Sundays, I dread. For me, they are an unmitigated bane. Few are likely to agree with this, barring some fellow “super seniors”. Members of that fragile community know what I mean. Their experience of this most unkind day of the week has to be the same as mine. But most other readers of this column, the yet-to-become-senior majority of this column’s readers, will say, “Who the hell cares? If he dreads Sundays, let him drown himself in one.”
This is a reader-reaction I have imagined, but it is surely real. Which reader of a Sunday morning newspaper will want to feel gloomy? Oldies are not for Sundays, nor Sundays for them. But the sun-kissed, young “under-sixties” — the Goldies —- are. They are for Sundays, and Sundays for them. They can swim, swirl through their Sundays, play water polo in them, do the backstroke/breaststroke in them, the butterfly and the dolphin-kick. Goldies are meant to cavort on Sundays, oldies are meant to “go drown” in them.
Let me explain.
A year has 52 Sundays. This is a factoid from calendric astronomy. Having lived almost 81 years, I have seen 4,212-plus Sundays — verily, an eternity. A smart statistician would say I have, by that count, seen the same number of Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and so on. Of course! Touché, true; point made. But so much is made of Sundays, such a mystique hangs over that last day of the week, that it cannot be regarded as just like any other day, no different from the rest.
Sundays are meant to be “something else”, a weekly festival as it were. For me too they are that “something else”, but that “something” — my “something” — is not pretty; not pretty at all.
To be sure, many Sundays have come and gone for me, uneventfully, un-memorably. Yes, some of those Sundays have been good enough, pleasant enough, like any other good and pleasant day.
But for the last 20 years or so definitely, in my post-senior years, I cannot remember a single Sunday, not one, as having been so enjoyable, so altogether delightful by virtue of being a happy Sunday, that I remember it gratefully as such. Not one.
Sundays mean for me, in that consecutive order, waking with the heart-thump of a fear that I or my wife who is only a little younger than I, may need during the day a doctor we cannot reach for he or she is on a well-earned “Sunday off”. Our driver being on his “Sunday off”, we cannot get him to take us to a clinic or hospital that may have an out-patient emergency functioning. Getting an Uber or Ola on a Sunday is not as taken-for-granted a thing as it generally is. And pray God, our trusty car should be okay! If it is, then we could requisition the services of that miracle of a way-out, namely, the call-and-hire driver. He will charge a Sunday premium fee, but then health is health.
My thoughts will, on a Sunday morning, move next to the events that are happening that day, to which we are invited, where we are expected to be present, by good and kind people who have fixed them on a Sunday precisely because it is a Sunday and most people will be able to attend without the problem of a weekday time crunch. These kind hosts forget that for the elderly, locomotion on a Sunday is a chore — an expensive one at that. Our forced smiles and small talk conceal the anxieties of an iffy return home in a hired vehicle or in our own jalopy driven by a call-and-hire driver counting his minutes.
Should, God forbid, any of the essential services in our flat such as plumbing, the gas stove, our reliable water kettle, or the good but old fridge malfunctions, we will be sunk. None of the wonderful wizards who fix those things will be where they can be found. It is “Sunday off” for them. And, it is “headache on” for us.
Next, should that slave-driver of our times, the internet, and the WiFi decide to take a Sunday off, then we are finished! Our laptops, smartphones, and the many other devices that have made us utterly dependent will then leave us marooned. No techie will be there for us to call because the link to him will not be there, for it is “Sunday off”! It will feel like God has abandoned us.
Sundays are also days when oldies have to reconcile to having to do without the company of younger members of the family as they have as they should have, better things to do with the holiday. And that is when oldies recall the days when they, as young parents, left their little ones home with minders, to step into the arms of the waiting world. Ayyo, Sunday thy name is Loneday.
What is true of Sundays is also, alas, true of public holidays or what used to be called “bank holidays”. Some of them may exhilarate the young — Diwali, Holi, and that worst of all, New Year’s Eve, being the marquee ones. But they fill me with anxieties — not just about the deafening explosions that come with the first, the drenching deep-dyeings that mark the second, or the drunken revelries that disfigure the third, but also because essential services go into repose. They are at rest. Which means, for me, that they are unavailable. God bless and bless repeatedly the doctors and nurses, the ambulance drivers, fire servicemen, electricity department’s and telecommunications’ “linemen” who volunteer for duty on those days.
I must also mention here the several police personnel who report for duty on these “closed” days. They have families and dependents who must want them at home. But these men and women have a work ethic that is to be saluted.
In the same category are those who work our transport systems — bus, rail and air. Passengers will travel, on Sundays and holidays particularly. Do we — the passengers — realise how much we owe to those who are working on those holidays so that we may “go holidaying”?
And sanitary workers, God bless them the most! They are like us, family people. But whether with or without overtime/holiday compensations, they are out, sweeping, swabbing and cleaning. On Diwali, while we scatter thick and wide layers of cracker-debris and pollute the air without a thought, sanitary workers prepare to clear those millions of pieces of exploded wrappings and paper from the roads the morning after.
Readers will permit, and forgive, the macabre thought with which I will close. The very idea that one may die on the eve of or on a Sunday or a public holiday is chilling. Will there be anyone to take what we are leaving behind of ourselves, albeit lifeless, to a morgue, crematorium or cemetery? Will there be a skeleton staff around to take over the about-to-be-ashes/dust?
The purpose of this baleful rumination is not to lament. A serious thought underlies it. We must have a shift system for all Sundays and holidays so that no service — not one — shuts down. We are a notoriously unemployed country. Surely, we can build up a robust weekend/holiday cadre, starting with the essential services, that can erase the difference between normal working days and holidays. Clocks do not stop on Sundays. Why should life?
Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a student of modern Indian history and the author of The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India. The views expressed are personal
