Every six months, the state asks a retired clerk to prove that he is alive.
It does not mean this unkindly. Somewhere in Islamabad a ledger has to be kept honest, and the dead, whatever else may be said of them, should not draw pensions. For years the proof was a paper signed by a gazetted officer, carried to a bank where a much younger person examined the old man’s face and then, with a frown, his thumb. Lately the Finance Ministry has moved the ritual to the phone for federal pensioners. A face scan, a fingerprint, and a certificate that keeps the money coming for another six months. Those who cannot manage the app can go to a NADRA centre. This is a real improvement, and anyone who has watched an eighty-year-old stand in a bank queue in September heat will say so.
Still, I keep turning the certificate over in my mind. It is an odd document. It certifies a pulse and nothing else. It does not say the holder is useful, or consulted, or missed. It says only that he has not yet died on paper. And the uncomfortable thing is how closely it matches what many of us ask of our own elders at home. We want them alive. We ask for little beyond that.
Look at how an old man’s day is arranged in a typical house. His chair is by the window because the light is good there, and also because the window is where nothing needs deciding. The television is loud, tuned to a channel he did not choose. News is rationed to him: a cousin’s illness, the sale of a plot, the quarrel over the shop are discussed in the next room in lowered voices. His prayers are sought before every exam and every journey. His opinion, somehow, never is. We want his prayers and spare him our decisions, and we call that respect.
There is a plain name for what has happened. He is registered, but he is not enrolled in anything. His heart is on the books; his life is not. A pulse can be verified by a machine. A life needs a witness.
The scale of it is not small. According to the statement of objects attached to a recent amendment bill in the National Assembly, about 15 million Pakistanis are over sixty, roughly seven percent of the country. A survey in Rawalpindi, more than a decade old now and so only indicative, found that 88.3 percent of 384 elderly people said they were lonely, and those who felt lonely most often reported conditions such as high blood pressure, heart trouble and diabetes. A small study of Karachi’s shelter homes recorded the same story from the other end: children who had moved away for work, and insensitive treatment at home that left old people neglected. The same bill concedes that the Islamabad senior citizens law of 2021 has delivered less than it promised, because the rules needed to apply it had not been made. So the state can verify a pensioner every six months with a face scan, but the law meant to make that life worth verifying is still waiting for its paperwork.
None of this will be fixed by a book. Still, a Japanese psychiatrist named Hideki Wada did something worth noticing in 2022. His book on the “wall” that many people hit near eighty became the best-selling title in Japan that year, and its message, as the publisher puts it, is to stop enduring what you dislike and do what you like. I would take that with some salt. It assumes a pension, a clinic nearby and a family that will not panic. But underneath is an instinct our homes could use: that an old man is a person with appetites before he is a patient with a file. Pakistan’s elders have appetites too. A seat at the cricket match. A drive to the old neighbourhood. A plate of something they were told, years ago, to avoid. Somebody has to ask.
And asking matters more than we admit. In 2002 a team at Yale followed 660 people and found that those who held kinder views of their own ageing outlived the gloomier ones by about seven and a half years, even after health, income and loneliness were taken into account. Nobody should read that as an order to smile and live forever. Read it instead as a charge sheet against a sentence we say lightly, “now what is left for us,” repeated in front of a grandfather and absorbed by him like damp. The Harvard study of adult lives, which has been running since 1938, found that the happiest retirees were those who set about replacing their colleagues with new companions. That tells you what an office really is. It is a small society, with its gossip and its tea and someone to say good morning to. Retirement pulls down the society and leaves the building standing.
What would a proper proof of life look like, then? Not a certificate. Three habits, perhaps, none of which needs a budget.
First, a place in the decisions. Not every decision, but one real one a month: which school for the youngest, whether to rent out the upstairs room, what to do about the leaking roof. Let him be wrong sometimes. Being wrong is part of being a participant.
Second, a duty that expects him on a particular day. Tutoring the neighbour’s son in arithmetic, keeping the accounts of the mosque committee, reading to children at the local school. Anything that notices when he fails to turn up.
Third, a reversal of the usual lesson. The grandchild who helps him pass the face scan on the phone can also be asked to sit down while he explains how to read a bank statement, how to deal with a difficult boss, how his own mother made the dish that nobody now makes properly. Old people teach well when they are asked, and badly when they are merely supposed to.
I should admit how much of this assumes a family, a roof and a little money. The widow who lives with a son’s family on sufferance, the childless couple, the man whose pension is smaller than his rent are not helped by advice about chairs and windows. For them the remedy is not tenderness but policy: a senior citizen’s card that works, a clinic that is not a day’s journey away, rules that are actually framed. Sentiment is cheap, and it is the first thing we offer when we would rather not pay for policy.
One last picture. The face scan asks the pensioner to hold the phone at arm’s length and look straight into the camera. Many of them squint, and the app tries again. If you are the son or daughter holding the other end of that moment, do not simply take the phone and finish the job. Stay. Steady the screen. When it beeps, ask what he would like to do this week.
No ministry issues the certificate that matters. It expires every evening and must be renewed at breakfast. A pulse can be verified by a machine; a life has to be asked after.