‘We should check-out Coimbatore, they have nice retirement communities,” said my wife, and I choked on my oats topped with flax seeds and ‘jamun’ (black plum) honey.

“We are getting on. I would like to spend the winter years quietly, with no stress,” she said, spreading out brochures from a real estate company about a community with the flashy name, “Sunrise Valley”, that had the tag line, ‘Where living is easy’.

Coimbatore, also known as Kovai, is in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is situated on the banks of River Noyyal and surrounded by a mountain range that runs along the western coast.

“Remember Mississauga, where we lived when we first landed in Canada. Nothing much happened there, no riots over a movie, no power blackouts, except that day I slipped on the icy road and slowly skated to the opposite side despite it being sprinkled with salt. Luckily, there was no traffic,” I said.

“A retirement home will kill me. I would have to speak to vicious, gossipy women who have all the time in the world on their hands, and will have to play silly card games with doddering old chaps whose dentures fall off when they laugh. It would be like being trapped in a time warp,” I said.

“We should not think of retirement yet,” I told my wife. “I heard one man retired after working for over 35 years at a firm overseas and he went home and just before he hugged his wife, he dropped dead.”

“Did she kill him?” asked my wife.

“I suppose in a way she did. The shock of doing nothing after years of gainful employment, and spending the rest of his life with her, may have been too much of a shock,” I said.

Going on cruises

“I know many people who do nothing even when they are working,” said my wife. “I should have retired long time ago and gone on cruises around the world,” she said.

“That seems even worse,” I said. “You have to dine with the same people every night and the captain will make the same silly jokes about people falling overboard and the band will play endless songs from the 1990s.”

“Can’t we buy a trailer and go visit all the camping sites in America. You just have to pay a minimum sum for water and electricity at the campsites, and petrol is cheap” I said.

“One should be on the move all the time after a certain age or you get fossilised and your knees go and you have to get knee implants and that always causes problems at airport security. Look at this health advert in Hindi and English that advises you to, ‘Move Karo’, to move your something,” I said.

“Check out this place, it offers assisted living,” said my wife. “You won’t have to do a thing, everything will be taken care of,” she said.

“Sounds like the movie, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I said. “When I try to escape, the head nurse will have me lobotomised and you will have to deal with me staring at you blankly with my mouth open.” “Why don’t you take some time off and run off to those retreats for the weekend to get your bearings right,” I said. “We will talk about retirement homes later.”

“They give you bland, boiled food at these retreats, and you cannot speak for hours. My colleague who went to the retreat said it was very maddening as you sat meditating early morning and she could hear everyone’s stomach gurgling with hunger in the quiet,” said my wife.

“It says in this newspaper report that the world is getting older, especially the Western World. Maybe we should go back to North America so we can easily fit into the crowd,” I said.

Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi