To a ripe old age

False claimants can only show a couple great-grandchildren. What’s more, they have an eldest child only in their 60s.

Pakistan is the country with the most long-lived people. Or, so it should seem from the recent spate of newspaper reports about 130-year-old women. The five or six news items I refer to all speak of the same number of years for these different persons. About 30 years ago, the favourite figure was 144 years. Of course, none of these people have any document to prove their claim.

Fact: an illiterate village family weds its daughter when she reaches puberty. Therefore, the average village woman is married at not later than 15 years, the groom being a couple of years older. (Though things have changed, this was the norm until about 30 years ago). The couple parents their first child before they reach their 20^th birthdays.

By the time they are 30, they are grandparents. Consequently, if anyone claims to be 130 years old, they have to show us a line extending through at least seven or eight generations. But these false claimants can only show a couple of great-grandchildren. What’s more, they also have an eldest child only in their 60s. That is, these century-and-a-half-year-old persons married and produced children when they were in their 90s!

Here’s how it occurs.

Back in 1988, PTV aired the interview of an octogenarian who said he was 144 years old. Proof of longevity: he said he knew so much about Ranjit Singh’s time. Indeed, he did narrate a few details of the Maharaja’s death and funeral to the utter astonishment of the ignorant interviewer. Note that the Maharaja died in 1839 and by his own reckoning the man was not born until 1844! But our electronic media persons are hardly notable for their erudition and gumption.

Similarly, in 1997, up in Hunza where the moronic British invented the myth of longevity which was gobbled hook, line and stinker (no pun) by simple people, a man said his grandmother had died at age 150. His father –– who I also met –– was, incidentally, only in his early 50s. It was confirmed that he was the eldest child of his supposedly 150-year-old mother. Proof of longevity: grandma remembered everything about the time of Mir Safdar Ali (ousted by the Brits in the 1890s).

Aside: a 1990s research by IUCN shows that until very recently, Hunza and Gojal women were married not later than their 15^th year of age. This has only changed now because of the education programme of the Aga Khan Foundation.

I was researching Alexander the Macedonian in those days and sometimes felt I personally knew the man. I asked if that meant I was 2,200 years old. This was the only time in my life that I saw an angry Hunza man.

Even more recently, in the village Allahabad (Rahim Yar Khan), a local journalist took me to meet a 125-year-old man. This chap had interviewed the oldie and published it in an Urdu paper. I asked the man (another octogenarian) his age and he said ‘Paintali!’ (45).

I thought the old man was off his rocker and asked again. ‘Ik so paintali!’ he said the second time. Now, in July 2007, when he was interviewed by my journalist friend he was 125. In November the same year when I met him he was 145! That, then, is how we attain longevity. Incidentally, his eldest son (another angry man when I did my sums for them) was about 60.

Two things here. For one, illiterate people have little concept of time and space. I have known in my time of people who count two years from one winter (or summer) to the next. Secondly, they believe they ate pure and good. I ask you, what great and healthful diet can a poor man maintain?

The 145-year-old man had owned only an acre of land and barely made a living off it. The food in his youth was sparse: millet bread, some buttermilk and occasionally, some veggies. He had ten children and had worn himself out by the time he was 50 –– which, in his reckoning, was a 100 years.

If these fogies want a man of good sense to believe, then they have to produce certificates. Other than that, it is all balderdash.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 24^th, 2012.