The men and women in “Of White Hairs and Cricket” respond to challenges differently. On the one hand, the men in the story are afraid of showing weakness. For instance, rather than face aging (even resignedly), Daddy forces the narrator to pluck all the white hair out of his head every Sunday. He even stops playing cricket with his son seemingly because he doesn’t want to be seen as weak when he gets tired. Similarly, Viraf’s father, an overweight man, is now terminally ill because walking up the three flights of stairs to his flat taxes his heart so much, and he refuses to give up his upper-floor “paradise” even to save his own life. On the other hand, the narrator’s grandmother Mamaiji, whose mobility and eyesight are deteriorating, accepts aging gracefully and warns Daddy against trying to fight time. And Viraf’s mother describes how she tried to reason with her husband to take breaks between floors on the steps or move flats, but he refused her. With these differences—plus the narrator’s description of how his father taught him “to be tough, always,” despite any physical or emotional pain he might be experiencing—the story suggests that teaching men to be strong and silent actively harms the men who try to embody this ideal.
Daddy’s and Viraf’s father’s struggle against being perceived as weak ends up harming them (and the people around them) in the long run. Daddy is so fixated on appearing tough and fit—both of which are stereotypically masculine qualities—that rather than adapt to his aging body by resting during cricket games, he stops the games altogether. This decision negatively impacts the narrator’s life: he misses cricket but can’t share his feelings with his father about it, because his father has taught him “to be tough, always.” In other words, the narrator is afraid of appearing weak or emotionally vulnerable in front of his father because these traits don’t fit into Daddy’s idea of masculinity. Viraf’s father’s struggle to admit when his body is declining likewise causes problems. However, his problems are physical: because he refused to take care of what seems like a heart condition, he is now dying. And, as a result, he cannot be physically strong or provide for his family. In this way, trying to embody a masculine ideal actually make Viraf’s father less stereotypically masculine, as it weakens his body and makes him dependent on other people to care for him. And, more importantly, it makes him terminally ill, thereby putting his family in the position of losing a husband and father.
Unlike the men in the story, Mamaiji, Viraf’s mother, and Mummy accept their circumstances and encourage the men in their lives to do the same—but the men don’t take the women seriously, and so their advice falls on deaf ears. While Daddy can work outside the home, the narrator describes how Mummy is trapped in the kitchen all day preparing food for the family, and how Mamaiji spends her days housebound, spinning thread. However, rather than resist their circumstances, both women make the best of their situations. Because they don’t face the same expectations of looking “tough”—and because there are greater restrictions on their movements, abilities, and responsibilities as women—the women in “Of White Hairs and Cricket” face reality without pride getting in the way. Mummy, Mamaiji, and Viraf’s mother each warn the men in their lives against ignoring their body’s demands as they age. But since men aren’t expected to listen to women in the society of the story, their pleas go ignored—and in the end, it is too late for Viraf’s father.
At the end of the story, the narrator chooses to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a similarly prideful masculinity, suggesting that these sorts of ideals will likely persist as long as men pass them onto their sons. Although the narrator knows how Viraf’s father’s pridefulness has made him terminally ill, he cannot break free from Daddy’s—and society’s—expectations of him to be “tough,” which includes denying the natural decline and decay of the human body. For this reason, he commits himself to plucking out Daddy’s white hairs, something that Daddy enlists him to do in a vain effort to remain young and strong forever. The narrator makes this commitment in spite of the fact that trying to appear tough has literally hurt him in the past. For instance, when he got hit in the shin during one of his and his father’s cricket games, he resisted the urge show pain in order to gain his father’s approval. Now, he applies the same strategy to emotional pain: rather than face his father’s morality directly or talk to his father about his fears, he lets Daddy’s expectations dictate his behavior and sinks into denial. The narrator admits to himself that he knows he cannot stop the white hairs from growing on his father’s head, suggesting that at least his denial of the aging process is not as complete as his father’s. But he does not go so far as to face aging head-on, leaving the reader questioning whether he will turn out just like his father or be able to learn from his mother and Mamaiji to accept weakness and vulnerability as parts of life.
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Gender, Masculinity, and Pride Quotes in Of White Hairs and Cricket
His aaah surprised me. He had taught me to be tough, always. One morning when we had come home after cricket, he told Mummy and Mamaiji, ‘Today my son did a brave thing, as I would have done. A powerful shot was going to the boundary, like a cannonball, and he blocked it with his bare shin.’ Those were his exact words. The ball’s shiny red fury, and the audible crack—at least, I think it was audible—had sent pain racing through me that nearly made my eyes overflow. Daddy had clapped and said, ‘Well-fielded, sir, well-fielded.’ So I waited to rub the agonised bone until attention was no longer upon me.
Daddy finished cutting out and re-reading the classified advertisement. ‘Yes, this is a good one. Sounds very promising.’ He picked up the newspaper again, then remembered what Mamaiji had muttered, and said softly to me, 'If it is so duleendar and will bring bad luck, how is it I found this? These old people’ and gave a sigh of mild exasperation. Then briskly: ‘Don't stop now, this week is very important.’ He continued, slapping the table merrily at each word: ‘Every-single-white-hair-out.’
My guilty conscience, squirming uncontrollably, could not witness the quarrels. For though I was an eager partner in the conspiracy with Mamaiji, and acquiesced to the necessity for secrecy, very often I spilled the beans—quite literally—with diarrhoea and vomiting, which Mamaiji upheld as undeniable proof that lack of proper regular nourishment had enfeebled my bowels. In the throes of these bouts of effluence, I promised Mummy and Daddy never again to eat what Mamaiji offered, and confessed all my past sins. In Mamaiji’s eyes I was a traitor, but sometimes it was also fun to listen to her scatological reproaches: ‘Mua ugheeparoo! Eating my food, then shitting and tattling all over the place. Next time I’ll cork you up with a big bootch before feeding you.’
