Maggie Smith proved that elderly ladies are the real scene stealers

But then she admitted that thanks to those roles little children now recognised her at places like the Waitrose supermarket. In an industry where most actresses see their roles dwindle after 50, we were witnessing the prime of Dame Maggie Smith. And it was a relief to see that she had not aged into either weepy mother or evil conniving mother-in-law, roles that were the fate of so many fine actresses in India.

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But more than the acting prowess, I think whenever an old lady with a life well-lived dies, there is a different kind of loss. And I use “old lady" deliberately because these were women who wore their age with pride, they didn’t care about politer terms like “elderly". Men of that age might have been generals and statesmen and industrialists. For example, Henry Kissinger’s death at 100, certainly made news. He might have known the behind-the-scenes machinations in war rooms. But I always felt white-haired ladies with twinkling eyes knew the real dirt. In an 1899 essay in The Atlantic, titled In Praise of Old Ladies, Lucy Martin Donnelly, an English teacher at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, writes, “it may be that the old gentleman is unamiable; that, his days of strenuousness fairly over, he becomes crabbed, a lover of snuff, and unpoetical. But the old lady is a creature of another quality… How softly the old India shawls she wears falls about her shoulders! What strange unlikely stories she tells of the beginning of the century!"

In films I loved feisty old aunties—Chhaya Devi in Padi Pishir Barmi Baksha (1972), as the very formidable old aunt who faces off dacoits and wrests a jewel encrusted box for herself. And much later Moushumi Chatterjee as the salty-tongued ghost of a child widow in Aparna Sen’s Goynar Baksho (2013), still craving the dried fish from Faridpur, wondering what sex felt like and plotting extramarital affairs for her kith and kin. Or Zohra Sehgal, as the feisty foul-mouthed granny in Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Masala (1991), scene stealers all.

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Perhaps it’s because I grew up with my great-grandmother who lived well into her 90s. Till her dying day, she secretly ate everything she wasn’t supposed to, the more deep-fried, the better. She would install herself at the front door and nab all the cooks and maids passing by, trawling for neighbourhood gossip. Once she fell down and cracked her head. As the family scurried around trying to bandage her head, my great-grandmother was hollering for the maid. “Oh Parul’s mother, can you soak some dal so we can have fritters tomorrow?" My harried mother had her hands full trying to manage her irrepressible grandmother-in-law but now in her own old age she remembers her shenanigans with a wry smile. “She was a housewife but also a business woman," she says. “We got a little rental money from a tea shop. She told me that money was meant to be ours as the women of the house, not to be spent on husband and children. It was our nest egg as women."

She was not a rebel. She was conservative in her own way and a stickler for traditions but remarkable nonetheless. I just wish I had asked her more questions. Many years later I got to ask another elderly woman questions about her life. Beatrice Wood was an American ceramic artist but one who had fallen in love with India and Indian craft and spent the rest of her life preferring to wear a sari, the mother of all curry queens one could say. When I visited her at her sunny studio in Ojai, California, she rued she could not manage the folds of a sari anymore. So she was wearing a bougainvillea coloured blouse and ghagra and lots of clunky silver jewellery. She was 104 and still flirtatious, her hearing aid discreetly hidden behind her snow-white hair. When I asked her what it was like to have seen two centuries turn, she said that was a very rude question.

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As we spoke I realised I was talking to someone who had known Annie Besant, the first woman president of the Indian National Congress and doyenne of the Theosophical Society. “I am the oldest living Theosophist around," she chortled. “Isn’t that disgusting?"

She had seen Monet paint in his garden, tie-dyed costumes with dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan, and been in a three-way relationship with the Dadaist French artist Marcel Duchamp and diplomat Henri-Pierre Roché. François Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim (1962) was apparently based on that. But she wore all that history lightly. “I am not the Mama of Dada," she said. “I was in love with two of the men. All these people are dead and here I am getting the publicity."

Long before tribal jewellery became fashionable, she was collecting it, documenting it and wearing it though then Vice-President S. Radhakrishnan told her it made her look like a gypsy. Other Indians were aghast she wore jewellery that only the lower castes wore. She didn’t care. She fell in love with a top Indian scientist even though she knew his conservative parents would never approve of her. “I never married the men I loved. I never loved the men I married," she told me impishly and refused to reveal his name. She lived with an Indian assistant. I wonder if he was her boytoy. I didn’t dare ask. He was a sprightly 75.

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Best of all Beatrice Wood seemed to really enjoy being an old lady and talking about both Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and her love for “nice violent young men with black hair" with equal verve. Perhaps she felt finally free from the oppressive straitjacket of being a bhadramahila in a society where girls like her had debutante balls. “I left home, a luxurious home, with $15, to be free," she said. Now she did not give a damn about what the world thought of her. That felt fantastically liberating to someone like me struggling to conform to the world’s expectations of me.Then as she posed for pictures, she said archly, “Make sure you cannot see my hearing aid."

I loved her.

“You just love these old ladies," laughed a friend remembering how I had dragged him to see Ladies in Lavender (2004) at a tiny art house cinema in San Francisco. The film had middling reviews but it starred Judi Dench and Maggie Smith as ageing sisters. I was in old lady heaven.

Now Maggie Smith is gone. When an icon in her 80s or 90s dies, we usually mourn the loss of a piece of our childhood. But Smith was very much a piece of our present lives. She once told The Guardian, “I think I got pigeonholed in humour. If you do comedy you kind of don’t count." But she did count. She gave us so much joy. She showed us old ladies, like girls, just wanna have fun.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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