DEL19252
United by their loneliness, America’s elderly Indian
immigrants......PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
They gather five days a week at a mall called the Hub,
sitting on concrete planters and sipping thermoses of chai. These elderly
immigrants from India are members of an all-male group called The 100 Years
Living Club. They talk about crime in nearby Oakland, the cheapest flights to
Delhi and how to deal with recalcitrant daughters-in-law.
Together, they fend off the well of loneliness and isolation
that so often accompany the move to this country late in life from distant
places, some culturally light years away.
“If I don’t come here, I have sealed lips, nobody to talk
to,” said Devendra Singh, a 79-year-old widower. Meeting beside the parking
lot, the men were oblivious to their fellow mall rats, backpack-carrying
teenagers swigging energy drinks.
In this country of twittering youth, Devendra and his
friends form a gathering force: the elderly, who now make up America’s
fastest-growing immigrant group. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born people
over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million — or about 11 per cent of the
country’s recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16
million by 2050. In California, one in nearly three seniors is now foreign
born, according to a 2007 census survey.
Many are aging parents of naturalized American citizens,
reuniting with their families. Yet experts say the ethnic elderly are among the
most isolated people in America. Seventy per cent of recent older immigrants
speak little or no English. Most do not drive. Some studies suggest depression
and psychological problems are widespread, the result of language barriers, a
lack of social connections and values that sometimes conflict with the dominant
American culture, including those of their assimilated children.
The lives of transplanted elders are largely untracked,
unknown outside their ethnic or religious communities. “They never win spelling
bees,” said Judith Treas, a sociology professor and demographer at the
University of California, Irvine. “They do not join criminal gangs. And nobody
worries about Americans losing jobs to Korean grandmothers.”
Many who have followed their grown children here have
fulfilling lives, but life in this country does not always go according to plan
for seniors navigating the new, at times jagged, emotional terrain, which often
means living under a child’s roof.
Devendra Singh grew up in a boisterous Indian household with
14 family members. In Fremont, he moved in with his son’s family and devoted
himself to his grandchildren, picking them up from school and ferrying them to
soccer practice. Then his son and daughter-in-law decided “they wanted their
privacy,” said Devendra, an undertone of sadness in his voice. He reluctantly
concluded he should move out.
So when he leaves the Hub, dead leaves swirling around its
fake cobblestones, Devendra drives to the rented room in a house he found on
Craigslist. His could be a dorm room, except for the arthritis heat wraps
packed neatly in plastic bins.
“In India there is a favourable bias toward the elders,”
Devendra said, sitting amid Hindu religious posters and a photograph of his
late wife. “Here people think about what is convenient and inconvenient for
them.”
Sociologists call Devendra Singh and his cohort the “.5
generation,” distinct from the “1.5 generation” — younger transplants who
became bicultural through school and work. Immigrant elders leave a familiar
home, some without electricity or running water, for a multigenerational home
in communities like Fremont that demographers call ‘ethnoburbs’.
A generation ago, Fremont was 76 per cent Caucasian. Today,
nearly one-half of its residents are Asian, 14 per cent are Latino and it is
home to one of the country’s largest groups of Afghan refugees (it was a
setting for the best-selling book The Kite Runner).
Along the way, a former beauty college has become a mosque;
a movie house became a Bollywood multiplex; a bank, an Afghan market, and a
stucco-lined street renamed Gurdwara, after the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Temple.
Reliant on their children, late-life immigrants are a
vulnerable population. “They come anticipating a great deal of family
togetherness,” Prof. Treas said. “But American society isn’t organized in a way
that responds to their cultural expectations.”
Hardev Singh, 76, and his wife, Pal Keur, 67, part of
Fremont’s large Sikh community, live above the office of the Fremont Frontier
Motel, its lone nod to a Western motif a dilapidated wagon wheel sign.
They rented the fluorescent-lighted apartment after living
for three years with their daughter, Kamaljit Purewal, her husband, his mother
and two grandchildren. As the children grew, Hardev and Pal were relegated to
the garage, transformed into a room. As Hardev said, “in winter it was too much
cold.”( Their daughter, Purewal, said that she “tried to give them a better
life,” but felt unappreciated because her parents favoured her older brother in
India. “If you’re a happy family, a small house is a big house,” she said. )
Fraught family dynamics when elderly parents move in with
children often leave older members without a voice in decision-making, whether
about buying a house or using the shower.
