair in a pony tail, has a silver ring on a middle finger, and plays golf. So the General treats him like some kind of alien, although to most people he’s just a middle-aged chemist in a white coat behind the counter at the pharmacy.

He arrived with three videos. Kristin Scott Thomas starred in two, which meant that the General refused to have any truck with them. There's something intellectual about Scott Thomas's forehead that the General can't abide. So that left us with Water Lilies.

“What’s it about?” the General inquired.

“It’s a coming-of-age movie about girls in a synchronised swimming team,” the Wallah explained.

“You can’t be serious,” the General said.

What makes the General, the medical Wallah and myself companions is that each of us has come to “existential awareness” late in life. The General’s faith always resided in hierarchy, patriarchy and the Balmoral agricultural show, as the true expressions of goodness in the universe. The Wallah’s faith was in a soup of Hinduism, regular spliffs and nice things the Dalai Lama said. And my faith in orthodox Catholicism lingered in my bones far longer than I realised. But in recent years our faith has collapsed and we find ourselves lost in the existential wasteland of late middle age. As the medical Wallah says: “Impermanence never dawned on us when we were young.”

Earlier in the day we had chicken masala in the Indian restaurant in Carrick-on-Shannon.

“Do you do this Facebook thing?” the medical Wallah wondered.

“That’s only for children,” the General declared.

“No,” the Wallah said, “Facebook is about communication. And I have a friend who went to India last summer to do a yoga course, and ended up in an ashram, and he’s always on Facebook, and I’m worried about him.”

“Why,” the General inquired, “because he’s on Facebook, or because he’s in an ashram?”

“He’s been on Facebook 24/7 since Christmas. Never offline. There’s a little green dot beside his name every time I check. At first I used to leave messages. But he never answered. Now I fear something terrible has happened. He was fragile enough before he went out. Maybe he left the computer on in his room and went out into the dark forever, like some famous explorer did in the snow.”

“It doesn’t snow in southern India,” the General remarked.

“I was thinking,” the Wallah continued, “of phoning the ashram, and asking the head honcho to go check his room.”

“Oh my! So they have telephones in ashrams nowadays,” the General sneered.

To change the subject, I said: “Why don’t we get a movie? The wife is away in Dublin, the house is empty and we could light the stove.” The General immediately brightened and said, “Splendid, I’ll get the drink.”

For the General, a movie, like anything else after dark, is merely an excuse to drink whiskey. The medical Wallah volunteered to collect a few movies, and that's how we ended up with Scott Thomas, Water Lilies, and a bottle of Black Bush.

There was a scene in the film where two girls lay on a bed staring at the ceiling. Eventually one of them remarked that the last thing most people see before they die is a ceiling. “And when you die, that last image remains imprinted on the brain. So imagine,” she concluded, “all those dead people with ceilings in their heads.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” the General erupted, “why are we watching this tripe?” It was a beautiful movie, and one that the Wallah’s tender nature relished, but in a huff, which was out of character, the General grabbed the remote control and turned it off, and for a moment the three of us sat, like silver-backed gorillas in a single cage, all desperately sad. And nobody seemed capable of defusing the situation. Males tend not to have a reverse gear on their emotions. It comes from thousands of years of charging into battles and playing rugby.

So we sat in silence until I thought of Leonard Cohen. Cohen always works on silver-backed gorillas. I plugged my iPhone into the speakers, and we huddled around the fire – me, the Wallah, the General, and Leonard Cohen, singing together until the whiskey was gone and the darkness had lifted.