‘Listen to this,’ Daddy said to her, ‘just found it in the paper: “A Growing Concern Seeks Dynamic Young Account Executive, Self-Motivated. Four-Figure Salary and Provident Fund.” I think it’s perfect.’ He waited for Mummy’s reaction. Then: ‘If I can get it, all our troubles will be over.’ Mummy listened to such advertisements week after week: harbingers of hope that ended in disappointment and frustration. But she always allowed the initial wave of optimism to lift her, riding it with Daddy and me, higher and higher, making plans and dreaming, until it crashed and left us stranded, awaiting the next advertisement and the next wave.
‘It’s these useless wicks. The original Criterion ones from England used to be so good. One trim and you had a fine flame for months.’ He bit queasily into the toast. ‘Well, when I get the job, a Bombay Gas Company stove and cylinder can replace it.’ He laughed. ‘Why not? The British left seventeen years ago, time for their stove to go as well.’
He finished chewing and turned to me. ‘And one day, you must go, too, to America. No future here.’ His eyes fixed mine, urgently. ‘Somehow we’ll get the money to send you. I’ll find a way.’
His face filled with love. I felt suddenly like hugging him, but we never did except on birthdays, and to get rid of the feeling I looked away and pretended to myself that he was saying it just to humour me, because he wanted me to finish pulling his white hairs.
I thought of the lines on Daddy’s forehead, visible so clearly from my coign of vantage with the tweezers. His thinning hair barely gave off a dull lustre with its day-old pomade, and the Sunday morning stubble on his chin was flecked with grey and white.
Something—remorse, maybe just pity—stirred inside, but I quashed it without finding out. All my friends had fathers whose hair was greying. Surely they did not spend Sunday mornings doing what I did, or they would have said something. They were not like me, there was nothing that was too private and personal for them.
Cricket on Sunday mornings became a regular event for the boys in Firozsha Baag. Between us we almost had a complete kit; all that was missing was a pair of bails, and wicket-keeping gloves. Daddy took anyone who wanted to play to the Marine Drive maidaan, and organised us into teams, captaining one team himself. We went early, before the sun got too hot and the maidaan overcrowded. But then one Sunday, halfway through the game, Daddy said he was going to rest for a while. Sitting on the grass a little distance away, he seemed so much older than he did when he was batting, or bowling leg breaks. He watched us with a faraway expression on his face. Sadly, as if he had just realised something and wished he hadn’t.
There was no cricket at the maidaan after that day.
Viraf was standing at the balcony outside his flat. ‘What’s all the muskaa-paalis for the doctor?’
He turned away without answering. He looked upset but I did not ask what the matter was. Words to show concern were always beyond me. I spoke again, in that easygoing debonair style which all of us tried to perfect, right arm akimbo and head tilted ever so slightly, ‘Come on yaar, what are your plans for today?’
He shrugged his shoulders, and I persisted, ‘Half the morning’s over, man, don’t be such a cry-baby.’
‘Fish off,’ he said, but his voice shook. His eyes were red, and he rubbed one as if there was something in it. I stood quietly for a while, looking out over the balcony.
‘Puppa is very sick,’ whispered Viraf, as we passed the sickroom. I stopped and looked inside. It was dark. The smell of sickness and medicines made it stink like the waiting room of Dr Sidhwa’s dispensary. Viraf’s father was in bed, lying on his back, with a tube through his nose. There was a long needle stuck into his right arm, and it glinted cruelly in a thin shaft of sunlight that had suddenly slunk inside the darkened room. I shivered. The needle was connected by a tube to a large bottle which hung upside down from a dark metal stand towering over the bed.
Viraf’s mother was talking softly to the neighbours in the dining-room. ‘. . . in his chest got worse when he came home last night. So many times I’ve told him, three floors to climb is not easy at your age with your big body, climb one, take rest for a few minutes, then climb again. But he won’t listen, does not want people to think it is too much for him. Now this is the result, and what I will do I don’t know… to exchange with someone on the ground floor, but that also is no. Says I won’t give up my third-floor paradise for all the smell and noise of a ground-floor flat. Which is true, up here even B.E.S.T. bus rattle and rumble does not come. But what use of paradise if you are not alive in good health to enjoy it?’
Daddy looked up questioningly. His hair was dishevelled as I had left it, and I waited, hoping he would ask me to continue. To offer to do it was beyond me, but I wanted desperately that he should ask me now. I glanced at his face discreetly, from the corner of my eye. The lines on his forehead stood out all too clearly, and the stubble flecked with white, which by this hour should have disappeared down the drain with the shaving water. I swore to myself that never again would I begrudge him my help; I would get all the white hairs, one by one, if he would only ask me; I would concentrate on the tweezers as never before, I would do it as if all our lives were riding on the efficacy of the tweezers, yes, I would continue to do it Sunday after Sunday, no matter how long it took.
I felt like crying, and buried my face in the pillow. I wanted to cry for the way I had treated Viraf, and for his sick father with the long, cold needle in his arm and his rasping breath; for Mamaiji and her tired, darkened eyes spinning thread for our kustis, and for Mummy growing old in the dingy kitchen smelling of kerosene, where the Primus roared and her dreams were extinguished; I wanted to weep for myself, for not being able to hug Daddy when I wanted to, and for not ever saying thank you for cricket in the morning, and pigeons and bicycles and dreams; and for all the white hairs that I was powerless to stop.
