On My 2362nd Birthday!

As you read this I will be preparing to be born 2362 years ago. Today. At 11.30, just before midnight. How does it feel to be as old as that? Well, in a word: great.

It’s a great feeling. Having been around since the time Alexander arrived with his legions and lived through the great parade of everyone marching in to make the subcontinent the great and wonderful place it became, I’ve seen and learned a great deal.

But the funniest thing in these long years is the number of people I’ve met who claim to be one hundred and forty years old. Bloody minnows. Just one hundred and forty years old? Compare that to my 2300+ years!

If they are Punjabis, they claim this great age because, as they say, they remember the time of Maharaja Ranjit Singh – the only Punjabi leader worth the name since Raja Paurava (Porus) the Great. If from Hunza they remember, so they think, Mir Safdar Ali who was ousted by the Brits in the last decade of the 19th century.

Even funnier was the man who I met in Kharian only some years ago. He said he was one hundred and twenty years of age. Poor bugger. He didn’t remember Ranjit Singh. What a disappointment! So, at the time we met, he would have been born in 1885. He said he was in the army during World War II. Meaning the poor bastard was called up for service at the age of fifty-five! Man, the British Indian government was in difficult straits fighting wicked old Herr Hitler that they had to muster all the old farts they could get their hands on.

I asked this funny man if, having served in World War I and retired, he had been called out a second time. No, said he, that he missed out on. When I persisted, he said, ‘Don’t even mention that,’ (Ohdi gull na karo!) and he kept repeating himself as if that was a bad memory. Only, I knew that was no memory at all. Because, for heaven’s sake, you cannot remember something you have not lived through.

My homoeopathic doctor friend who had told me of this man-marvel for being the only one hundred and twenty year-old who cycled around Kharian was sorely disappointed. He couldn’t believe that if you did the sums, the marvel turned out to be only about seventy-five.

The trouble with folks nowadays is that they do not respect Methuselah-like old age. Why, I’ve very nearly got beaten up a number of times for telling people they just cannot get the arithmetic of their age right.

In November 2008, in Rahim Yar Khan my friend Raheal Siddiqui then DCO there arranged for me to visit a one hundred and twenty-five year-old fart. The escort he gave me was a journalist who had in May that year published a newspaper about the man and his great age. So, when we met – six months after the interview and the article – the oldie told me he was a hundred and forty five years old.

The man had aged twenty years in a space of just six months. What miracles won’t the Lord in heaven work! This never happened before in all my 2362 years. But his sons got rather peeved when I did some sums for them and would have attacked me if Raheal hadn’t provided me an armed escort. After all I was the DCO sahib bahadar’s guest, you know.

Now with all these oldies adding to it, the average age of Pakistan should be somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred. But we haven’t cross the sixty-three mark. Since I am 2360 years old, I’ll tell you why that is so.

Like the average IQ of Pakistan is pulled down by the mere fact that folks like Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif continue to live, so too is the average age at only sixty-three because every year most women get younger. And leading among them is Meera (who meanwhile seems to have learned English, or some version of it). Of course there are a few more of her kind.

Top image: On the Chiring Glacier in the Central Karakoram Mountain

Related: I am 2300 old!