GROW old along with the old. The best is over, but actually it's not so bad in one of those homes we thought were only for White people who grew old and unwanted. One after another, now 'homes' are coming up in Britain for the Indian elderly. Thousands of Indian parents have been sent to these homes, and the waiting lists are lengthening with time.
Pratapbhai has forgotten his age, he has almost forgotten his two sons and daughters who live in London. One of them last came to visit him two months ago. He has not seen two of his children in years. There are other parents in the same home in Leicester, about 100 miles north of London, whom no one visits. A nursing home built on a road named Asha Marg in Leicester provides plenty of parking space for families visiting parents. It's a lot of wasted space. A couple of cars or so on weekends is all that comes.
"We are now one another's family," says Sushilaben, an elderly Gujarati woman at the Mahatma Gandhi House in Leicester. "Let them not come to us, we do not wait for them anymore." Sushilaben is not angry. "My grandchildren were growing up, they needed the rooms," she says. "My children put me in the drawing room but it did not look nice when guests came. So they sent me here. They said they will see me every weekend. Now nobody comes but it's all right. They never looked after us but now we are here to look after one another." A neighbour who has walked up agrees. "They didn't want me then, I don't want them now either." Two other women walk up to join the chat. "You want to bring your parents here? Wait," says one. Down the corridor she fetches the agreed spokesman for the lot. "There are no rooms just now," he says in clipped English. He has known years of success in Kenya. "You will have to wait for one of us to die, and there are plenty waiting for rooms before you." But, he says, "we keep getting vacancies".
Downstairs in the common room a portrait of Gandhi and a map of India are put up on the walls to make inmates feel at home. An old man is watching TV alone. His wife died years ago, his son went back to Kenya. He is now alone but insists he is not unhappy. "We all get along very well," he says. "Singhs, Muslims, Gujaratis, people of all castes, we are now one family here." Finally, everyone has come together in this pre-death club.
Bipinbhai is partially paralysed after a stroke. He came to Britain during the Uganda expulsions of 1972 with a brother and seven sisters. Over the last three years only one sister has ever called him. "We were like one family there. Here I don't know what happened, it must be this country, what else can it be?" Conservative leader John Major never tires of pointing to Indian family values as a model for the crumbling British family to follow. But in the nuclear times, the Indian family itself seems eager to go the other way.
The homes carry the quietness of death. "We like it here because we have to," Kumudben says. "You don't always get what you want. " And what does she think of her son who sent her here? "No, it was not him, it was his wife, what could he do?" Kumudben is waiting only for days to repeat themselves. "We do what we would do anywhere," she says. "Get up, make breakfast, clean, cook lunch, sleep, come to the common room for tea, watch TV, have dinner, then sleep." But two days last year were different. "We were taken in a bus on a day trip for picnics." There are other days to wait for. The government council, which pays for these homes, also funds parties for Christmas and Diwali.
Leicester, where a third of its population of about 280,000 is Asian, is among the first cities where homes for the Asian old with familiar names—Mahatma Gandhi House, Jalaram Jyot et al—began to mushroom. Polite social workers say they were driven out by "family conflicts." The English have another term for it: granny-bashing. Offers of refuge for the Asian elderly were pioneered by a group called ASRA (Asian Sheltered Residential Accommodation). Its report on the need for such homes speaks of the "myth that Asian people in this country are able to care for their old as well as their young under one roof because of the extended family." The truth, the report says, is that "some Asians are treated degradingly by their children and such treatment would include granny-bashing, taking away of supplementary benefits, not giving them enough food to eat, locking them out, making them do the housework and so on."
HER Majesty's government has opened the doors for parents to leave, or be thrown out. Social security is alive at £90 billion (Rs 5.3 lakh crore) a year despite the trimmings by Thatcher. The Leicester city council spends something between £212 (Rs 12,500) and £330 (Rs 19,500) a week on an elderly person in a private nursing home. In London, the expenses range up to £384 (Rs 22,500) a week. That includes room rent and a personal allowance for an elderly person of about £70 a week paid out by the Benefits Agency. "The state is our mother, the state is our father," says Nitesh Chohan.
The children know their parents can stay there for free and get enough money to live on. "They say why should they look after us when the state can do it better?" Parents who get thrown out usually have more spending money. "Yes, we manage to save some money from what we get," says Ashaben, nearing 70, who has moved several homes over the past three years because the next one seemed better. "But we don't know what to do with the money we save."
Children who push parents out are not usually short of money. A young Gujarati woman drives up in her red Mercedes sports car to visit her mother now and then. She left the mother at a city council shelter as a homeless woman. Social workers brought her into residential care. Ramanbhai Kotecha sees her come and go with some bitterness. "In India, the children have no choice but to be tolerant, where will they send their parents?" he asks. "Maybe that is good, maybe not, I don't know." But he did not hope to retire in such independence. "The government will cremate us," he says. "We will die on our own two feet."
For the enterprising, there is money in eviction of parents and the duty of the state to shelter them. There is no business like the nursing home business now. Everyone is growing older, most people are living longer. More and more want them to live in government homes at government expense. It's a growing market. "We don't have enough place in our homes any more," says a spokeswoman for the Leicester city council. "It is easier to pay private nursing homes than set up more of our own." Nursing homes to look after the south Asian elderly are coming up quickly in London, Leicester, Birmingham, Wolver-hampton and other cities with a large Asian population. The Times recently ran a story on an Indian doctor who gave up his practice to open nursing homes. He is now on one of those lists of Asian millionaires.
Property is still cheap in many places. Backed by bank loans, nursing homes can be opened with relatively small personal capital. Much of the government grant averaging £300 per person per week goes to nursing home or residential care managers. This breed of people never discusses budgets. But there seems to be plenty left over for them, enough to make quick millionaires of the men who launched into this business early. Resigned to professional care, the old are more defiant of the past than bitter.
