The characters in “Of White Hairs and Cricket” stubbornly resist the signs of age and decay that that surround them. For instance, the apartment building where the 14-year-old narrator and his family live is crumbling, but his parents ignore this by covering the gaps in the plaster with old calendars. The narrator’s parents and grandmother are also visibly getting older, and his father asks him to pluck out all the white hairs from his head every Sunday—a routine that has replaced their old Sunday morning ritual of playing cricket together. Seeing his best friend, Viraf’s, terminally ill father drives home for the narrator that his time with his own loved ones is limited—he becomes more committed to plucking his father’s white hairs after this, even though he admits that he’s “powerless to stop” his father from aging. Indeed, the only thing in the narrator’s life that seems frozen in time is the Murphy Baby’s eerily enduring smile on the old Murphy Radio calendar in the narrator’s apartment, which gives the sense that the family is trying to cling to the past through this outdated calendar rather than accept that time is moving forward. Together, the characters’ vain attempts to stop time suggest that while it’s perhaps natural to resist mortality and decay, it’s ultimately futile to do so, because these processes are inevitable for everyone and everything.
The narrator and his family remain stuck in the past and try to cover up signs of aging and decay—but they are only avoiding reality and ignoring the inevitable. Outdated calendars cover the crumbling wall plaster in the narrator’s home, serving as constant reminders of the past for him and his family. All of them seem to remember the past more fondly than they experience the present, and they aren’t hopeful or optimistic. In fact, Daddy tells the narrator outright that there is “no future” in India, and the narrator spends much of the story longing for the days when he and Daddy used to play cricket together instead of focusing on his present or future. Daddy’s focus on the past seems to make him less able to contend with the present: the narrator describes how every weekend Daddy goes through the same routine of looking for a job in the newspaper and having his son pluck out white hairs from his head to make himself appear younger. But he never seems to make any progress in his job search and starts the process all over again the next weekend. This ritual suggests that Daddy wants to believe that he’s still a young man and that he has unlimited time to get a job—but his persistent white hairs prove that this isn’t true. And by treating time as an unlimited resource, Daddy is avoiding the truth and failing to meet his family’s present needs. Daddy’s attempts to stave off aging are like his strategy for covering holes in the wall with calendars: only temporary and purely aesthetic. Beneath the surface, the problems the characters refuse to face persist.
In particular, the photo of the Murphy Baby on one of the old calendars suggests that stopping time is impossible, and that the characters’ efforts to do so are wasted. Since the Murphy Baby is suspended in a permanent state of infancy in the photo on the calendar, it is an exaggerated symbol of the kind of youth-preservation that Daddy is after. But the narrator doesn’t seem to find the baby adorable or likeable—instead, he mostly notices the cracks in the wall plaster spreading out from behind the Murphy Radio calendar’s curling edges. The Murphy Baby’s youth clashes with this underlying decay, suggesting that decay will always set in, even if one tries to stop it. Moreover, when the narrator’s parents compare the narrator’s own smile as a baby to the Murphy Baby’s “innocent and joyous” smile, their observations only serve to emphasize that the narrator has since grown up and lost his former innocence. He notes that the baby “would now be the same age as me,” again suggesting that the family’s attempts to live in the past and stave off aging and decay are in vain.
But even though the narrator eventually recognizes that it’s impossible to stop aging and decay, he adopts the same stubbornness as Daddy by the end of the story. After the narrator sees his friend Viraf’s father on his deathbed, the signs of his own father’s aging stand out to him more: “The lines on his forehead stood out all too clearly, and the stubble flecked with white[.]” That the narrator notices these features just after the traumatizing sight of Viraf’s father dying suggests that the experience has made him realize that Daddy is getting older despite his attempts to cheat his own mortality. Rather than learning from his father’s stubbornness, the narrator instead resolves to pluck out Daddy’s white hairs with newfound intensity—“as if all our lives were riding on the efficacy of the tweezers.” And rather than accepting that his father’s mortality is a fact of life, he continues the cycle of trying to stop time from passing, even though he knows his efforts are futile. This suggests that even when people logically know that aging and decay are inevitable, it is perhaps natural and expected for them to resist these forces anyway.
At the end of the story, the narrator collapses onto his bed and feels like crying when he thinks about how tired his grandmother Mamaiji looks, and how Mummy is “growing old” and giving up on her dreams. He regrets not being grateful enough for happy moments in his past, and he knows that he is “powerless to stop” Daddy’s white hairs from growing back. That the story ends on this note suggests that although the passage of time is inevitable, it is perhaps also inevitable that people will cling to the past and dread the future—even to their own detriment.
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Time, Decay, and Mortality ThemeTracker
Time, Decay, and Mortality 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.
By angling the tweezers I could aim the bulb’s light upon various spots on the Murphy Radio calendar: the edges of the picture, worn and turned inward; the threadbare loop of braid sharing the colour of rust with the rusty nail it hung by; a corroded staple clutching twelve thin strips—the perforated residue of months ripped summarily over a decade ago when their days and weeks were played out. The baby’s smile, posed with finger to chin, was all that had fully endured the years. Mummy and Daddy called it so innocent and joyous. That baby would now be the same age as me. The ragged perimeter of the patch of crumbled wall it tried to hide strayed outward from behind, forming a kind of dark and jagged halo around the baby. The picture grew less adequate, daily, as the wall kept losing plaster and the edges continued to curl and tatter.
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.’
‘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.
‘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.