Pravinchandra Patel, the 84-year-old founder of the ‘100
Years Living Club’, intervened when he heard that the son in one family was
taking his parents’ monthly Supplemental Security Income check, for $658, then
doling out $20 for spending money.
“I ask the son, ‘How much money do you figure you owe your
parents for your education?’ “ he said.
Fremont, 40 miles south of San Francisco, is now the Bay
Area’s fourth-largest city, with voters from 152 countries. Physical distances
can be compounded by psychic ones: 13 per cent of the city’s immigrant seniors
live in households isolated by language. Theirs is a late-life journey without
a map.
For the men in the ‘100 Years Living Club’, the road leads
to the Hub, where they have been meeting for 14 years, since the Target store was
a Montgomery Ward. Patel, who was an herbal doctor in India, started the group
after he noticed his friends were in “house prisons,” as he put it, without
even the confidence to use a bus. The men keep their spirits alive by sharing
homemade chaat snacks. They are the lucky ones.
Loneliness creeps up on Delhi's elders’
NEW DELHI: On the face of it they're busy and happening at
60: exercise regime, social work, satsang, paying bills, housework and the
works. Yet, in a disturbing way, loneliness is increasingly creeping up on the
old in Delhi, making them feel isolated. A study on the elderly conducted by
NGO Agewell Foundation shows that about 80% of the surveyed Delhi residents in
their 60s reported feeling isolated despite an active life. While only 11% of
old who live in joint families experience loneliness, in nuclear families, more
than 70% feel isolated.
Reduced interaction with family emerges as the greatest factor leading to
feeling isolated. Differentiating between emotional and social isolation, the
study — conducted in January this year among 10,000 citizens above age 60 in 20
states across all economic strata — found that 44% in cities such as Delhi,
Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata felt both social and emotional isolation. Social
isolation stems from a dwindling friends circle, immobility and a feeling of
being ignored socially, while emotional isolation results from strained
interpersonal relations within family.
Himanshu Rath, founder Agewell explains that at home, younger members are
"always bone-tired and too busy" to spend time with the old.
"It's not that there's no concern. Even where nuclear families do all that
needs to be done for the old, life is too hectic and tough for them to give
time," he says.
Additionally, adds Rath, their stagnant incomes and growing costs of living
especially in the last two years have led to much self-denial, also resulting
in feeling alone, says Rath. "Last two years' slowdown has hit the old
hardest. Interest rates have slipped. Monthly yields are reduced. The
pressure's tremendous," he says.
Rath gives an example of the stress an average middle-class 65-year-old faces.
"With longer life-spans, and given that today, a 65-year-old's wife will
be to 6 to 12 years his junior, the retired man believes he has to secure
finances for the wife for at least 20 to 30 years." With skyrocketing
costs especially for medical, conveyance and food, the feeling of helplessness
is strong.
There may be better medical facilities today, but they're expensive.
Neighbourhood GPs are a thing of the past, points out Rath, a simple blood test
will cost Rs 200 at least. "They cut down on the simple things. A third
biscuit can mean Rs 1.50 more. I'm talking upper middle-classes who've had a
certain lifestyle," he says. Saving for a rainy day, the old are cutting down
on socializing also to avoid expenditure. Understandably, loneliness among
elderly in Delhi increases with age.
Further, in cities many oldies, says 81-year-old Carol H. Barbosa, have had to
financially pitch in to help children who have suffered setbacks and job losses
due to recession. "They encash FDs, send money. The financial pressure has
grown. It takes a toll, it's like a physical and mental breakdown," says
Barbosa, who lives by herself in a South Delhi apartment complex that houses
several retired people.
The report, conducted via interviews in urban and rural randomly selected
districts found that at nationally, 87% of those in their 70s reported
loneliness. Interestingly, rural old reported lesser levels of loneliness at
78% than urban ones (90%). At 97%, the loneliest were individual elderly who
lived by themselves.
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