# The House of Age

I went to visit my grandmother the other day. She's grown old now, can't venture outside, and spends all her hours sitting at home watching television. I know the people in the house don't really have much time for her. Loneliness is the great curse of old age.

When I arrived, I found her absorbed in her favorite serial on Zee Bangla. She gestured for me to sit when she saw me. I could see how intently she watched, how her eyes and heart seemed to merge with those characters on screen—a merging that had been happening for a long time now.

After the serial ended, she switched off the television and turned to me. "Don't mind, dear boy," she said, "that I kept you sitting there. Did you find the serial unpleasant?" I said, "No, no grandmother, not at all. How are you doing?" Instead of answering my question, she said, "You see, I sit here all day watching TV, and none of them like it. But what can I do? Nobody gives me their time. I have no one to talk to. I feel lonely too—I'm old now. These last few days of my life are days of losing my friends, and I've accepted that. My friends now—they're the people inside this television. They never leave me. They come to keep me company every single day. So I stay with them. I have to survive, don't I?"

I understood my grandmother's feeling completely. So many people in this world survive by depending on television alone. There's nothing wrong with that. When no one gives you their time, when nobody has the leisure to value your feelings, what else can they do? It's those who have work to do, those whose lives are filled with people to talk to—they don't need television. Television, mobile phones, computers—they've kept so many people alive.